midnight
When they were in Broadway again it seemed lonelier and silenter than it was a few minutes before . Except for their own coup , the cable-cars , with their flaming foreheads , and the mechanical clangor of their gongs at the corners , seemed to have it altogether to themselves . A tall , lumbering United States mail van rolled by , and impressed my friend in the coup with a cheap and agreeable sense of mystery relative to the letters it was carrying to their varied destination at the Grand Central Station . He listened with half an ear to the child 's account of the fun she had at the party , and he watched with both eyes for the sight of the men waiting at the bakery for the charity of the midnight loaves . He played with a fear that they might all have vanished , and with an apprehension that the cabman might forget and whirl him rapidly by the place where he had left them . But the driver remembered , and checked his horses in good time ; and there were the men still , but in even greater number than before , stretching farther up Broadway and farther out along the side street . They stood slouched in dim and solemn phalanx under the night sky , so seasonably , clear and frostily atwinkle with Christmas-week stars ; two by two they stood , slouched close together , perhaps for their mutual warmth , perhaps in an unconscious effort to get near the door where the loaves were to be given out , in time to share in them before they were all gone .