about seven
o'clock
An acrid odor of ink rose upward to him . Occasionally a cable car passed , trundling heavily , with a strident whirring of jostled glass windows . On week days the street was very lively . It woke to its work about seven o'clock , at the time when the newsboys made their appearance together with the day laborers . The laborers went trudging past in a straggling file -- plumbers ' apprentices , their pockets stuffed with sections of lead pipe , tweezers , and pliers ; carpenters , carrying nothing but their little pasteboard lunch baskets painted to imitate leather ; gangs of street workers , their overalls soiled with yellow clay , their picks and long-handled shovels over their shoulders ; plasterers , spotted with lime from head to foot . This little army of workers , tramping steadily in one direction , met and mingled with other toilers of a different description -- conductors and `` swing men '' of the cable company going on duty ; heavy-eyed night clerks from the drug stores on their way home to sleep ; roundsmen returning to the precinct police station to make their night report , and Chinese market gardeners teetering past under their heavy baskets . The cable cars began to fill up ; all along the street could be seen the shopkeepers taking down their shutters .