Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from
twenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly of nine months, lying
asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor covering, nor
with any one looking after it. Next half-a-dozen men, sleeping bolt
upright or leaning against one another in their sleep. In one place a
family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother's arms, and the
husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe. On another
bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife, and
another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents. Adjoining, a man
holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a man, his clothing
caked with gutter mud, asleep, with head in the lap of a woman, not more
than twenty-five years old, and also asleep.
It was this sleeping that puzzled me. Why were nine out of ten of them
asleep or trying to sleep? But it was not till afterwards that I
learned. _It is a law of the powers that be that the homeless shall not
sleep by night_. On the pavement, by the portico of Christ's Church,
where the stone pillars rise toward the sky in a stately row, were whole
rows of men lying asleep or drowsing, and all too deep sunk in torpor to
rouse or be made curious by our intrusion.
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