And then the city, too, turned real, this car no longer a quaint museum piece of the future, but of the here and now: solid, scarred, uncomfortable, dirty because the straw on the floor was stained with tobacco spit, driven by a harassed overworked man and pulled by a badly treated animal. It was cold out on that platform, I knew that, but I got up, walked up front, slid open the door, and stepped out, pulling the door closed behind me. I had to talk to this man.

I had the sense not to start right in. I stood there at his right staring ahead over the horse's swaying rump down the cobbled street under the gloom of the overhead El tracks. My eyes were squinted against the steady pressure of air from our forward motion, and it was so cold they instantly began watering. There were frequent little gusts of a nasty crosswind, and I watched it sift little creeping skims of hard snow onto and off the car tracks. The driver had glanced at me suspiciously; why would I come out here when I didn't have to? And I'd glanced back at him, smiling slightly. He wore a flat-topped round cloth cap with a flap that covered his neck and ears, and over it a ragged knitted tan muffler tied under his chin; he had an immense drooping mustache. He wore a heavy tan cloth coat, very worn; one big pocket, in which a bandanna was stuffed, was half torn off. He had heavy boots, heavy encrusted mittens, and as many clothes, obviously, as he could fit under that coat, so that his body was shapeless. The wavering light from the lanterns hanging from the front of the car shone upward onto his face, and it took me a minute or so after I'd glanced at him to realize that he wasn't old; but his face was permanently gorged, threaded with tiny broken veins, the color of uncooked old beef.

He just stood there, reins loose in his hands most of the time, facing the cold; I couldn't understand why the platform should be open. Ahead, a light delivery van with a lighted lantern hung under its rear axle trundled onto Third from a cross street, and, its wheels finding the smoother going of the tracks, settled down into them. It moved a bit slower than we; the car driver clanged his foot bell, and the wagon speeded up.

"Cold," I said then, hunching my shoulders momentarily; it wasn't really a stupid comment but just a word uttered aloud in recognition of his presence.

"Yep. It's cold," he said sardonically.

I was silent for half a dozen hoofbeats. "Do you ever get used to it?" I said then. "After a while? I don't think I could stand it myself."

"Used to it? Well, I should smile." He thought about that for a second or two. "Nah, you don't get used to it. You just get so you can stand it, that's all. If you want to get an idea of what real cold is, just hire yourself out to drive a streetcar in winter. If I was getting up an expedition to the North Pole and wanted a lot of men who could stand the climate, I'd take them from the drivers on the surface roads. Because a man who can stand this sort of service can stand anything." It was a burst of talk; I had the feeling I was the first passenger in a while to give him the chance. He stood silent for half a block; then at a cross street a blast of wind just shrieked across the platform, so impossibly cold the horse actually staggered, and I simply turned my back to it, shoulders hunched, and suffered; I didn't think I could take it, and wanted to go back inside but didn't.

It made him smile a little, made him talk again, when he saw I wasn't going in. "Feels pretty cold, don't it? I see you stamp your feet, and put your hands in your pockets. You stay here very long, and you'll be pretty well frozen out, and glad to get near a stove to warm yourself. But I have to do this all day long; stand out here and face the wind and sleet till my hands are frozen so stiff I can't feel the reins, and my nose has no more feeling in it than an icicle."

"How long do you work?"

"Fourteen hours a day is my working time, and sometimes longer, after the car is washed out and everything attended to. Don't give a fellow much chance to see his family, does it?" I said no, it didn't, and he nodded, and said, "How much do you think we make?" The dam was gone now, the torrent loose; I just shook my bead. "A dollar and ninety cents a day. Or a little more for the long routes to Harlem; that is the best we can possibly do. We're supposed to make seven trips a day at twenty-seven-and-one-seventh cents a trip. If the cars are blocked and we don't make so many trips, it is so much out of our pay. You just think about supporting a wife and children on a dollar and ninety cents a day. Most of us work on Sundays; poor people can't afford to rest on the Sabbath in a great city like this. Sometimes when I do have a Sunday off I go to church and take my wife and the children. It seems respectable, somehow, to go. And then the minister gets up and talks about the gratitude we ought to feel to God for all the blessings he gives us, and how thankful we ought to be that we live through his mercy. It may be very true as far as he is concerned, but I often think — and I don't mean to be ungrateful or irreverent — that most people in this world have very little to be thankful for, and very little reason to thank God for life at all. Nine tenths of the people in New York find scarcely a moment in their lives which they can call their own, and see mighty little but misery from one year's end to the other." He was troubled, deeply; his voice showed it; there was an almost inadmissible yet inescapable contradiction he couldn't get out of his mind. "How is it possible for me to thank God in my heart for the food he gives me and for life, while every morsel I eat I earn with my toil and even suffering? There may be a Providence for the rich man, but every poor man must be his own Providence. As for the value of life, we poor folks don't live for ourselves at all; we live for other people. I often wonder if the rich man who owns great blocks of stock in the road and reckons his wealth in the millions does not sometimes think, as he sits at his well-filled table and looks at the happy faces of his children, of the poor car driver who toils for his benefit for a dollar and ninety cents a day, and is lucky if he tastes meat twice a week and can give the little ones at home warm clothes and blankets for the winter.

"Cold, you say. Well, people can get used to anything, I suppose, and we get so used to the cold after a while that maybe we don't mind it much. They used to let us sit down, but a couple of winters ago a man was frozen to death. The car came into the depot, and the driver was found on his stool stiff and stark, with one hand on the brake, and the reins in the other. He had dozed off, and he never woke up. He was a lucky man. The worst place he could go to was warm at least, though I've heard the Eskimos think hell is a cold place. Anyway, he never was obliged to drive a car again at a dollar and ninety cents a day. After that what did the company do: close in the platforms? No, that costs money. A rule was passed that employees should not be allowed to sit down, lest they go to sleep and freeze to death. They say it's a very pleasant way to die, and I believe it, for more than once I've felt myself dozing off and becoming insensible to the cold. But I roused myself and stamped to keep awake, for I thought of the little ones; at least they don't sleep in the hay barges, as they might have to if I was gone."

"Hay barges?"

He looked at me angrily for not knowing. "Where do you think the boys — and yes, the girls, too — who shine your shoes and sell you papers in the daytime sleep at night? They're orphans, most of them, or kids nobody wants, and left to shift for themselves. A few of them sleep in the newsboys' homes and the like, but most sleep anywhere they can. Go down to the East River right now, and shine a light on the hay barges, hundreds of them, tied along the docks and shore. And you'll see the boys — some say thousands, and I think so, too, though nobody rightly knows — curled up in little nests they scratch up for themselves, and some of them not five years old. So I learn to stand the cold for the sake of my own. Sometimes I try to keep warm by an occasional dram of whiskey, but I find the reaction makes you feel all the colder afterward."