Underneath him the branch post-office was opening its doors, as was its custom between two and three o'clock on Sunday afternoons.

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.