St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1889-04-21

There are in this. as in every other
large city, certain class of men who
are little seen by day, and who live by
the maxim that 1.-The world begins to
move when the sun goes down."
the middle of the afternoon
when they walk down the avenue in
pairs or knots of three and four, or
stand on the corners and discuss city
politics, the policy of the police and the
latest sensational news, or sit in the
hotel Hobbies smoking and talking or
possibly reading. They disappear a
little while about 80 and no one seems
to know where they eat, but they show
up again soon after dark and stand
around the saloons and billiard rooms
until the ''wee sma hours ayont the
twa." They can scarcely be denomi-
mated class either, for they are
MADE UP OF SEVERAL CLASSES.
First and foremost comes the festive
and smoothly attired knight of the
green cloth, who turns an honest dollar
by "skinning sucker whenever one
can be baited, and at other times gathers
in such shekels as he may by processes
so mysterious that even he himself
would find it difficult to explain-before
a grand jury. Next is the nervous,
broken old man, whose whole frame is
an embodied temperance lecture.
and who has got to that point
where he can't sleep until he.has drank
the long night away. Then there is the
plug ugly, the natural-born and edu-
Gated thief, whose whole influence in
the world is for the perpetuation of &C
quired kleptomania. He hangs around
the lower dives and buys an occasional
drit, of icly ~,
spot a victim. One more prominent
figure in the procession of night-hawks
is the young-man-not-afraid -Of-a-cock-
tail who is out to make night of it.
His father is probably successful mer-
chant or lawyer, and he is spending
with princely contempt for expense
the kopeck that his father has heaped
4 up by Puritanical disregard for the
foibles and follIes of the world.
All these gather in the barroom early
in the evening or drop in after the
theater, and are joined at about the lat
ter time by
THE sHABBY-GENTEEL CITIZEN,
who has somehow obtained possession
of the price of drink. He comes in
timidly, buys his glass of whisky and
drinks it slowly, as if to get all the en-
joyment there is in it. and then stands
around looking greedily at the crowd of
drinkers and waiting patiently to be
asked to join them.
All these types may be found in the
all-night saloon from 10 o'clock in the
evening until or later in the morning,
and they are rarely seen elsewhere
later than II O'Clock, and where they
are to go to now is indeed a problem. It
is probably of more direct interest to
these men themselves than to any one
else, but it certainly is
AN INTERESTING SUBJECT
for thought to anyone who is of an in
quiring and speculative turn of mind.
One thing is certain, the dream of the
temperance fanatic will not come to
pass. these men will not go home. Two
thirds of them have no home, and if
they had they would not go there.
go home when you can't go any
where else.'' is common saying among
the Owls. and it is one of the chief ar
ticles in their creed. There doesn't
seem to be any other place for them to
go, unless it be the all night re staurants
and coffee houses, and a mans welcome
there usually departs with the money he
pays his bill with.