boards; barber shops with cigar stands in their vestibules; sad-looking
plumbers' offices; cheap restaurants, in whose windows one saw piles of
unopened oysters weighted down by cubes of ice, and china pigs and cows
knee deep in layers of white beans. At one end of the street McTeague
could see the huge power-house of the cable line. Immediately opposite
him was a great market; while farther on, over the chimney stacks of the
intervening houses, the glass roof of some huge public baths glittered
like crystal in the afternoon sun. 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. The cable cars began to fill up; all along the street
could be seen the shopkeepers taking down their shutters.