shifting and seething on great metropolitan highways, breed in my mind a
sense of calm, cool remoteness in which all the glitter and excitement
of the spectacle suggests only its appalling transiency.

From the gay carnival of Broadway I cut across through the brownstone
gloom of 27th Street into Sixth Avenue, where the tired men and women of
the toiling millions sat in their doorways or at their windows over the
shops resting after the heat and travail of the day. Some watched the
sidewalk antics of their children--perhaps speculating on the
possibility that this or the other among that merry throng of urchins
might rise to be an alderman or even a city boss--perhaps President of
the greatest republic on earth--or--transcendent bliss--a Rogers or a
Rockefeller.

From 42d Street I turned up Fifth Avenue, lifting my hat and exchanging
a word with Mr. and Mrs. Russell Sage, and for an instant, as I left
them, my wandering thoughts took a new twist, for Mrs. Sage had informed
me that "Father and I are on the way to prayer-meeting"--early evening
prayer-meeting in New York! For an instant I was in one of those tiny
New Hampshire villages, a forgotten haven of rest and simplicity,
innocent as yet of steam, machinery, or trolleys, for the sweet lady and
the angular man with the pained gait which spoke in loud tones of the
unbroken store-shoe could belong in no other than a rural place. But the
image of the New Hampshire village only flitted across my mind's film,
for my truant senses seized on a message over memory's telephone:
"Russell Sage has $100,000,000." One hundred millions, and I was back on
earth again, but as I walked the thought was buzzing in my brain: "Is it
possible that that countryman has MADE _one hundred million dollars_,
when the expert carpenter who started at the birth of Christ to trudge
the world until from his honest labors he had accumulated $1,000,000 by
laying aside each day all the wage he was entitled to, one dollar, had
at the end of 1,900 years only a little more than half that sum?"

At last I turned the corner of 57th Street, and when I looked down Mr.
Rogers' home-like hall and grasped his outstretched hand and heard his
"Lawson, I'm glad to see you!" I would have sworn it was hours and hours
since I left the little table in the corner of Delmonico's.

* * * * *

The chief impression I recall of my experience that night is gratitude
for Henry H. Rogers' un