there first."

"New York certainly is hurried and restless; I can't say I like the
noise and the skyscrapers," replied Burns.

"But it's great the way those buildings tower up," the boy exclaimed
enthusiastically, "the low houses and poky ways of older and smaller
cities look as though they were made for dwarfs, after living in the New
York streets."

"Yet there are taller buildings, in other places, even in Europe," the
statistician remarked.

"Spires!" answered the boy, "propped up by buttresses and flying
buttresses and all the rest of it so as to keep them from falling. Look
at those," he added, pointing at the skyscrapers before him, "they're
not afraid to stand by themselves; they mean something, they have a use,
while a spire just sticks straight up, pointing at nothing and being of
no service unless it is to hang bells in a belfry. I don't care what
people say about those crazy old tumble-down buildings of the Middle
Ages, they may be beautiful and all that, but they're useless nowadays.
The New York skyscraper is the greatest example of architecture in the
world because it best does what it was built to do."

"You are enthusiastic, Noble," said his friend.

"I'm a New Yorker all the way through," the lad continued, "and I want
to feel that I'm right in the whirl of things, where there is so much to
do that you can't crowd it into a day, where the fun is at the same
speed as the work. No backwaters for me, I want to be right out in the
center. I don't say that I'm going to win, but I want to be a game sport
and try my strength with the rest of the crowd in the current, sink or
swim. It's all right to say that the heart of the nation is Washington,
and the backbone is the farm, but its nerve center is here,--right here
in New York. America's the wonder of the world, all right, but all there
is to it is capital plus brains, and New York is the furnace that melts
them down into that quickness and grip on things we call the American
spirit. Millions from every race of the world come here, and the Statue
of Liberty is the first symbol, and the skyscrapers of lower New York
the first reality they see of the Land of Promise."

"How about the inside of these great shells of structure?"

"No such office buildings in the world," the boy answered
enthusiastically. "The salt winds from over three thousand miles of
ocean blow around them; in their steel walls there are lots of windows;
lightning speed elevators mak