had been necessary. If I am ever anywhere near Robbinsville, I
shall make a point to see him and tell him."

"Why, I had nothing to do with it!" said the girl. "It was entirely
your plan--I merely said I'd go halves with you."

"Yes. But I would really have never done anything by myself," Smith
replied frankly. "And for a very good reason. But in any event the
old man would be much more interested in thinking it was you."

"If I am ever in Robbinsville, I shall see that he knows the real
facts," said Miss Maitland, with a slight flush in her cheeks.

"Here is Twenty-third Street," the underwriter said abruptly. "Where
are you bound for, if I may ask?"

"Nowhere in particular," the girl answered. She stopped. "Isn't that
a wonderful sight, now, in the sunlight?" She indicated the white
tower of the Metropolitan Life building, pointing far up into the clear
blue of the eastern sky, across Madison Square.

"Wonderful indeed," agreed Smith, so thoughtfully that his companion
glanced at him. "By the way, you didn't happen to be here half a
century ago, did you?" he asked whimsically.

"No," said Miss Maitland. "If I had been anywhere, it would have been
around Back Bay, I presume."

"Then you miss part of this. Unless you had been here then, you can't
appreciate how marvelous all this is now," he went on. "Of course I
wasn't here either; but I am a New Yorker, and I know how it used to
look."

"Do you?" she asked with interest. "And how did it look then?"

"Well, suppose we go back another ten years and make it sixty in all.
There was no tower there and no Flatiron building here beside us. And
there was no open square before us. Oh, it was open, but not a
square--more of a prairie. Broadway came up and intersected Fifth
Avenue just as it does to-day. But on this Flatiron corner there stood
just one thing. And what do you suppose that was?"

"I couldn't imagine."

"One solitary, lonesome lamp post. And over there, on the site of that
monstrous building, was the little frame structure that gave the Square
its name--the Madison cottage. And that was the only building to be
seen."

"The only one! But when was this?"

"In the fifties--in fact, up to eighteen fifty-eight, when they began
to put up the Fifth Avenue Hotel on the same ground. Next year that
was finished, and in eighteen sixty came the Prince of Wales and
honored it by leading the grand march in its great dining hall."

They h