ffect of
circumstance on bricks and mortar. And that there should be this
visible effect is no doubt natural enough, for the difference between
nation and nation is a salient thing. It would be far stranger were it
to fail of effect even on so unimpressionable a thing as a six-story
red-brick tenement house.

There are forces, however, which prove themselves hardly less potent
than this force of fellow-nationality, but which would at first thought
be denied any vital molding power over people or over things. These
are the trades, and--less distinctive in their outward aspects, at
least--the professions. It is not odd that a fishing village or a
mining camp should take on a certain character unique to itself, but
surely one would not expect a lawyer to impress on his environment a
stamp so unmistakable that one could say, observing it from without,
"In this building lawyers plot." Superficially there would be said to
be scant difference between a lawyer and a broker or a real estate
dealer or an insurance man. Yet in New York City, where communities of
these professions mesh and intermesh and overlap, there are still
streets which are, and which could be, to a trained eye, the habitat of
financiers alone, and where at once all other wayfarers are seen to be
interlopers, or at best mere visitors at a fair.

Such a street is Wall Street, and such is Broad. And on the eastern
rim of this same zone runs a street which, despite the countless
changes that the years untiringly bring, could not possibly be mistaken
for anything but what it is, the great aorta of the fire insurance
world. William Street is as distinctly a fire insurance street as any
street could possibly be distinctive of its profession.

Scattered along the intersecting ways, but lining William Street from
Pine to Fulton, are gathered the fire insurance companies and the
brokers, respectively the sellers and the buyers of insurance. There
you will find the homes of the big alert New York companies whose lofty
steel and granite buildings stand as fit monuments to their strength
and endurance and enterprise, and the United States headquarters of the
dignified but aggressive British fire offices whose risks are scattered
over every portion of the earth where there is property to insure, and
the metropolitan departments of the great corporations that have made
the name of Hartford, Connecticut, almost symbolic of fire insurance.
There are also the agenc