s, a pair of
boots at the shoe-maker's, and a waistcoat at least at the tailor's. In
view of such a condition I protest that the price I name for writing the
article is astonishingly reasonable." Needless to say, M. de Balzac did
not write the paper desired. The publisher managed to find another
scribe who finished the task creditably without purchasing so much as a
sheet of paper. But imagine the expense account that would be presented
by a writer engaged to describe the stretch of shopping Fifth Avenue
from Thirty-fourth Street to Fiftieth who considered it necessary to
follow the method suggested by the creator of the _Comedie Humaine_!

Paraphrasing the saying of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, three or four
generations in the story of a New York store make an aristocrat of
trade. There are names of commerce that stand out in the imagination of
the New Yorkers like the names of great soldiers and statesmen. Solid,
imposing, facing the Avenue at a corner that represents land value that
is computed by the square inch, is the structure of Brown-Smith. In some
cases the passer-by will search in vain for any indication of the
name--the information being deemed wholly superfluous. It matters not in
the least whether the commodity upon which Brown-Smith has reared its
history be hats, or groceries, or furs, or jewelry, or silverware, or
boots, or men's furnishings. The story of the enterprise, its growth and
its migrations, is, in epitome, the story of the city.

The beginning of the tale, dealing with the first Brown-Smith, is the
narrative of the Industrious Apprentice, coming to the growing town
towards the close of the eighteenth century, a raw-boned country youth
from New Hampshire or Vermont, finding after much tramping and many
rebuffs employment which meant sleeping on a counter in the hours when
he was not running errands, sweeping out dusty corners, and polishing
up the handle of the big front door, slowly, persistently winning his
way to promotion and pay, perhaps, by way of romance, marrying his
employer's daughter, eventually setting up for himself and emblazoning
the name destined to be great over the entrance of a shop in Catherine
or Cherry Street, and there to purvey to the residents of the near-by
fashionable Franklin Square. Then the development of the hundred years.
The first migration, suggested and urged by an ambitious and far-seeing
son, to a corner on remote Grand Street. That was probably the hardest