and most radical step in all the history of the house, and there must
have been strange doubts and misgivings in the soul of the founder, now
grown grey, as he said good-bye to the familiar dwellings of Quality Row
in Cherry Street and prepared to venture forth on unknown seas. Be sure
that he took with him, as a sacred treasure, his first day-book, with
its quaint entries of expenses and receipts. Very likely he did not long
survive the change, and was never quite happy in it.

Probably, if you happen to be a patron of the Brown-Smith establishment,
and scrupulously leave its communications unopened in the letterbox at
the club, you received, three or four years ago, a little book,
commemorating the centenary of the house. They differ from one another
merely in form and detail--these souvenir booklets. In substance and
flavour they are all pretty much the same. There are the old prints
reproduced from Valentine's Manual, the allusions to the horse-propelled
ferry-boats to Brooklyn, to the advertisement that appeared in a City
Directory of one of the years of the fifties, to the attack upon the
establishment during the stirring times of the Draft Riots of the Civil
War, to the frequent extensions of business and the migrations that
carried the name from Grand Street over to Broadway and Prince Street,
thence up the great street to a point near Twelfth, then to Union
Square, to Madison Square, and finally, to the stately and spacious
edifice of the present, far up the Avenue. And who will venture to
predict how many years will pass before that structure, today regarded
as the last cry in the matter of architecture and convenience, will be
outgrown and inadequate, and its situation hopelessly far to the south?

It was about 1901 that the movement began that was to transform Fifth
Avenue from a residential thoroughfare into a shopping street beside
which the vaunted glories of London's Bond Street and Paris's Rue de la
Paix seem dim. In the Knickerbocker days the important shops of the town
lined lower Broadway and the adjacent streets. Then it was to Grand
Street that the ladies journeyed to barter and bargain for the latest
fashions from the Paris whose styles were dominated by the Empress
Eugenie. When Grand Street had been outgrown the shops moved northward
to Fourteenth Street and Union Square. There are tens of thousands of
New Yorkers whose childhood dates back to the early eighties who recall
as one of the delights