r's office who pushed
his own lawn mower at New Rochelle was there; the man who got aboard at
One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street was there. There was the man with a
Van Dyke, the man with a mustache and the fat, smooth-shaven man and the
wives, the sisters and the stenographers of all these. They were just as
Galbraithe had left them--God bless 'em.

Swept out upon Forty-second Street, he took a long, full breath. The
same fine New York sky was overhead (the same which roofed Kansas) and
the same New York sun shone down upon him (even as in its gracious
bounty it shone upon Kansas). The thrill of it made him realize as never
before that, though the intervening years had been good to him, New York
was in his blood. His eyes seized upon the raw angular buildings as
eagerly as an exiled hill-man greets friendly mountain peaks. There are
no buildings on earth which look so friendly, once a man gets to know
them, as those about the Grand Central. Galbraithe noticed some new
structures, but even these looked old. The total effect was exactly as
he had left it. That was what he appreciated after his sojourn among the
younger cities of the West. New York was permanent--as fixed as the pole
star. It was unalterable.

Galbraithe scorned to take cab, car or bus this morning. He wanted to
walk--to feel beneath his feet the dear old humpy pavement. It did his
soul good to find men repairing the streets in the same old places--to
find as ever new buildings going up and old buildings coming down, and
the sidewalks blocked in the same old way. He was clumsy at his
hurdling, but he relished the exercise.

He saw again with the eyes of a cub reporter every tingling feature of
the stirring street panorama, from gutter to roof top, and thrilled with
the magic and vibrant bigness of it all. Antlike, men were swarming
everywhere bent upon changing, and yet they changed nothing. That was
what amazed and comforted him. He knew that if he allowed five years to
elapse before returning to his home town in Kansas he wouldn't recognize
the place, but here everything was as he had left it, even to the men on
the corners, even to the passers-by, even to the articles in the store
windows. Flowers at the florist's, clothing at the haberdasher's, jewels
at the jeweler's, were in their proper places, as though during the
interval nothing had been sold. It made him feel as eternal as the
Wandering Jew.

Several familiar landmarks were gone but he won