ort to bribery"--his
smile slowly deepened--"which is a penal offense in this State?"

I found such questions cropping up almost everywhere I went. In their
dealings with the public and still more with their rivals, there was a
ruthless vigor that swept old-fashioned maxims aside. And I liked this,
for it got things done! I was bored to find, as I often did, these men
in their homes quite old-fashioned again to suit sober old wives who
still went to church. I remember one such elderly lady and the shock I
unwittingly gave her. She had deplored the decline of churches; her own,
she said, was barely half full. And I then tried to cheer her by an
account of my last story, which was of an advertising man, a genius who
in the last two years had made churches his especial line and by his
up-to-date methods had packed church after church on a commission basis.
Her burst of disapproval almost drove me from the house. And there were
so many homes like that. Men who were perfect giants by day would become
the gentlest babies at night, allowing their wives to read to them such
sentimental drivel as would have been kicked from the office by day.

"But God knows they need such vacuous homes," I reflected, "to rest in."

I had never dreamed before how strenuous men's lives could be. One day
in the New York office of a big plunger in real estate I pointed to a
map on the wall.

"What are all those lots marked 'vacant' for?" I asked him. "I never saw
many vacant lots in that part of town." He grinned cheerfully.

"Anything under four stories is vacant to us," he answered, "because it
pays to buy it, tear it down and build something higher."

That was the way they crowded their cities, and as with their cities, so
with their lives. One story that interested me most was of the weird
America which a renowned nerve specialist knew. To him came these men
broken down, some on the verge of insanity. He gave me stories of their
lives, of his glimpses into their straining minds, he described their
pathetic efforts to rest, their strenuous attempts to relax. He himself
had some mysterious ailment, his hands kept trembling while he talked.
His wife said he hadn't had a vacation of over a week in eleven years.

From such men I would turn to exuberant lives, like that of the Tammany
leader now dead, who gave a ten-thousand-dollar banquet one night, in
the Ten Eyck in Albany, in honor of the newsboy who every morning for
twenty-two winters had