brought morning papers to him in bed in his hotel
room. Or like that of the millionaire merchant who told me with the most
naive pride of the eleven hundred electric lights in his new home on
Fifth Avenue, and of how the bathrooms of both his large daughters were
fitted in solid silver throughout.

"Not plated, understand," he said. "I told the architect while he was at
it to put in the real solid stuff--and plenty of it!"

Through this varied throng of successes, this rich abundance of types, I
ranged with an ever deepening zest. As a hunter of game I watched that
endless human procession on and off the front pages of papers, the men
who were for the moment news. Often small people too would be
there--like the telephone girl from a suburb, who for one day, as the
most important witness in a sensational case of graft, was suddenly
before the whole country and then as suddenly dropped out of sight. In
fact, that was now my view of the land, figures emerging from dark
obscure multitudes up into a bright circle of light.

And I took this front-page view of New York. I saw it as a city where
big exceptional people were endlessly doing sensational things, both in
the making and spending of money. I saw it not only as a cluster of tall
buildings far downtown, but uptown as well a towering pile of rich
hotels and apartments, a region that sparkled gaily at night, lights
flashing from tens of thousands of rooms, in and out of which, I felt
delightedly, millions of people had passed through the years. I loved to
look up at these windows at night, at the sheer inscrutability of them.
For behind these twinkling masses I knew were all things tragic,
comic--people laughing, fighting, hating, scheming, dreaming, loving,
living. I thought of that row of cabins de luxe that I had seen on the
Christmas boat. Here was the same thing magnified, a monstrous
caravansary with but one question over its doors: "Have You Got the
Price?"

Once I had seen a harbor. Then it had grown into a port. And now I saw a
metropolis, the hub of a successful land.

And through this gay city of triumph I moved, myself a success, and my
view of the whole was colored by that. My life as an observer was
sprinkled with personal moments that made me see everything in high
lights. I would watch the life of a street full of people, and I myself
would be on my way to an interview with some noted man or coming away
from one who had given me stuff that I knew wou