ttractive men, about nothing. If the man is wise he
allows the woman to force him into a corner, where he yields with a
grace, ill-concealed, and thus is he victor, without the lady's knowing
it. This is a sort of salesmanship that Sheldon knows nothing of, and
that, happily, is, for the most part, not yet obsolete. A. T. Stewart
was a natural salesman of the old school. He was a success from the very
start. He was tall; he had good teeth, a handsome face, a graceful form
and dressed with exquisite care. This personal charm of manner was his
chief asset. And while business then was barter, and the methods of
booth and bazaar prevailed, Stewart was wise enough never to take
advantage of a customer regarding either price or quality. If the buyer
held off long enough she might buy very close to cost, but if she bought
quickly and at Stewart's figures, he had a way of throwing in a yard of
ribbon, or elastic, or a spool or two of thread, all unasked for, that
equalized the transaction. He seems to have been the very first man in
trade to realize that to hold your trade you must make a friend of the
customer. In a year he had outgrown the little store at Two Hundred
Eighty-three Broadway, and he moved to a larger place at Two Hundred
Sixty-two Broadway. Then came a new store, built for him by a worthy
real-estate owner, John Jacob Astor by name. This store was thirty feet
wide, one hundred feet deep, and three stories high, with a basement. It
was a genuine Drygoods-Store.

It had a ladies' parlor on the second floor, and a dressing-room with
full-length mirrors ordered from Paris.

They were the first full-length mirrors in America, and A. T. Stewart
issued a special invitation to the ladies of New York to come and see
them and see themselves as others saw them. To arrange these mirrors so
that a lady could see the buttons on the back of her dress was regarded
as the final achievement of legerdemain.

The A. T. Stewart store was a woman's store. In hiring salesmen the
owner picked only gentlemen of presence. The "floorwalker" had his rise
in A. T. Stewart. Once a woman asked a floorwalker this question, "Do
you keep stationery?" and the answer was, "If I did I'd never draw my
salary." This is a silly story and if it ever happened, it did not
transpire at A. T. Stewart's. There the floorwalker was always as a cow
that is being milked. For the first fifteen years of his career, Stewart
made it a rule to meet and greet every