oft at the peaks of Broadway which lay beyond the foothills
of the river-front avenues.

"All to me what the desert is to other folks!" he mused; "desert, without
any cacti or mesquite! All the trails cross one another in a maze. A
boxed-up desert--boxes and boxes piled on top of one another! Everybody
in harness and attached by an invisible, unbreakable, inelastic leash to
a box, whither he bears his honey or goes to nurse his broken wings!--so
it seems to me and very headachy!"

At Madison Square he was at the base of the range itself; and halting on
the corner of Twenty-third Street and the Avenue he was a statue as aloof
as the statue of Farragut from his surroundings. Salt sea spray ever
whispers in the atmosphere around the old sailor. How St. Gaudens
created it and keeps it there in the heart of New York is his secret.
Possibly the sculptor put some of his soul into it as young Michael
Angelo did into his young David.

It is a great thing to put some of your soul into a thing, whether it is
driving a nail or moulding a piece of clay into life. There are men who
pause before the old Admiral and see the cutwater of men-of-war's bows
and hear the singing of the signal halyards as they rise with the command
to close in. Perhaps the Eternal Painter had put a little of his soul
into the heart of Jack; for some busy marchers of the Avenue trail as
they glanced at him saw the free desert and heard hoof-beats in the sand.
Others seeing a tanned Westerner kissing his hand to Diana of Madison
Square Garden probably thought him mad. Next, performing another
sentimental errand for the Doge of Little Rivers, his gaze rose along the
column of the Metropolitan tower. Its heights were half shrouded in mist,
through which glowed the gold of the lantern.

"Oh, bully! bully!" he thought. "The only sun in sight a manufactured
one, shining on top of a manufactured mountain! It is a big business
building a mountain; only, when God Almighty scattered so many ready-made
ones about, why take the trouble?" he concluded. "Or so it seems to me,"
he added, sadly, in due appreciation of the utterly reactionary mood of a
man who has been boxed up for a week.

Now he turned toward a quarter which he had, thus far, kept out of the
compass of observation. He looked up the jagged range of Broadway where,
over a terra-cotta pile, floated a crimson flag with "John Wingfield" in
big, white letters.

"My mountain! My box! My millions!" he breathe