en though he had no place to go.
The man who walked slowly and looked about him was in the way--he was
jostled here and there, and people eyed him with suspicion and
annoyance.

Elsewhere on the island men did the work of the city; here they did the
work of the world. Each room in these endless mazes of buildings was a
cell in a mighty brain; the telephone wires were nerves, and by the
whole huge organism the thinking and willing of a continent were done.
It was a noisy place to the physical ear; but to the ear of the mind it
roared with the roaring of a thousand Niagaras. Here was the Stock
Exchange, where the scales of trade were held before the eyes of the
country. Here was the clearing-house, where hundreds of millions of
dollars were exchanged every day. Here were the great banks, the
reservoirs into which the streams of the country's wealth were poured.
Here were the brains of the great railroad systems, of the telegraph
and telephone systems, of mines and mills and factories. Here were the
centres of the country's trade; in one place the shipping trade, in
another the jewellery trade, the grocery trade, the leather trade. A
little farther up town was the clothing district, where one might see
the signs of more Hebrews than all Jerusalem had ever held; in yet
other districts were the newspaper offices, and the centre of the
magazine and book-publishing business of the whole country. One might
climb to the top of one of the great "sky-scrapers," and gaze down upon
a wilderness of houses, with roofs as innumerable as tree-tops, and
people looking like tiny insects below. Or one might go out into the
harbour late upon a winter afternoon, and see it as a city of a million
lights, rising like an incantation from the sea. Round about it was an
unbroken ring of docks, with ferry-boats and tugs darting everywhere,
and vessels which had come from every port in the world, emptying their
cargoes into the huge maw of the Metropolis.

And of all this, nothing had been planned! All lay just as it had
fallen, and men bore the confusion and the waste as best they could.
Here were huge steel vaults, in which lay many billions of dollars'
worth of securities, the control of the finances of the country; and a
block or two in one direction were warehouses and gin-mills, and in
another direction cheap lodging-houses and sweating-dens. And at a
certain hour all this huge machine would come to a halt, and its
millions of human units w