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 breathed half audibly.

How the people whom he passed, their faces speaking city keenness of ambition, must envy his position!  How little reason they had to envy him, he thought, as he walked around the great building and saw his name glaring at him in gilt letters over the plate-glass windows and on all the delivery wagons, open-mouthed for the packages being wheeled out under the long glass awning.

“A whole block now!  Yes, the doctor was right.  It must be thirty instead of twenty millions!” he concluded, as his vision swept the straight-line, window-checkered mass of the twelve stories.  “And I do wish we had a tower!  If one could go up on top of a tower and look out over the range now and then and breathe deep, it would help.”

When he entered the main door he paused in a maze, gazing at the acreage of counters manned by clerks and the aisles swarming with shoppers under the glare of the big, electric globes, and listening to the babble of shrill talk, the calls of the elevator boys, the coughing of the pneumatic tubes and the clang of the elevator doors.  It was all like some devilishly complicated dream from which he would never awake.  He must have a little time in order to orient himself before he could think rationally.  The roar of the train still obsessed him; the air in the store seemed more stifling than that of the sleeper.