From this high view the city itself becomes degraded to an unintelligible mass of distorted buildings and impossible perspectives; the revered ocean is a duck pond; the earth itself a lost golf ball.  All the minutiae of life are gone.  The philosopher gazes into the infinite heavens above him, and allows his soul to expand to the influence of his new view.  He feels that he is the heir to Eternity and the child of Time.  Space, too, should be his by the right of his immortal heritage, and he thrills at the thought that some day his kind shall traverse those mysterious aerial roads between planet and planet.  The tiny world beneath his feet upon which this towering structure of steel rests as a speck of dust upon a Himalayan mountain—­it is but one of a countless number of such whirling atoms.  What are the ambitions, the achievements, the paltry conquests and loves of those restless black insects below compared with the serene and awful immensity of the universe that lies above and around their insignificant city?

It is guaranteed that the philosopher will have these thoughts.  They have been expressly compiled from the philosophies of the world and set down with the proper interrogation point at the end of them to represent the invariable musings of deep thinkers on high places.  And when the philosopher takes the elevator down his mind is broader, his heart is at peace, and his conception of the cosmogony of creation is as wide as the buckle of Orion’s summer belt.

But if your name happened to be Daisy, and you worked in an Eighth Avenue candy store and lived in a little cold hall bedroom, five feet by eight, and earned $6 per week, and ate ten-cent lunches and were nineteen years old, and got up at 6.30 and worked till 9, and never had studied philosophy, maybe things wouldn’t look that way to you from the top of a skyscraper.

Two sighed for the hand of Daisy, the unphilosophical.  One was Joe, who kept the smallest store in New York.  It was about the size of a tool-box of the D. P. W., and was stuck like a swallow’s nest against a corner of a down-town skyscraper.  Its stock consisted of fruit, candies, newspapers, song books, cigarettes, and lemonade in season.  When stern winter shook his congealed locks and Joe had to move himself and the fruit inside, there was exactly room in the store for the proprietor, his wares, a stove the size of a vinegar cruet, and one customer.

Joe was not of the nation that keeps us forever in a furore with fugues and fruit.  He was a capable American youth who was laying by money, and wanted Daisy to help him spend it.  Three times he had asked her.

“I got money saved up, Daisy,” was his love song; “and you know how bad I want you.  That store of mine ain’t very big, but—­”

“Oh, ain’t it?” would be the antiphony of the unphilosophical one.  “Why, I heard Wanamaker’s was trying to get you to sublet part of your floor space to them for next year.”