His sign was not out yet, by the way; that was the next thing to be attended to.  He must get himself an office at once, and some books, and begin to read up insurance law; and so, bright and early the next morning, he took the subway down town.

And here, for the first time, Montague saw the real New York.  All the rest was mere shadow—­the rest was where men slept and played, but Jiere was where they fought out the battle of their lives.  Here the fierce intensity of it smote him in the face—­he saw the cruel waste and ruin of it, the wreckage of the blind, haphazard strife.

It was a city caught in a trap.  It was pent in at one end of a narrow little island.  It had been no one’s business to foresee that it must some day outgrow this space; now men were digging a score of tunnels to set it free, but they had not begun these until the pressure had become unendurable, and now it had reached its climax.  In the financial district, land had been sold for as much as four dollars a square inch.  Huge blocks of buildings shot up to the sky in a few months—­fifteen, twenty, twenty-five stories of them, and with half a dozen stories hewn out of the solid rock beneath; there was to be one building of forty-two stories, six hundred and fifty feet in height.  And between them were narrow chasms of streets, where the hurrying crowds overflowed the sidewalks.  Yet other streets were filled with trucks and heavy vehicles, with electric cars creeping slowly along, and little swirls and eddies of people darting across here and there.

These huge buildings were like beehives, swarming with life and activity, with scores of elevators shooting through them at bewildering speed.  Everywhere was the atmosphere of rush; the spirit of it seized hold of one, and he began to hurry, even 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