credit and financial resources were to be strained to the utmost.

It is entirely possible that the record of the Macy store might not be set down as one of final and overwhelming success, if it had not been for the driving force of a woman, who was brought into the organization not long after the opening of the original store in lower Sixth Avenue. This woman, Margaret Getchell, was also born in Nantucket. She had been a school-teacher upon the island, until the loss of one of her eyes forced her to seek less confining work. She drifted to New York and, taking advantage of a girlhood acquaintance with Mr. Macy, asked him for employment in his store. He knew her and was glad to take her in. She, in turn, engaged rooms in a flat just over a picture-frame store, in Sixth Avenue, across from her employment, so that she might devote every possible moment of her time, day and night, to its success.

So was born a real executive—and in a day when the possibilities of women ever becoming business executives were as remote seemingly as that they might ever fly. For decades after she had gone, she left the impress of her remarkable personality upon the store. An attractive figure she was: a small, slight woman, with masses of glorious hair and a pert upturn to her nose, while the loss of her eye was overcome, from the point of view of appearance at least, by the wearing of an artificial one, which she handled so cleverly that many folk knew her for a long time without realizing her misfortune.

At every turn, Margaret Getchell was a clever woman. Once when Mr. Macy had imported a wonderful mechanical singing-bird—a thing quite as unusual in that early day as was the phonograph when it came upon the market—and its elaborate mechanism had slipped out of order, it was she, with the aid of a penknife, a screw-driver and a pair of pliers—I presume that she also used a hair-pin—who took it entirely apart and put it together again. And at another time she trained two cats to permit themselves to be arrayed in doll's clothing and to sleep for hours in twin-cribs, to the great amusement and delectation of the visitors to the store. Later she caused a photograph to be made of the exhibit, which was retailed in great quantities to the younger customers. Miss Getchell was nothing if not businesslike.

It was her keen, commercial acumen that made her alert in the heart center of the early store—the cashier's office. She tolerated neither discrepancies nor irregularities there. There it was that the New England school-ma'm showed itself most keenly. Did a saleswoman overcharge a patron two dollars? And did the cashier accept and pass the check? Then the cashier must pay the two dollars out of her meagre pay-envelope on Saturday night. "Overs" were treated the same as "unders." It made no difference that the store was already ahead two dollars on the transaction. Discipline was the thing. Discipline would keep that sort of offense from being repeated many times, and Macy's from ever being given the unsavory reputation of making a practice of overcharging.

"Don't ever erase a figure or change it, no matter what seems to be the logical reason in your own mind," she kept telling her cashiers. "The very act implies dishonesty."

So does the New England conscience ever lean backward.

Yet it is related of this same Margaret Getchell that when a little and comparatively friendless girl had been admitted to the cashier's cage—a decided innovation in those days—and had been found in an apparent peculation of three dollars and promptly discharged by Mr. Macy, Miss Getchell dropped everything else and went to work on behalf of the little cashier. Intuitively she felt that another of her sex in the cage had made the theft—a young woman who had come into the store from a prominent up-state family to learn merchandising. The up-state young woman was fond of dress. Her dress demands far exceeded her salary. Of that Miss Getchell was sure.

Yet intuition is one thing and proof quite another. For a fortnight the store manager worked upon her surpassing problem. She induced Macy to suspend for a time his order of discharge and she kept putting the women cashiers in relays in the cage, to suit her own fancy and her own plans. The petty thefts continued. But not for long. The plans worked. The altered checks were found to be all in the time of one of the cashiers—and that was not the one who had been discharged. Miss Getchell drove to the home of Miss Upper New York and there, in the presence of her family, got both confession and reparation.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MACY'S

The original small store in Sixth Avenue just south of 14th Street. Here the business starts in 1858

She was forever seeking new lines of activities for the store—branching out here, branching out there, and turning most of these new ventures into lines of resounding profits. "If necessary, we shall handle everything except one," she is reputed to have said. And upon being asked what that one was, she replied brusquely, "Coffins." Once she embarked Macy upon the grocery business—whole decades before the establishment of the present huge grocery department—and while eventually the store was forced to drop for a time this line of merchandise, she succeeded in taking so much business from New York's then leading firm of grocers that they came to Macy, himself, and begged him to drop the competition.

In the retailing world of that day, tradition and habit still governed and with an iron hand. Stores opened early in the morning and kept open until late in the evening, and did this six days of the week. Their workers rose and left their homes—before dawn in many months of the year—and did not return to them until well after dark. Yet they did not complain, for that was the fashion of the times and was recognized as such. Wages were as low as the hours were long. But food-costs also were low, and rentals but a tiny fraction of their present figure. The apartment house had not yet come to New York. It was a development set for a full two decades later. The store-workers lived in boarding-houses, in small furnished rooms or with their families. The greater part of them resided within walking distance of their employment.

Mr. Macy had all of his fair share of traditional New England thrift. One of the favorite early anecdotes of "the old man," as his fellow-workers were prone to call him, and with no small show of affection, concerned his refusal to permit shades to be placed upon the gas-jets in the store, saying that he paid for the light and so wanted the full value for his money. He was skeptical, at the best, about innovations. Moreover, necessity compelled him to keep close watch upon the pennies. At one time he reduced the weekly wages of his cash-girls from two dollars to one-dollar-and-a-half, saying that the war was over and he could no longer afford to pay war wages. Yet when a courageous sales-clerk went to him and told him that she could not possibly live any longer upon her weekly wage of three dollars, he promptly raised it a dollar, without argument or hesitation. And the following week he automatically extended the same increase to every other clerk in the store.

Labor conditions in that day were hard, indeed. The working hours, as I have already said, were long. In regular times the store hours were from eight to six, instead of from nine to five-thirty, as today. On busy days the clerks worked an extra hour, putting the stock in place, while in the fortnight which preceded