Brooklyn and Williamsburgh and Jersey City and Hoboken and Astoria and Staten Island; steamboat lines down the harbor to Amboy and to Newark and to Elizabethtown; and up the Sound to Fall River, to Providence and to the Connecticut ports. But the finest steamers of all plied the Hudson. There the rivalry was keenest, the opportunities for profit apparently the greatest. And despite the fact that New York was already the port of many important ocean lines—the Cunard, the Collins, the Glasgow, the Havre, the Hamburg and the Panama steamers, for the fast-growing fame of the metropolis of the New World was already attracting great numbers of travelers from overseas—the fact also remains that when the Daniel Drew, of the Albany Night Line, was first built, in 1863, she exceeded in size and in passenger-carrying capacity any ocean liner plying in and out of the port of New York.

So came the countrymen and the residents of the other smaller towns and cities of the land, along with many, many foreigners, to this new vortex of humanity. They found their way, not alone to the hotels of the Union Square district, but to such equally distinguished houses as the Astor, the Brevoort, the St. Nicholas, the Metropolitan, the New York. They went to the theaters and almost invariably they climbed the brown-stone spire of old Trinity, in order to drink in the view that it commanded: the wide sweep of busy city close at hand, the more distant ranges of the upper and lower harbors, the North and the East Rivers, Long Island, Staten Island, New Jersey and the western slopes of the Orange Mountains. And some, loving New York and realizing the fair opportunities that it offered, came to stay.

In among this throng of folk who rushed into the town in 1858 there came—among those who came to stay—Rowland H. Macy. The partial success of his Haverhill store, to an extent overbalancing the initial failure in Boston, had brought him into the metropolis of America, the city of wider, if indeed not unlimited opportunity. In those days there were few large stores in New York; nothing to be in the least compared with its great department stores of today. One heard of its hotels, its churches, its theaters, its banks, but very little indeed of its mercantile establishments. They were, for the most part, very small and exceedingly individual. They were known as shops and well deserved that title. There were a few exceptions, of course: A. T. Stewart's—still on Broadway between Worth and Chambers Streets—Ridley's, Lord & Taylor's and John Daniell's in Grand Street (this last at Broadway), McNamee & Company's, Arnold, Constable & Co., McCreery's, Hearn's, and one or two others, perhaps, of particular distinction.

It is hardly possible that Macy, as he found his way into these larger establishments, believed that he might ever in his own enterprise match their elegance and distinction. It is difficult to believe that in those very earliest days he had the vision of a department store. At any rate the extremely modest establishment which he opened at 204 Sixth Avenue, between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets, in conjunction with his brother-in-law, Samuel S. Houghton, devoted itself at first, and for a long time afterward, exclusively to the sale of fancy goods. For specializing was the fashion of that day and generation; John Daniell sold nothing but ribbons and trimmings then; Aiken laces, and Stewart's chiefly dress-goods.

Yet Macy had vision. The department store idea must slowly have forced itself into his mind. For, five years later, we find his small business, originally on Sixth Avenue, just a door or two below Fourteenth Street, expanding so rapidly that he was forced to secure more room for it. And this despite the fact that not only was he two long blocks distant from Broadway but the particular corner which he had chosen for his store was known locally as unlucky—two or three other stores had gone bankrupt on it. Macy had no intention of going bankrupt. He added to his original shop the store at 62 West Fourteenth Street, at right angles to and connecting in the rear with it, and in this he installed a department of hats and millinery. He was beginning to come and come quickly—this country merchant to whom at first New York refused to extend either recognition or credit.

Now was the complete department store idea fairly launched, for the first time in the history of America, if not in the entire world. Yet, when one came to fair and final analysis, it represented nothing else than the country-store of the small town or cross-roads greatly expanded in volume. And so, after all, it is barely possible that the canny New Englander may have had the germ of his surpassing idea implanted in his mind, a full decade or more before he had the opportunity to make use of it. Incidentally, it may be set down here, that Mr. Macy in the rapidly recurring trips to Paris which he found necessary to make in the interest of his business developed a great admiration for the Bon Marché of that city. He studied its methods carefully and adopted them whenever he found the opportunity.

From hats to dress-goods—the addition of still another adjoining store was inevitable—came as a fairly natural sequence. And one finds the successful young merchant who had had the enterprise and the initiative to leave Broadway—supposedly the supreme shopping street of the New York of that day—laying in his stocks of alpaca, of black bombazine, of silks and muslins, sheetings and pillow-cases and all that with these go. The idea once born was adhered to. As it broadened it gained prosperity. And as a natural sequence there came gradually and with a further steady enlargement of the premises, jewelry, toilet-goods and the so-called Vienna goods. Toys were added in 1869, and gradually house-furnishing goods, confectionery, soda water, books and stationery, boys' clothing, ladies' underwear, crockery, glassware, silverware, boots and shoes, dress-goods, dressmaking, ready-to-wear clothing, and, in due time, a restaurant.

For many years it was the only store in town to carry soaps and perfumes. This, of itself, brought to the store a clientele of its own—the most beautiful women of New York, among the most notable of them, Rose Eytinge, the actress, who was just then coming to the pinnacle of her fame.

Mr. Macy, accompanied by his wife and daughter—the latter of whom is still alive at an advanced age—took up his residence at first over the store and then, a little later, in a small house in West Twelfth Street, within easy walking distance of his place of business. From this he afterward moved to a larger residence in West Forty-ninth Street. He was a man of sturdy build, of more than medium height and thick-set, extremely affable in manner. He wore a heavy beard, and an old employee of the store was wont to liken his appearance to that of the poet, Longfellow. His tendency toward black cigars and to appearing in the store in his shirt-sleeves did not heighten the resemblance, however.

He was a man of almost indomitable will. Such a quality was quite as necessary for success in those days as in these. The modern ideas of beneficence and generosity to the employee were little dreamed of then. The successful merchant, like the successful manufacturer or the successful banker, drove his men and drove them hard. Macy was no exception to this rule. If he had been, it is doubtful if he would have lasted long. For while '58 was a year of seeming prosperity in New York it also followed directly one of the notable panic-years in the financial history of the United States and was soon to be followed by four years of internecine struggle in the nation—in which its