The elevator ejects you. You are taken into dazzling daylight, into what
is modestly called a business office; but it resembles in its grandeur
no European business office, save such as may have been built by an
American. You look forth from a window, and lo! New York and the Hudson
are beneath you, and you are in the skies. And in the warmed stillness
of the room you hear the wind raging and whistling, as you would have
imagined it could only rage and whistle in the rigging of a three-master
at sea. There are, however, a dozen more stories above this story. You
walk from chamber to chamber, and in answer to inquiry learn that the
rent of this one suite-among so many-is over thirty-six thousand dollars
a year! And you reflect that, to the beholder in the street, all that is
represented by one narrow row of windows, lost in a diminishing
chess-board of windows. And you begin to realize what a sky-scraper is,
and the poetry of it.

More romantic even than the sky-scraper finished and occupied is the
sky-scraper in process of construction. From no mean height, listening
to the sweet drawl of the steam-drill, I have watched artisans like
dwarfs at work still higher, among knitted steel, seen them balance
themselves nonchalantly astride girders swinging in space, seen them
throwing rivets to one another and never missing one; seen also a huge
crane collapse under an undue strain, and, crumpling like tinfoil,
carelessly drop its load onto the populous sidewalk below. That
particular mishap obviously raised the fear of death among a
considerable number of people, but perhaps only for a moment. Anybody in
America will tell you without a tremor (but with pride) that each story
of a sky-scraper means a life sacrificed. Twenty stories--twenty men
snuffed out; thirty stories--thirty men. A building of some sixty
stories is now going up--sixty corpses, sixty funerals, sixty domestic
hearths to be slowly rearranged, and the registrars alone know how many