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30 THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT
station. Now, he had at the same time his first view of his new world and of a great city. There were as yet no skyscrapers except that twelve-story building at Number One Broadway; but all things human are relative, and the six-story office buildings seemed to pierce the clouds. The automobile was a decade away; but down Broadway ran end to end public conveyances with no engine before or behind — propelled as by force of circumstances. Overhead clattered the Elevated; itself just lately electrified.
He stood on Fifth Avenue, reviewing the afternoon parade of hansoms, of private carriages with footmen on the boxes and ladies lolling within. He dodged through the splendours of the Ladies’ Mile on Broadway, watching the bustled and coiffured peacocks ply their shopping — such women as his adolescent imaginings had never dared dream on. He stood fascinated before the array of big diamonds in the window of Tiffany’s, Union Square. He must have glanced diagonally across the square to a row of conservative four-story buildings housing on their ground floor “specialties for ladies.” No flash of prescience told him that there, fifteen years later and when all the glory was gone from old Union Square, he would begin to build his fortune. . . . A year or so later, Thomas Alvah Edison sent to Oscar King Davis of the New York Sun a cryptic message about “something new.” Davis rushed to the laboratory at East Orange. Edison made him apply his eye to a little