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"Well," as the enthralled Louise shook her head, "they're taller than a lot of these tall buildings you see in the city. 'Skyscrapers' they call 'em. That's what the old Sally's topmasts looked like gazin' up at 'em out of the sea. They looked like they brushed the wind-driven clouds chasin' overhead.
More clear beauty, we say, because the present has its own vigorous beauty, more complex than what went before, but not yet clarified from the ugly elements that are making it. The forests and the skyscrapers are beautiful in America, but pretty much everything else below and between is soiled or broken by progress and prosperity.
America's the wonder of the world, all right, but all there is to it is capital plus brains, and New York is the furnace that melts them down into that quickness and grip on things we call the American spirit. Millions from every race of the world come here, and the Statue of Liberty is the first symbol, and the skyscrapers of lower New York the first reality they see of the Land of Promise."
I dug gold from the earth and so produced others like myself. I built railroads, skyscrapers, steamships and great public works. I disguised myself, in order to enhance my power, under new forms of paper and metal, coin, drafts, checks, orders and notes. Indeed I scarcely knew myself when I returned to the bill with the red stain upon it.
"Gee!" he exclaimed. "I never talk a streak like this to anybody. I just hold my hush an' keep my thinks to myself. But, somehow, I guess it's funny, I kind of have a feelin' I want to make good with you. An' that's why I'm tellin' you my thinks. Anybody can dance." The way led uptown, past the City Hall and the Fourteenth Street skyscrapers, and out Broadway to Mountain View.
It does a fellow good once in a while to get away from the grip of the tenements, the shades of the skyscrapers, the roar of the factories, and the shuffling, tired footsteps of the crowds, the smell of the sweat-shops. "But, do you know, it seemed to me that that minister missed something; that he was too contented.
I hardly recognized my own voice as I jerked out the word. I couldn't see the faces of the girls, but I understood what skyscrapers of hope they had built upon the announcement I had made when Edith had told of her discovery.
"I'll even manufacture the airships that are needed to carry the stuff over the tops of blazing skyscrapers, dropping it down. I'll supply complete aerial fire-fighting plants." "And I think you'll do a good business," said the chemist. It was the conclusion of the final tests of an improved chemical mixture, and the reaction that had taken place in the test tube was the end of the experiment.
One story, two stories, three stories that is about as high as they dare go. But in New York City one sees the skyscrapers reaching up their sixty stories into the air. The explanation is not difficult: Manhattan Island is solid rock. If you are going to build great structures you must have great foundations. And civilization is a vast and complicated structure.
I stop in the street to listen to listen while that great hive of people tolls tolls not the reveries of monks above the roofs of the skyscrapers, but the religion of business of the real and daily things, the seriousness of the mighty street and the faces of the men and the women.
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