indeed perhaps the costliest and most “important” of all the business block of St. Paul, is the building of the New York Life Insurance Company. In saying that the total impression of this edifice is one of picturesque quaintness, one seems to deny its typicalness, if not its appropriateness, as a housing and an expression of the local genius, for assuredly there is nothing quaint about the Western business man or his procedures during business hours, however quaint and even picturesque one may find him when relaxing into anecdote in his hours of ease. The building owes its quaintness in great part to the division of its superstructure into two unequal masses flanking a narrow court, at the base of which is the main entrance. The general arrangement is not uncommon in the business blocks of New York. The unequal division into masses, of which one is just twice as wide as the other, looks capricious in the present detached condition of the building; though when another lofty building abuts upon it, the inequality will be seen to be a sensible precaution to secure the effective lighting of the narrower mass, the light for the wider being secured by a street upon one side as well as by the court upon the other. Even so, this will not be so intuitively beheld as the fact of the inequality itself, and as the differences of treatment to which it gives rise and by which it is emphasized; for the quaintness resulting from the asymmetry is so far from being ungrateful to the designer that he has seized upon it with avidity, and developed it by all the means in his power. Quaintness is the word that everybody uses spontaneously to express the character of the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance, and the treatment of these unequal gables is obviously derived from Flemish examples. The origin of their crow steps and ailerons is unmistakable, and the treatment of the grouped and somewhat huddled openings, and their wreathed pediments and bull’s-eyes, richly and heavily framed in terra-cotta, is equally characteristic, to the point of being baroque. This character is quite evidently meant, and the picturesqueness that results from it is undeniable, and gives the building its prevailing expression; howbeit it is confined to the gables, the treatment of the substructure being as “architecturesque” as that of the superstructure is picturesque. A simple and massive basement of two stories in masonry carries the five stones of brick-work heavily quoined in stone that constitute the body of the building, and this is itself subdivided by slight but sufficient differences, the lower story being altogether of masonry, and the upper arcaded. An intermediate story, emphatically marked off above and below, separates this body from the two-story roof, the gables of which we have been considering. The main entrance, which gives [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, ST. PAUL.]