I had been in the store the day before and selected, in broad daylight, with a big mirror staring me out of countenance, a hat which was a quarter of a size too large. To clinch the matter, I had ordered four ventilating holes to be punched in it, and had it sent to my rooms to be my hat--implacably my hat as I supposed, for better for worse, for richer for poorer--always. The next morning, after standing before a mirror and trying hopefully for a few minutes to see if I could not look more intelligent in the hat, I returned to the store firmly. I had made up my mind that I would keep from looking the way that that hat made me look, at any cost. The store was not responsible according to the letter either for the hat or for the way I looked in it. I had deliberately chosen it, looked at myself in cold blood in it, had those dreadful, irremovable, eternal air-holes dug into it. I would buy a new one. I jumped into a cab, and a moment after I arrived I found myself before the clerk from whom I had bought it, with a new one on my head, and was just reaching into my pocket for my purse when, to my astonishment, I heard, or seemed to hear, the great Department Store Itself, in the gentle accents of a young man with a yellow moustache, saying: "I'm sorry"--all seven storys of it gathering itself up softly, apparently, and saying "I'm sorry!" The young man explained that he was afraid the hat was wrong the day before, and thought he ought to have told me so, that the store would not want me to pay for the mistake. I came home a changed man. I had been hit by the Golden Rule before in department stores, but always rather subtly--never with such a broad, beautiful flourish! I made some faint acknowledgment, I have forgotten what, and rushed out of the store. But I have never gone past the store since, on a 'bus, or in a taxi, or sliding through the walkers on the street, but I have looked up to it--to its big, quiet windows, its broad, honest pillars fronting a world. I take off my hat to it. But it gave me more than a hat. I think what a thousand department stores, stationed in a thousand places on this old planet, could do in touching the imagination of the world--every day, day by day, cityfuls at a time.