Ah! to show off such a country, and to have to begin to do it in New York, beats showing off babies, school-children, automobiles, and cemeteries. The Herr Director was sure he would hate our sky-scrapers; he had seen them from the ship, and the assaulted sky-line looked to him like the huge mouth of an old woman with its isolated, protruding teeth. Frankly, I myself am not interested in sky-scrapers; I prefer the elm trees which shade the streets of the quiet town where I live. I thank God daily for the men who had faith enough to plant trees upon those wind-swept prairies. They were mighty spirits who came to the edges of civilization and drove the wilderness farther and farther back by drawing furrows, sowing wheat, and planting trees--those men whom heat and a relentless desert could not separate from that other ocean with its Golden Gate to the sunset and the oldest world. Determining to have and to hold it till time is no more, they proceeded to unite the two oceans in holy wedlock. A task which involved another nation in hopeless scandal and bankruptcy, they completed with as little ceremony as that which prevails at a wedding before a justice of the peace. Those were the men who went among savages, yet did not become like them; who for homes dug holes in the ground among rattlesnakes, prairie-dogs, and moles, and made of such homes the beginnings of towns and cities. If I admire the sky-scrapers it is because they are an attempt on the part of this same type of people to do pioneering among the clouds. Public lands being exhausted, they proceed to annex the sky and people it, now that the frontier is no more. What the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin would say to the sky-scraper meant to me, not whether they would say it is beautiful or ugly, but whether they would discover in it the Spirit of America, the daring spirit of the pioneers who built Towers of Babel, though reversing the process; for they began with a confusion of tongues which outbabeled Babel, and finished on a day of Pentecost when men said: "We do hear them all speaking our own tongue, the mighty works of God." We moved along Broadway, pressing through the crowds, the Herr Director puffing and panting, the Frau Directorin doing likewise. The Flatiron Building with its accentuated leanness lured them on until we came to the open space of Madison Square and they were face to face with the Metropolitan tower. The Herr Director said: "_Gott im Himmel!_" The Frau Directorin said: "_Um Gottes Himmels Willen!_" And then they gazed their fill in silence. I have never "done" Europe with a guide, nor have I ever had an American city introduced to me through a megaphone, so I scarcely knew what to say.