from ten to thirty miles in the morning, the same journey home at night, as but an incident in their day's work. They form the great brigade of commuters, as a rule the last of the working army of New York to come to business. The commuter has his own troubles--sometimes. By reason of his self-chosen isolation he may suffer certain deprivations. The servant question is not the least of these. And the extremes of a winter in New York come hard upon him. There are days when the Eight-twenty-two suddenly loses all that reputation for steadiness and sobriety that it has taken half a year to achieve, days when sleepy schooners laden with brick and claiming the holy right-of-way of the navigator get caught in the draw-bridges, days when the sharp unexpectedness of a miniature blizzard freezes terminal switches and signals and tangles traffic inexplicably--days, and nights as well, when the streets of his suburban village are well-nigh impassable. But these days are in a tremendous minority. And even upon the worst of them he can put the rush and turmoil of the city behind him--in the peace and silence of his country place he can forget the sorrows of Harlem yesteryear--with the noisy twins on the floor below and the mechanical piano right overhead. * * * * * For nearly four hours the steady rush toward work continues. You can gauge it by a variety of conditions--even by the newspapers that are being spread wide open the length of the cars. In the early morning the popular penny papers--the _American_ and the _World_ predominating, with a sprinkling of the _Press_ in between. Two hours later and while these popular penny papers are still being read--they seem to have a particular vogue with the little stenographers and the shopgirls--the more staid journals show themselves. Men who like the solid reading of the _Times_, with its law calendars and its market reports; men of the town who frankly confess to an affection for the flippancy of the _Sun_, or who have not lost the small-town spirit of their youth enough to carry them beyond the immensely personal tone of the _Herald_. And in between these, men who sniff at the mere mention of the name of Roosevelt, and who read the _Tribune_ because their daddies and their grand-daddies in their turn read it before them, or frankly business souls who are opening the day with a conscientious study of the _Journal of Commerce_ or the Wall street sheets. New York goes to work reading its newspaper. And before you have finished a Day of Days in the biggest city of the land you might also see that it goes to lunch with a newspaper in its hand, returns home tired with the fearful thoughts of business to delve comfortably into the gossip of the day in the favorite evening paper.