Now let your vision drop into the near foreground--into the tracery of trees about the jewel-box of a City Hall. Let it pause for a moment in the broad-paved street at your feet with the queer little openings through which humans are sweeping like a black stream into a funnel; others from which the human streams come crawling upward like black molasses and you are again reminded that some of the greatest highways of New York are those that are subterranean and unseen. The sidewalks grow a little blacker than before. "It's lunch-time," laughs the young engineer. Bless you, it is. The morning that you gave to one of the most typical of the towers has not been ill-spent. III Thirty minutes before the big bell of Trinity spire booms out noon-tide New York's busiest grub-time begins. A few early-breakfasting clerks and office-boys begin to find their way toward the shrines of the coffee-urns and the heaped-up piles of sandwiches. [Illustration: The view of New York from the lunch club in the skyscraper] Of course, in New York breakfast is an almost endless affair--generally a fearfully hurried one. But lunch is far more serious. Lunch is almost an institution. Fifteen minutes after it is fairly begun it is gaining rapid headway. Thin trails of stenographers and clerks are finding their ways, lunch-bound, through the canyon-like streets of lower Manhattan, streams that momentarily increase in volume. By the time that Trinity finally booms its twelve stout strokes down into Broadway there is congestion upon the sidewalks--the favorite stools at the counters, the better tables in the higher-priced places are being rapidly filled. At twelve-thirty it begins to be luck to get any sort of accommodations at the really popular places; before one o'clock the intensity of grubbing verges on panic and pandemonium. And at a little before three cashiers are totaling their receipts, cooks, donning their hats and coats to go uptown, and waiters and 'buses are upturning chairs and scrubbing floors with scant regard for belated lunchers who have to be content with the crumbs that are left after the ravishing and hungry army has been fed. Order after pandemonium--readiness for the two hours of gorge upon the morrow. The restaurants and lunch-rooms are as quiet as Trinity church-yard and something like three quarters of a million hungry souls have lunched in the business section of Manhattan south of Twenty-third street--at a total cost, according to the estimate of a shrewd restauranteur of a quarter of a million dollars. * * * * *