Nevertheless, here was the enlightened day at hand when women would and did work in stores--not alone in great numbers but in a great majority and in many cases to the exclusion of men. It was one of the sweeping economic changes that the Civil War brought in its train. When the men must go to fight in the armies of the North, women must take their places--for only a little while it seemed up to that time. Yet so well did they do much of men's work, that their retention in many of their positions came as a very natural course. So while the decade that preceded the Civil War found few or no professions open to women--save those of teaching or of domestic employment--the one which followed it found them coming in increasing numbers, into a steadily increasing number and variety of endeavors. So it was then that the great war of the last century brought women behind the counters of the stores--Macy's was no exception to the invasion. They came to stay. And stay they have, to this very day, even though most of the New York stores still retain men to a considerable extent in some of their departments--notably those devoted to the sale of furniture, dress-goods and boots and shoes. For some varieties of stock the male clerk still is the most suitable and successful sort of salesman. In his store in Haverhill, Mr. Macy had adopted as his trade-mark a rooster bearing the motto in his beak, "While I live, I'll crow." For his nascent enterprise in New York, however, he adopted a different and, to him at least, a far more significant device, which to this day remains the symbol of the great enterprise which still bears his name. It was a star, a star of red, if you will. And back of that simple symbol rests a story: It seems that in the days of his youth when he sailed the northern seas in a whaling ship he had gradually acquired such proficiency that he was made first mate and then master. It was in the earlier capacity, however, and upon an occasion when he was given a trick at the wheel that Macy found himself in a thick fog off a New England port--one version of the story says Boston, the other New Bedford. To catch the familiar lights of the harbor gateways was out of the question. The cloud banks lay low against the shore. Overhead there was a rift or two, and in one of them, well ahead of the vessel's prow, there gleamed a brilliant star.