Why will you persist in dragging in tomorrow? Is it not enough to know that tomorrow Milady of the great metropolis of the Americas will still be shopping? You may set tomorrow a year hence, twenty years hence, fifty years in the misty future that is to come upon us and still make that statement in perfect safety. And twenty years, fifty years, a hundred years hence, even, Macy's should still be in Herald Square ready to wait upon her needs and upon the needs of her men and children, too. To forecast far into the future is indeed dangerous. Only rash men undertake it. We know that 1932 is one thing, but that 1952 or even 1942 is quite another one. A savant of uptown Manhattan, who has a nice facility for handling census figures, not long ago predicted that by 1950 little old New York would hold within its boundaries sixteen million people. He may know. I don't. And you are privileged to take your guess--with one man's guess almost if not quite as good as another's. A New York of sixteen million souls is an alluring picture, if a bewildering one, withal. It is a fairly bewildering town with its six million of today. But I have not the slightest doubt that Rowland Hussey Macy said the selfsame thing of the New York of six hundred and fifty thousand souls, to which he first came, away back there in 1858. And the Macy's of 1952, serving its fair and goodly portion of those sixteen million souls, is indeed an alluring picture, which you may best construct for yourself. The store, itself, does well when it plans so definitely for 1932. Nevertheless, before you finally close the pages of this book, I should like to have it record a final picture upon your mind. It is the picture of a really great store. It runs from Broadway to Seventh Avenue, perhaps all the way to Eighth. It begins at Thirty-fourth Street and runs north--one, two, possibly even three or four blocks, or goodly portions of them. It employs ten, twelve, fifteen thousand workers. There are a thousand motor trucks in its delivery service--and a hundred aëroplanes as well. It has sixteen sub-stations, instead of six. Its own delivery limits run north to Peekskill and east to Bridgeport and to Huntington and west and south through at least half of New Jersey. Yet, above all this new enterprise there still towers the high addition which 1923 saw completed and added to the edifice, with the huge and flaming word "MACY'S" emblazoned by white electricity upon the blackened skies of night, visible all the way from Seventh Avenue to the thickly peopled range of the Orange mountains. "Macy's," whistles the small boy upon the North River ferryboat, who has traveled afar with his geography book. "Macy's! That's a regular Gibraltar of a store!" THE END End of Project Gutenberg's The Romance of a Great Store, by Edward Hungerford