And then, to the doors of the great red-brick emporium in Sixth Avenue would come New York Jr. He and she came afoot and in carriages, upon horse-cars of the surface railways and upon the steam-cars of the elevated, and before they entered stood for a moment at the great glass windows that completely surrounded the place. For there was spread to view a pantomime of the most enchanting sort. No theater might equal the annual Christmas window display of Macy's. No theater might even dream of creating such a vast and overwhelming spectacle. The Hippodrome of today was still nearly thirty years into the future. The responsibilities of this vast undertaking alone were all but overwhelming. The twenty-fifth of December was barely passed, the store hardly cleaned of all the debris and confusion that it had brought, before plans for another Christmas were actively under way; Miss Bowyer, who specialized in the window display, taking Mr. Wheeler up to the wax-figure experts of Eden Museé in Twenty-third Street to order the saints and sinners and famous folk generally who came to the window annually at the end of December. One of the present executives of Macy's can remember being privileged, as a small boy, to go behind the scenes of the window pantomime. There he saw it, not in its beauty of form and color and light, but as a bewildering perplexity of mechanisms--belts and pulleys and levers and cams--an enterprise of no little magnitude. While Miss Bowyer and her assistants were busy laying the first of the plans for another window display, Mr. Macy was off for Europe seeking a fresh supply of toys and novelties for New York Jr.'s own annual festival. Once in a while he touched a high level of novelty, such as the securing of the mechanical bird--which a moment ago we saw Margaret Getchell taking all to pieces and then placing the pieces together again, with all the celerity and precision of a Yankee mechanic. The mechanical bird appealed particularly to Mr. Macy's friend, Mr. Phineas T. Barnum. Mr. Barnum came often to the store in Fourteenth Street to gaze upon it and to listen to it. Perhaps he regretted that he had let so valuable an advertising feature slip out of the hands of his museum. For Mr. Macy's chief reason in importing a toy so rare and so expensive as to bring it far beyond the hands of any ordinary child was to create sensation--and so to gain advertising thereby. The merchant from out of New England was nothing if not a born advertiser. While his competitors were quite content with small and stilted announcements in the public prints as to the extent and variety of their wares, Macy splurged. He took "big space"--big at least for that day and generation. And he did not hesitate to let printer's ink carry the fame of his emporium far and wide--a sound business principle which has prevailed in it from that day to this.