Of these principles you shall read in the oncoming chapters of this book. There are many, they are varied--in some respects they vary greatly from those upon which other and equally successful and equally honest merchandising establishments are today operated. Macy's has no quarrel with any of its competitors. It merely writes upon the record that, for itself, it is quite satisfied with the merchandising principles that its founder and the men who came after him saw fit to establish. Upon those the store has prospered--and prospered greatly. And because of such prosperity--social as well as commercial--because it feels that its selling principles are quite as valuable to its patrons as to the store itself, it has no intention of giving change to them. Macy's of today is like in soul and spirit to Macy's of yesterday; Macy's of tomorrow is planned to be like unto the Macy's of today--only vastly larger in its scope and influence. For the convenience of the reader this book has been divided into three great parts, or books. Time has formed the logical factor of division. Time, as in the theater, forms these three books, or acts--Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. They move in sequence. The stage-hands are placing the setting for the New York of yesterday--the New York that already has begun to fade, far from the eyes of even the oldest of the humans who shall come to read these pages. It is a charming New York, this American city of the late 'fifties, the city whose ladies go shopping in hoopskirts and in crinoline. It has dignity, taste, bustle, enterprise. But anon of these. The stage is set. The director's foot comes stamping down upon the boards. The curtain rises. The first act begins. _Yesterday_ I. The Ancestral Beginnings of Macy's Interwoven into the history of the ancient island of Nantucket are the names and annals of some of the earliest of our American families--the Coffins, the Eldredges, the Myricks, and the Macys. Their forbears came from England to America fully ten generations ago. They settled upon the remote and wind-swept isle and there to this day many of their descendants ply their vocations and have their homes. In the beginning the vocation of these settlers was found to lie almost invariably upon a single path; and that path led down to the sea. They were sea-faring folk, those early residents of Nantucket: God-fearing, simple of speech and of action, yet mentally keen and alert. And from them sprang the segment of a race which was soon to grow far beyond the narrow barriers of the little island and to spread its splendid enthusiasm and energy far into a newborn land.