After a brief period of busy activity the store aisles are for the moment practically deserted once again. There is a group of buyers "signing in"--once again the inevitable time-list--at the superintendent's office just beneath the main stair, where five or ten minutes ago the "big chief" of the whole main floor was giving his section managers their special instructions for the day. The rest of the aisles are all but empty. The clerks are behind the desks, the cashiers at their posts, the section managers at attention, the elevators banked and waiting at the ground floor-- Then-- Nine o'clock! The echo of Madison Square Mary telling the hour comes rolling up Broadway. The street doors swing open; almost as if working upon a single mechanism. The first of the shoppers come tumbling in. The great main aisle of the store--one thinks of it almost as the Broadway of this city within a city--is populated once again. The chief stream of the store's patrons pours down through it. Other streams from the doors in the side streets join it; still others diverge down the side aisles, up the stair and escalators, into the elevators which presently go packing off, one by one, toward the mysterious and fascinating regions of the upper floors. In three or four brief minutes the picture that one has of that mighty first floor from the mezzanine balcony that runs roundabout it is of a great mass of hurrying, scurrying humanity; no longer any well-defined currents, but little eddies and pools of human beings constantly and forever changing. And this but hardly past nine o'clock in the morning. In another hour there will be still more folk within the great building. Most of them have come to shop, a few of them to take a tardy breakfast in the comfortable restaurant upon its eighth floor. One might not think that it would pay to open a restaurant for breakfast at as late an hour as nine in the morning, but such a one would not know his New York. Breakfast in our big town is rarely over until the setting of the sun.