Not long ago, I asked how many people came into Macy's in the passing of an average business day. I was promptly told that several times the firm had endeavored to make an actual and systematic count of the folk who passed through each of its many entrances, but had never entirely succeeded. Once, of a busy October day, the count up to two o'clock in the afternoon had reached and passed the one hundred and twenty thousand mark. At that time each of the great escalators which ascend from the main floor was handling its maximum capacity of 7,400 persons an hour; each of the fourteen public elevators was carrying the full number of passengers permitted it by law and the store management; while a host of other folk were doing business upon the ground floor without ever ascending to the fascinating mysteries of the land of Up-Above. And that was October. If a man who had seen the throng of that pleasant autumn day and thought it well-nigh impossible only had returned to the big store on a December day--say the Saturday before Christmas last--he would have thought that three hundred thousand would have been far nearer the mark of the eight and one-half hours. Could more folk have been squeezed through those wide doors and into those broad aisles? It would have seemed not. Even with the aid of a whole corps of special policemen and traffic rules as scientific and as ingenious as those which regulate the vehicular traffic of nearby Fifth Avenue, it was a task of a good half-hour to get within the huge mart; another half-hour to get out again. Certain departments--notably toys--possessed navigation problems of their very own, and other departments, such as refrigerators and other household goods, were comparatively deserted. The Christmas trade is nothing if not oddly balanced. Through a store such as this one may wander, _ad libitum_, and find a new surprise at nearly every corner of it. Certainly upon each of its floors. Nor are these to be limited, in any way, to the floors to which the public is ordinarily admitted. Once I remember coming through the eighth floor and suddenly emerging upon a clean, crisply lighted little workshop. At a long bench underneath an atelier-like window three men, fairly well-advanced in years, were working. One was engraving upon silver--the other two upon glass. The chief of the shop explained to me that in the beginning they were Germans but they had been in Macy's so many, many years that they were today to be classed as pretty thoroughly Americanized. One of them had sat at that bench--and the one down in Fourteenth Street that had preceded it before the northward trek to Thirty-fourth Street--for over thirty-two years. The three men were artisans--of the old school and of a sort that seemingly is not bred these days. "When they are gone I do not know where we shall go to replace them," said the superintendent. "You will have to quit doing this sort of work?" I ventured. He answered quickly: