"Oh no," said he, "Macy's never quits. We shall have to find others--even if we train them ourselves. It is only the material for training that worries me. American young men of today are not overfond of painstaking work of this sort." I knew instantly what he meant. As a nation we are made up of "shortcut" experts. Perseverance, patience, a tedious attention to uninteresting detail, have seemingly but little appeal to the average young man who is looking forward to a real career for himself. To be an executive--no matter by what name or title--and in as short a time as is humanly possible is apparently the only object that he sees ahead of him. A laudable ambition to be sure. But one shudders at the mere thought of a land which should be composed entirely of executives and wishes that we might develop more definitely a class of artisan workers, such as came to us forty, thirty, even twenty-five years ago. The oldest of these men--the man with thirty Macy years to his credit--was chasing a hunting scene upon a great glass bowl as I bent over his desk. It was more than artisanship, that task; it was artistry. A real work of real art even though at the moment these elaborate cut-glass designs have lost a little in public favor. In their own time and order they will come back again, however. And the workmanship that made them possible will be restored to its own former high favor. But even today there are large demands in Macy's for precisely this sort of thing. And glass grinding and engraving--which runs all the way from the making of prescription lenses for spectacles or for milady's _lorgnons_ up to the cutting of an entire dinner service of the most exquisitely patterned glass or repairs to the bowl or pitcher that Bridget or Selma has so carelessly broken--is the chief factor of a shop that handles, as other parts of its day's job, jewelry and watch repairs, electro-plating of gold, copper, silver, nickel, the printing or engraving or stamping of stationery of every sort, to say nothing of leather goods of every kind and description and a thousand lesser and highly individual jobs, such as the regilding of a mirror or the transformation of an ancient whale-oil lamp into a modern incandescent one. It is small wonder that as a minimum seventy-five men are constantly employed in this shop; more, as the exigencies of this season or of that may demand them.