of tenements and homes.  Then the boat swept under the enormous steel bridges which seemed upheld by some invisible power and throbbed with life above them.  And then, finally, came the Vision of the City.  The wide expanse of rolling, slapping water was busy with innumerable harbor craft, crowded ferries, puffing tugs, each wafting its plume of smoke and white steam; but from those waters rose tier after tier of square-set skyscrapers climbing in an irregular hill to the thin peak of the highest tower.  In the golden haze, shot with sun, the whole block of towers loomed distant, gigantic, shadowy, unreal—­a magic city floating on the waters of the morning.  Windows flashed, spirals of white smoke spun thin from the far roofs.  Myra thought of those skyscrapers as the big brothers of the island gazing out over the Atlantic.

The boat rounded the tip of the island, furrowing the broad surface of the bay, which seemed as the floor of a stage before that lifting huge sky-lost amphitheater.  Every advance changed the many-faceted beauty of New York, and Myra, gazing, had one glimpse across little green Battery Park up the deep twilit canon of Broadway, the city’s spine.  The young woman was moved to tears.  She seemed to slough off at that moment the church of her youth, averring that New York was too big for a creed.  It was the great human outworking; the organism of the mighty many.  It seemed a miracle that all this splendor and wonder had been wrought by human hands.  Surely human nature was great—­greater than she had dreamed.  If creatures like herself had wrought this, then she was more than she had dared to imagine, “deeper than ever plummet had sounded.”  She felt new courage, new faith.  She wanted to leave the boat and merge with those buildings and those swarming streets.  She was proud of the great captains who had engineered this masswork, proud of the powers that ruled this immensity.

But beyond all she felt the city’s livingness.  The air seemed charged with human activity, with toil-pulsations.  She was all crowded about with human beings, and felt the mystery of what might be termed crowd-touch.  Here, surely, was life—­life thick, happy, busy, daring, ideal.  Here was pioneering—­a reaching forth to a throbbing future.  So, as the boat landed, she mentally identified herself with this city, labeled herself New-Yorker, and became one of its millions.

Her rapture lasted throughout her first stay.  She tasted romance glancing in shop windows or moving in a crowd or riding in an elevated train.  A letter of introduction to a friend of her mother’s secured her a companion, who “showed her the sights” and helped her choose her boarding-house in East Eightieth Street.  And then came the examinations for public-school teaching; and after these she went home for the summer, returning to New York in the fall.