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It was evening. The white moon shone down upon the royal gardens. Two men were strolling there.

"What think ye, Exeter," the younger inquired, "of the new royal sport?"

""Tis a royal sport indeed," replied the elder, the Marquis of Exeter. "And of the Welshman?"

The marquis paused thoughtfully for a moment, then spoke slowly. ""Tis better to have him for a friend than for an enemy. Mark ye, Sir George, within the year he'll hold the lord-chancellorship left vacant by Wolsey. The king counsels him; the queen looks upon him with awe and respect; and all England shall come to know his authority."

Sir George mused casually: "Then I shall open the doors of my country estate in Devonshire to his Excellency. A partridge hunt might please the future lord chancellor of England."

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"He is indeed," quoth the holder of the king's bridle, "a gracious nobleman."

22

The moonbeams filtered softly through the windows where sat Sir David, the Welshman, and his countryman from York.

""Twas a great day for Wales," chuckled the latter. "With ye socalled Welsh pastime of foote ball in royal favor and my esteemed uncle, Sir David, in still higher royal favor, Wales shall rank high in influence and benefits under his gracious Majesty the King."

"Aye," responded Sir David indulgently, "but my reckless nephew came very near to ruining our socalled Welsh game as a royal sport of England."

A puzzled expression accompanied the nephew's inquiry. "Ruining it, d'ye say?

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In the moonlight Sir David's eyes could be seen twinkling merrily. "Aye, ruining it, my nephew, for did not ye beef-eaters from York come very near to overpowering his Majesty's drilled phalanx?"

"But what if they had, my dear uncle?" inquired the other. "When ye thought up this wild game of foote ball from nowhere in ye fertile mind, then dubbed it the Welsh pastimealthough heaven knows it's never been heard of in Wales-then sent me off to York to persuade the young duke to take up the sport and challenge his Majesty to a combat, ye certainly loaded me down with rules and directions, but never a word did ye say about fixing it so his Majesty's boar-hidesmen should win."

"Of course not, my boy," laughed the other, "but I didn't reckon that

ye could take the duke and his motley knights and in a lone fortnight turn out a boar-hide phalanx equal, if not superior, to one drawn from the best athletes of his Majesty's courte with three fortnights under the inventor of the game himself. Ye surpassed even my high estimation of you, and your fighting boar-hidesmen were very near this afternoon to spoiling my carefully laid plans and injuring the cause of Wales at the English courte."

"But, my dear uncle, how would the duke's victory have caused so much damage?"

"Tut, tut, my nephew," Sir David chided affectionately. "Great though ye be as a mentor in ye royal sport of foote ball, ye have yet to learn much about its influence in statecraft. Foote ball is a strenuous game, a young man's game. I designed it so. But his Majesty great athlete though he once was-is no longer young. After winning such a great game as to-day he can now retire from the sport and become the royal patron of ye game in which he is the retired champion. Your uncle shall see that every attendance of his Majesty at contests in the new sport will renew the shouts ye heard to-day from the spectators: 'Long live the king; ye Imperial Battering-Ram.' All of this will be especially pleasing to his Majesty. A defeated monarch would make a poor patron. Memories would rankle. As to ye young Duke of York, think not that I wished to cheat him. He is a great athlete, great even in defeat, and will win renown in the new sport-far greater renown than had he won today.'

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For a moment neither spoke; then

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"Tut, tut, my boy. I know naught about it," replied Sir David blandly, "except that between ye halves of the game to-day I purposed to pass hard by the queen's box and paused to express my humble admiration of his Majesty's physical prowess. At the same time I took particular pains to impress upon her Majesty the fact that the king was wearied from his great exertions and expressed the fear that no man of his age-not even the mighty king himself-could endure such a terrific strain for the whole second half unless some accident should delay the game and allow his Majesty a few minutes of rest.”

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"Then ye think the queen-" "I repeat, I know naught of it,' replied Sir David. "Except," he added slyly, "that the queen has a reputation as a woman of great

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Tve

GRAND CENTRAL

How Fortune Was Found in the Search for Good-Will

WEBB WALDRON

HE railroad traveler who adventures for the first time upon Manhattan Island from the north or from the east, gazing eagerly out of the car-window for some color of the metropolis, catches vistas of East River on one hand and of Morningside Heights on the other through narrow clefts of tenements, then plunges suddenly into a tunnel whose length seems interminable. Yet at last he finds himself gliding from its close walls into a wide underground railroad-yard, forested thickly with concrete pillars, roofed solidly with concrete and steel, through which his train threads a tangle of tracks to its platform. Mounting a gentle ramp, the traveler enters into the amazement of Grand Central Station. He crosses the high starryroofed concourse into a labyrinth of underground streets faced with fruit-stands, news-counters, drugstores, clothing-shops, book-shops, jewelry-shops, dry-cleaning establishments, beauty-parlors, restaurants-streets alive with hurrying humanity. Observing a throng pouring up from some unknown region beneath these streets, he breasts the tide and discovers farther down in the earth another concourse with another set of gates and platforms leading out into another vast under

ground railroad-yard beneath the yard his train has just rumbled through. While trains on the level above are disembarking passengers from Bangor and Burlington and Medicine Hat, here on this lower level thousands of suburbanites are pouring in from Pelham and Peekskill and Westport and Chappaqua.

Turning, bewildered, our traveler follows a passageway that carries him surprisingly up into the lobby of a luxurious hotel which surmounts part of the station yard. And then, pushing his way through the lobby and out into the open air, he discovers that Grand Central is planted in the heart of the up-town business zone, a few minutes' walk from Fifth Avenue. If he chances to circle the giant station building, he finds north of it an imposing avenue of tall apartment-houses and hotels. But he will not know that this avenue and its cross-streets are merely the roof of the railroad-yard through which he has just entered the station, that these apartment-houses and hotels with their marble foyers and staircases, and courtyards crowded with fountains and forest-trees, are supported on steel pillars above the tracks over which railroad-trains move incessantly-inaudible, invisible! He will not know that the rail

road receives such enormous rental for this roof of its yard that the terminal is a richly profitable institution instead of a liability, as are railroad terminals usually.

Even without this knowledge, he will marvel at the foresight that placed Grand Central where it is.

But, as a matter of fact, the man who located the station would be as much amazed as our traveler, could he see Grand Central as it is.

Grand Central is interesting not only for the bold engineering that went into its construction and for the almost fantastic quality of its life, but also for its revelation of the chances of American business. It illustrates the curious mixture of foresight and luck that often lies behind what are called our great industrial and commercial achievements.

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Manhattan has never taken a boy's delight in steam-engines. The island's dislike of steam has exerted a constant pressure on its railroads and terminals-from its first railroad on through the years to its final effect on the location and amazing character of Grand Central.

In 1832, when construction of the first road began, New York was a city of not much over two hundred thousand, clustered on the island's southern tip. North of the city, the island was a region of rolling meadow and rocky upland, with here and there a village-Chelsea, over near the Hudson shore in what is now the West Twenties; Manhattanville in the deep valley where West 125th Street now runs; Yorkville, in the present East Sixties; and the old settlement of Harlem on the Harlem River, six or seven miles north of the

city. It was to this distant bourne, Harlem, that the first railroad aspired.

"Yesterday," said the "New York Courier and Enquirer" of February 24, 1832, "pursuant to invitation, several members of the corporation, visitors, engineers, contractors, etc., proceeded with the officers and directors of the Harlem Railroad Company from their office in Chambers Street in carriages to Murray Hill and Fourth Avenue where the ceremony of breaking ground was performed. On their arrival at the elevated and commanding spot, where a number of citizens and persons engaged in the work had already assembled, the rock had been bored and thirteen blasts were exploded, when John Mason, Esq., Vice President of the Company, addressed the assembly:

"To this city the Harlem Railroad will be an immense convenience. Those who remember what Clapham and other villages were once to London and who now see them united will form an idea of what Harlem will be to the city of New York. It will supply our vegetables and fruit markets and will open a communication with the rich and fertile country of Westchester, will bring fuel to the poor and marble for buildings. Along the line of this railroad we shall have cottages and villas with ample gardens and grounds belonging to our merchants and traders where they can breathe the fresh air and have several acres for the price of a single lot of ground in the compact part of the city.'

"This address was received with great cheering after which the company and guests repaired to Hinton's at the Shot Tower Hotel where a

cold collation was spread and success to the Harlem Railroad was drunk in sparkling champagne with great hilarity and good feeling."

Work on the island's first railroad was pushed rapidly at several points. In the autumn of the same year, this notice appeared in New York newspapers:

"NEW YORK & HARLEM RAILROAD "The cars will run upon the rails from Prince to Fourteenth Street in the Bowery from 9 A.M. each fair day except Sundays for the purpose of affording evidence to the public of the expediency of running railroads within the city. A small charge will be made to defray expenses."

The cars ran, but they ran by horsepower. The charter of the road forbade the use of steam locomotives south of Fourteenth Street. The advertisement indicates, indeed, that there was a prejudice, not only against steam-power, but against railroads of any sort.

The persistence of that prejudice is amusingly shown in a pamphlet the Harlem Railroad issued a year or so later. "The frightful predictions of steam carriages furiously propelled through the streets upon rails elevated above the surface, overturning and demolishing carriages and travelers, have all proved groundless and visionary," we read. "The people can examine for themselves and will find only a thin plate of iron lying so near the surface as to be barely visible. Upon these rails they will find a few beautiful carriages running without dust or danger and occupying less space than is now required for the same purpose by the omnibus coaches." And yet, the pamphlet

goes on to complain, "For some weeks past an anonymous map or design has been most industriously circulated fraught with the most palpable misrepresentations. Instead of the space actually less than five feet between the rails, this fanciful picture represents the company as monopolizing 23 feet of street and excluding all other vehicles!"

One night a gang, said to be members of the cab-drivers' union who had met at Tammany Hall, tore up a section of the tracks. The company quietly replaced the rails, and gave the public to understand that further depredations would be met with

force.

And steadily the line pushed northward. By the summer of 1833, the rails had reached Sun Fish Pond, at the present intersection of Fourth Avenue and Thirty-second Street, and by the following year the foot of Hamilton Hill in Yorkville. Nearing Harlem, the engineers faced the necessity of tunneling the rocky eminence known as Observatory Place. The tunnel, cut through solid rock for almost six hundred feet, on what is now the line of Park Avenue between Ninety-second and Ninetyfourth streets, was in fact the original section of the present Park Avenue tunnel of the New York Central. Beyond the tunnel, the road spanned the Harlem flats. A few years later, the Harlem Railroad bought the old toll-bridge across the Harlem River belonging to Gouverneur Morris and pushed its line on into the mainland of Westchester. Thus the Harlem Railroad had a line almost the whole length of Manhattan Island; from its lower terminus at Tryon Row, a step from City Hall Park, north to

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