XIX BUILDING THE WOOLWORTH BUILDING
Here is a moody colossus—sometimes it is fine, sometimes filthy. It was all right the day I made this drawing, stately amid the clouds. One thing it has done—it has made a new sky line and brought New York together again. It comes up best from the river, but no longer do the Brooklyn river-boats run; from them I used to get the best views. Still, there are other ways of seeing the Wonder of Work even now at New York.
XX BUTTE, MONTANA, ON ITS MOUNTAIN TOP
Butte is the most pictorial place in America—therefore no one stops at it—and most people pass it in the night, or do not take the trouble to look out of the car windows as they go by. But there it is. On the mountain side spring up the huge shafts. The top is crowned not with trees but with chimneys. Low black villages of miners' houses straggle toward the foot of the mountain. The barren plain is covered with gray, slimy masses of refuse which crawl down to it—glaciers of work—from the hills. The plain is seared and scored and cracked with tiny canyons, all their lines leading to the mountain. If you have the luck to reach the town early in the morning you will find it half revealed, half concealed in smoke and mist and steam, through which the strange shafts struggle up to the light, while all round the horizon the snow peaks silently shimmer above the noisy, hidden town. If you have the still better fortune to reach it late in the evening you will see an Alpine glow that the Alps have never seen. In the middle of the day the mountains disappear and there is nothing but glare and glitter, union men and loafers about.
