RECOLLECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS
more plentiful and very much higher than before, and this, to my mind, was all to the good. I have always admired sky-scrapers and think that they are the greatest contribution of our generation to architecture. I remember very well the first of these, the old " flat-iron " building in New York. I once saw it in a mist thick enough to obscure the surrounding buildings, and it looked like the bows of a great vessel coming out of nowhere and bearing down on a doomed city. America must have been fortunate enough to possess great architects to create, and make so effective, this new type of building.
Broadway, too, had become, I will not say more beautiful, but certainly more effective, in its special mission of forcing itself upon one's attention. The luminous advertisements were so numerous that each side of the street seemed to be ablaze. Piccadilly Circus at its best or worst is to Broadway but as moonlight is to sunlight.
Mr Eglin, a Vice-President of the Franklin Institute, whose kindness in thinking of and providing everything that would add to our pleasure, interest or comfort was one of the main reasons why our visit was so pleasant, invited us one night to dine with him at the Ambassadors Restaurant, and took us after dinner to the Ziegfeld Follies, the most famous theatre in New York. We saw there Will Rogers, whose tragic death in an Arctic aeroplane accident occurred only a fortnight before I am writing this. His performance was quite unlike anything I ever saw, before or since. He had been a cowboy, and in his spare time had practised doing tricks with his rope. In one of his turns at the Follies, he stood holding one end of a rope in his hand and making it go into all kinds of curves; while he was doing this, he jerked out one short sentence after another about some political, social, or indeed any kind 244