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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Our Philadelphia, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Our Philadelphia
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+Illustrator: Joseph Pennell
+
+Release Date: November 21, 2011 [EBook #38076]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR PHILADELPHIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Wirawan, Suzanne Shell, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+  +----------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Notes:                                           |
+  |                                                                |
+  | Words surrounded by _ are italicized.                          |
+  |                                                                |
+  | A number of obvious errors have been corrected in this text.   |
+  | For a complete list, please see the bottom of this document.   |
+  |                                                                |
+  +----------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+OUR PHILADELPHIA
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: LOOKING UP BROAD STREET FROM SPRUCE STREET]
+
+
+
+
+OUR PHILADELPHIA
+
+DESCRIBED BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
+ILLUSTRATED WITH ONE HUNDRED & FIVE
+LITHOGRAPHS BY JOSEPH PENNELL
+
+PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
+J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
+MCMXIV
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
+
+PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1914
+
+PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
+AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
+PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+To-day, when it is the American born in the Ghetto, or Syria, or some
+other remote part of the earth, whose recollections are prized, it may
+seem as if the following pages called for an apology. I have none to
+make. They were written simply for the pleasure of gathering together my
+old memories of a town that, as my native place, is dear to me and my
+new impressions of it after an absence of a quarter of a century. But
+now I have finished I add to this pleasure in my book the pleasant
+belief that it will have its value for others, if only for two reasons.
+In the first place, J.'s drawings which illustrate it are his record of
+the old Philadelphia that has passed and the new Philadelphia that is
+passing--a record that in a few years it will be impossible for anybody
+to make, so continually is Philadelphia changing. In the second, my
+story of Philadelphia, perfect or imperfect, may in as short a time be
+equally impossible for anybody to repeat, since I am one of those
+old-fashioned Americans, American by birth with many generations of
+American fore-fathers, who are rapidly becoming rare creatures among the
+hordes of new-fashioned Americans who were anything and everything else
+no longer than a year or a week or an hour ago.
+
+ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL 3 ADELPHI TERRACE HOUSE, LONDON May, 1914
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                           PAGE
+
+     I. AN EXPLANATION                                               1
+
+    II. A CHILD IN PHILADELPHIA                                     24
+
+   III. A CHILD IN PHILADELPHIA (Continued)                         48
+
+    IV. AT THE CONVENT                                              72
+
+     V. TRANSITIONAL                                               104
+
+    VI. THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE                                       130
+
+   VII. THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE: THE ASSEMBLY                         154
+
+  VIII. A QUESTION OF CREED                                        175
+
+    IX. THE FIRST AWAKENING                                        205
+
+     X. THE MIRACLE OF WORK                                        233
+
+    XI. THE ROMANCE OF WORK                                        268
+
+   XII. PHILADELPHIA AND LITERATURE                                304
+
+  XIII. PHILADELPHIA AND LITERATURE (Continued)                    332
+
+   XIV. PHILADELPHIA AND ART                                       368
+
+    XV. PHILADELPHIA AND ART (Continued)                           390
+
+   XVI. PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE                                      413
+
+  XVII. PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE (Continued)                          433
+
+ XVIII. PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY                  451
+
+   XIX. PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY (Continued)      477
+
+    XX. PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY (Continued)      509
+
+        INDEX                                                      543
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+LOOKING UP BROAD STREET FROM SPRUCE STREET              _Frontispiece_
+
+DELANCEY PLACE                                                       3
+
+"PORTICO ROW," SPRUCE STREET                                         7
+
+ARCH STREET MEETING HOUSE                                           13
+
+THE SCHUYLKILL SOUTH FROM CALLOWHILL STREET                         17
+
+FRIENDS' GRAVEYARD, GERMANTOWN                                      21
+
+IN RITTENHOUSE SQUARE                                               25
+
+THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM THE GROUNDS                          29
+
+"ELEVENTH AND SPRUCE"                                               33
+
+DRAWING ROOM AT CLIVEDEN                                            37
+
+BACK-YARDS, ST. PETER'S SPIRE IN THE DISTANCE                       45
+
+INDEPENDENCE SQUARE AND THE STATE HOUSE                             51
+
+CHRIST CHURCH INTERIOR                                              57
+
+CLASSIC FAIRMOUNT                                                   65
+
+DOWN PINE STREET                                                    69
+
+LOUDOUN, MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN                                    75
+
+ENTRANCE TO FAIRMOUNT AND THE WASHINGTON STATUE                     83
+
+MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN                                             89
+
+ARCH STREET MEETING                                                 95
+
+THE TRAIN SHED, BROAD STREET STATION                                99
+
+ST. PETER'S, INTERIOR                                              105
+
+THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM PINE STREET                         109
+
+SECOND STREET MARKET                                               115
+
+FOURTH AND ARCH STREETS MEETING HOUSE                              121
+
+JOHNSON HOUSE, GERMANTOWN                                          127
+
+THE CUSTOMS HOUSE                                                  131
+
+UNDER BROAD STREET STATION AT FIFTEENTH STREET                     135
+
+THE PHILADELPHIA CLUB, THIRTEENTH AND WALNUT STREETS               141
+
+THE NEW RITZ-CARLTON; THE FINISHING TOUCHES; THE WALNUT STREET
+  ADDITION HAS SINCE BEEN MADE                                     149
+
+THE HALL, STENTON                                                  155
+
+"PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND INTO ALL THE INHABITANTS
+  THEREOF"                                                         159
+
+BED ROOM, STENTON, THE HOME OF JAMES LOGAN                         163
+
+THE TUNNEL IN THE PARK                                             167
+
+THE BOAT HOUSES ON THE SCHUYLKILL                                  171
+
+THE PULPIT, ST. PETER'S                                            179
+
+THE CATHEDRAL, LOGAN SQUARE                                        185
+
+CHRIST CHURCH, FROM SECOND STREET                                  189
+
+FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SEVENTH STREET AND WASHINGTON SQUARE    195
+
+OLD SWEDES' CHURCH                                                 201
+
+INDEPENDENCE HALL: THE ORIGINAL DESK ON WHICH THE DECLARATION
+  OF INDEPENDENCE WAS SIGNED AND THE CHAIR USED BY THE PRESIDENT
+  OF CONGRESS, JOHN HANCOCK, IN 1776                               207
+
+PHILADELPHIA FROM BELMONT                                          211
+
+THE DINING ROOM, STENTON                                           217
+
+DOWN THE AISLE AT CHRIST CHURCH                                    223
+
+THE BRIDGE ACROSS MARKET STREET FROM BROAD STREET STATION          229
+
+STATE HOUSE YARD                                                   235
+
+THE PENITENTIARY                                                   247
+
+ON THE READING, AT SIXTEENTH STREET                                251
+
+LOCUST STREET EAST FROM BROAD STREET                               255
+
+BROAD STREET, LOOKING SOUTH FROM ABOVE ARCH STREET                 261
+
+CLINTON STREET, WITH THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL AT ITS END          265
+
+THE CHERRY STREET STAIRS NEAR THE RIVER                            269
+
+THE MORRIS HOUSE ON EIGHTH STREET                                  273
+
+THE OLD COACHING-INN YARD                                          279
+
+FRANKLIN'S GRAVE                                                   285
+
+ARCH STREET MEETING                                                291
+
+CLIVEDEN, THE CHEW HOUSE                                           295
+
+BARTRAM'S                                                          301
+
+CARPENTER'S HALL, INTERIOR                                         305
+
+MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN                                            311
+
+ARCH STREET MEETING--INTERIOR                                      317
+
+FRONT AND CALLOWHILL                                               321
+
+THE ELEVATED AT MARKET STREET WHARF                                327
+
+DR. FURNESS'S HOUSE, WEST WASHINGTON SQUARE, JUST BEFORE IT WAS
+  PULLED DOWN                                                      333
+
+THE GERMANTOWN ACADEMY                                             339
+
+THE STATE HOUSE FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE                           345
+
+"THE LITTLE STREET OF CLUBS," CAMAC STREET ABOVE SPRUCE STREET     349
+
+DOWN SANSOM STREET FROM EIGHTH STREET. THE LOW HOUSES AT
+  SEVENTH STREET HAVE SINCE BEEN TORN DOWN AND THE WESTERN
+  END OF THE CURTIS BUILDING NOW OCCUPIES THEIR PLACE              353
+
+THE DOUBLE STAIRWAY IN THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL                   359
+
+CARPENTER'S HALL, BUILT 1771                                       365
+
+INDEPENDENCE HALL--LENGTHWISE VIEW                                 369
+
+GIRARD COLLEGE                                                     377
+
+UPSALA, GERMANTOWN                                                 383
+
+THE HALL AT CLIVEDEN, THE CHEW HOUSE                               387
+
+THE OLD WATER-WORKS, FAIRMOUNT PARK                                391
+
+THE STAIRWAY, STATE HOUSE                                          397
+
+UPPER ROOM, STENTON                                                403
+
+WYCK--THE DOORWAY FROM WITHIN                                      409
+
+THE PHILADELPHIA DISPENSARY FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE               415
+
+MORRIS HOUSE, GERMANTOWN                                           419
+
+THE STATE HOUSE COLONNADE                                          425
+
+THE SMITH MEMORIAL, WEST FAIRMOUNT PARK                            431
+
+THE BASIN, OLD WATER-WORKS                                         435
+
+GIRARD STREET                                                      441
+
+THE UNION LEAGUE, FROM BROAD AND CHESTNUT STREETS                  415
+
+BROAD STREET STATION                                               453
+
+WANAMAKER'S                                                        457
+
+ST. PETER'S CHURCHYARD                                             461
+
+CITY HALL FROM THE SCHUYLKILL                                      465
+
+CHESTNUT STREET BRIDGE                                             469
+
+THE NARROW STREET                                                  475
+
+THE MARKET STREET ELEVATED AT THE DELAWARE END                     479
+
+THE RAILROAD BRIDGES AT FALLS OF SCHUYLKILL                        483
+
+THE PARKWAY PERGOLAS                                               487
+
+MARKET STREET WEST OF THE SCHUYLKILL                               491
+
+MANHEIM CRICKET GROUND                                             497
+
+DOCK STREET AND THE EXCHANGE                                       501
+
+THE LOCOMOTIVE YARD, WEST PHILADELPHIA                             507
+
+THE GIRARD TRUST COMPANY                                           511
+
+TWELFTH STREET MEETING HOUSE                                       515
+
+WYCK                                                               519
+
+THE MASSED SKY-SCRAPERS ABOVE THE HOUSETOPS                        523
+
+SUNSET. PHILADELPHIA FROM ACROSS THE DELAWARE                      527
+
+THE UNION LEAGUE BETWEEN THE SKY-SCRAPERS                          531
+
+UP BROAD STREET FROM LEAGUE ISLAND                                 535
+
+FROM GRAY'S FERRY                                                  539
+
+
+
+
+OUR PHILADELPHIA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I: AN EXPLANATION
+
+
+I
+
+I think I have a right to call myself a Philadelphian, though I am not
+sure if Philadelphia is of the same opinion. I was born in Philadelphia,
+as my Father was before me, but my ancestors, having had the sense to
+emigrate to America in time to make me as American as an American can
+be, were then so inconsiderate as to waste a couple of centuries in
+Virginia and Maryland, and my Grandfather was the first of the family to
+settle in a town where it is important, if you belong at all, to have
+belonged from the beginning. However, J.'s ancestors, with greater
+wisdom, became at the earliest available moment not only Philadelphians,
+but Philadelphia Friends, and how very much more that means
+Philadelphians know without my telling them. And so, as he does belong
+from the beginning and as I would have belonged had I had my choice, for
+I would rather be a Philadelphian than any other sort of American. I do
+not see why I cannot call myself one despite the blunder of my
+forefathers in so long calling themselves something else.
+
+I might hope that my affection alone for Philadelphia would give me the
+right, were I not Philadelphian enough to know that Philadelphia is, as
+it always was and always will be, cheerfully indifferent to whatever
+love its citizens may have to offer it. I can hardly suppose my claim
+for gratitude greater than that of its Founder or the long succession of
+Philadelphians between his time and mine who have loved it and been
+snubbed or bullied in return. Indeed, in the face of this Philadelphia
+indifference, my affection seems so superfluous that I often wonder why
+it should be so strong. But wise or foolish, there it is, strengthening
+with the years whether I will or no,--a deeper rooted sentiment than I
+thought I was capable of for the town with which the happiest memories
+of my childhood are associated, where the first irresponsible days of my
+youth were spent, which never ceased to be home to me during the more
+than a quarter of a century I lived away from it.
+
+[Illustration: DELANCEY PLACE]
+
+Besides, Philadelphia attracts me apart from what it may stand for in
+memory or from the charm sentiment may lend to it. I love its
+beauty--the beauty of tranquil streets, of red brick houses with white
+marble steps, of pleasant green shade, of that peaceful look of the past
+Philadelphians cross the ocean to rave over in the little old dead towns
+of England and Holland--a beauty that is now fast disappearing. I love
+its character--the calm, the dignity, the reticence with which it has
+kept up through the centuries with the American pace, the airs of a
+demure country village with which it has done the work and earned the
+money of a big bustling town, the cloistered seclusion with which it
+enjoys its luxury and hides its palaces behind its plain brick fronts--a
+character that also is fast going. I love its history, though I am no
+historian, for the little I know colours its beauty and accounts for its
+character.
+
+
+II
+
+It is not for nothing that I begin with this flourish of my birth
+certificate and public confession of love. I want to establish my right,
+first, to call myself a Philadelphian, and then, to talk about
+Philadelphia as freely as we only can talk about the places and the
+people and the things we belong to and care for. I would not dare to
+take such a liberty with Philadelphia if my references were not in
+order, for, as a Philadelphian, I appreciate the risk. Not that I have
+any idea of writing the history of Philadelphia. I hope I have the
+horror, said to be peculiar to all generous minds, of what are commonly
+called facts, and also the intelligence not to attempt what I know I
+cannot do. Another good reason is that the history has already been
+written more than once. Philadelphians, almost from their cave-dwelling
+period, have seemed conscious of the eye of posterity upon them. They
+had hardly landed on the banks of the Delaware before they began to
+write alarmingly long letters which they preserved, and elaborate
+diaries which they kept with equal care. And the letter-writing,
+diary-keeping fever was so in the air that strangers in the town caught
+it: from Richard Castleman to John Adams, from John Adams to Charles
+Dickens, from Charles Dickens to Henry James, every visitor, with
+writing for profession or amusement, has had more or less to say about
+it--usually more. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has gathered
+the old material together; our indispensable antiquary, John Watson, has
+gleaned the odds and ends left by the way; and no end of modern writers
+in Philadelphia have ransacked their stores of information: Dr. Weir
+Mitchell making novels out of them, Mr. Sydney Fisher and Miss Agnes
+Repplier, history; Mr. Hampton Carson using them as the basis of further
+research; Miss Anne Hollingsworth Wharton resurrecting Colonial life and
+society and fashions from them, Mr. Eberlein and Mr. Lippincott, the
+genealogy of Colonial houses; other patriotic citizens helping
+themselves in one way or another; until, among them all, they have
+filled a large library and prepared a sufficiently formidable task for
+the historian of Philadelphia in generations to come without my adding
+to his burden.
+
+
+III
+
+It is an amusing library, as Philadelphians may believe now they are
+getting over the bad habit into which they had fallen of belittling
+their town, much in their town's fashion of belittling them. I am
+afraid it was partly their fault if the rest of America fell into the
+same habit. As I recall my old feelings and attitude, it seems to me
+that in my day we must have been brought up to look down upon
+Philadelphia. The town surely cut a poor figure in my school books, and
+the purplest patches in Colonial history must have been there reserved
+for New England or New York, Virginia or the Carolinas, for any and
+every colony rather than the Province of Pennsylvania, or I would not
+have left school better posted in the legends of Powhatan and Pocahontas
+than in the life of William Penn, and more edified by the burning of
+witches and the tracking of Indians than by the struggles of Friends to
+give every man the liberty to go to Heaven his own way. The amiable
+contempt in which Philadelphians held William Penn revealed itself in
+their free-and-easy way of speaking of him, if they spoke of him at all,
+as Billy Penn, though Penn would have been the last to invite the
+familiarity. Probably few outside the Society of Friends could have said
+just what he had done for their town, or just what they owed to him. If
+I am not mistaken, the prevailing idea was that his chief greatness
+consisted in the cleverness with which he fooled the land out of the
+Indians for a handful of beads.
+
+[Illustration: "PORTICO ROW" SPRUCE STREET]
+
+The present generation could not be so ignorant if it wanted to. The
+statue of Penn, in full-skirted coat and broad-brimmed hat, dominating
+Philadelphia from the ugly tower of the Public Buildings, though it may
+not be a thing of beauty, at least suggests to Philadelphians that it
+would not have been put up there, the most conspicuous landmark from the
+streets and the surrounding country, if Penn had not been somebody, or
+done something, of some consequence. As for the rest of America, I doubt
+if it often comes so near to Philadelphia that it can see the statue.
+The last time I went to New York from London I met on the steamer a man
+from Michigan who had obviously been but a short time before a man from
+Cork, and who was so keen to stop in Philadelphia on his way West that I
+might have been astonished had I not heard so much of the miraculously
+rapid Americanization of the modern emigrant. Most people do not want to
+stop in Philadelphia unless they have business there, and he had none,
+and naturally I could not imagine any other motive except the desire to
+see the town which is of the greatest historic importance in the United
+States and which still possesses proofs of it. But the man from Michigan
+gave me to understand, and pretty quick too, that he did not know
+Philadelphia had a history and old buildings to prove it, and what was
+more, he did not care if it had. He guessed history wasn't in his line.
+What he wanted was to take the next train to Atlantic City; folks he
+knew had been there and said it was great. And I rather think this is
+the way most Americans, from America or from Cork, feel about
+Philadelphia.
+
+
+IV
+
+It is not my affair to enlighten them or anybody else. I have a more
+personal object in view. Philadelphia may mean to other people nothing
+at all--that is their loss; I am concerned entirely with what it means
+to me. In those wonderful Eighteen-Nineties, now written about with awe
+by the younger generation as if no less prehistoric than the period of
+the Renaissance, until it makes me feel a new Methusaleh to own that I
+lived and worked through them, we were always being told that art should
+be the artist's record of nature seen through a temperament, criticism
+the critic's story of his adventures among the world's masterpieces, and
+though I am neither artist nor critic, though I am not sure what a
+temperament is, much less if I have one, still I fancy this expresses in
+a way the end I have set myself in writing about Philadelphia. For I
+should like, if I can, to record my personal impressions of the town I
+love and to give my adventures among the beautiful things, the humorous
+things, the tragic things it contains in more than ample measure. My
+interest is in my personal experiences, but these have been coloured by
+the history of Philadelphia since I have dabbled in it, and have become
+richer and more amusing. I have learned, with age and reading and
+travelling, that Philadelphia as it is cannot really be known without
+some knowledge of Philadelphia as it was: also that Philadelphia, both
+as it is and as it was, is worth knowing. Americans will wander to the
+ends of the earth to study the psychology--as they call it of people
+they never could understand however hard they tried; they will shut
+themselves up in a remote town of Italy or Spain to master the secrets
+of its prehistoric past; they will squander months in the Biblioth�que
+Nationale or the British Museum to get at the true atmosphere of Paris
+or London; when, had they only stopped their journey at Broad Street
+Station in Philadelphia or, if they were Philadelphians, never taken the
+train out of it, they could have had all the psychology and secrets and
+atmosphere they could ask for, with much less trouble and expense.
+
+I have never been to any town anywhere, and I have been to many in my
+time, that has more decided character than Philadelphia, or to any where
+this character is more difficult to understand if the clue is not got
+from the past. For instance, people talk about Philadelphia as if its
+one talent was for sleep, while the truth is, taking the sum of its
+achievements, no other American town has done so much hard work, no
+other has accomplished so much for the country. Impressed as we are by
+the fact, it would be impossible to account for the reputation if it
+were not known that the people who made Philadelphia presented the same
+puzzling contradiction in their own lives--the only people who ever
+understood how to be in the world and not of it.
+
+[Illustration: ARCH STREET MEETING HOUSE]
+
+The usual alternative to not being of the world is to be in a cloister
+or to live like a hermit, to accept a role in common or to renounce
+social intercourse. But the Friends did not have to shut themselves up
+to conquer worldliness, they did not have to renounce the world's work
+and its rewards. For "affluence of the world's goods," Isaac Norris,
+writing from Philadelphia, could felicitate Jonathan Dickinson, "knowing
+both thyself and dear wife have hearts and souls fit to use them." That
+was better than shirking temptation in a monk's cell or a philosopher's
+tub. If George Fox wore a leather suit, it was because he found it
+convenient, but William Penn, for whom it would have been highly
+inconvenient, had no scruple in dressing like other men of his position
+and wearing the blue ribbon of office. Nor because religion was freed
+from all unessential ornament, was the house stripped of comfort and
+luxury. I write about Friends with hesitation. I have been married to
+one now for many years and can realize the better therefore that none
+save Friends can write of themselves with authority. But I hope I am
+right in thinking, as I always have thought since I read Thomas Elwood's
+_Memoirs_, that their attitude is excellently explained in his account
+of his first visit to the Penningtons "after they were become Quakers"
+when, though he was astonished at the new gravity of their look and
+behaviour, he found Guli Springett amusing herself in the garden and the
+dinner "handsome." For the world's goods never being the end they were
+to the World's People, Friends were as undisturbed by their possession
+as by their absence and, as a consequence, could meet and accept life,
+whether its gifts were wealth and power or poverty and obscurity, with
+the serenity few other men have found outside the cloister. Moreover,
+they could speak the truth, calling a spade a spade, or their enemy the
+scabbed sheep, or smooth silly man, or vile fellow, or inhuman monster,
+or villain infecting the air with a hellish stench, he no doubt was, and
+never for a moment lose their tempers. This serenity--this "still
+strength"--is as the poles apart from the phlegmatic, constitutional
+slowness of the Dutch in New York or, on the other hand, from the
+tranquillity Henry James traces in progressive descent from taste,
+tradition, and history, even from the philosopher's calm of achieved
+indifference, and Friends, having carried it to perfection in their own
+conduct, left it as a legacy to their town.
+
+[Illustration: THE SCHUYLKILL SOUTH FROM CALLOWHILL STREET]
+
+The usual American town, when it hustles, lets nobody overlook the fact
+that it is hustling. But Philadelphia has done its work as calmly as the
+Friends have done theirs, never boasting of its prosperity, never
+shouting its success and riches from the house-top, and its dignified
+serenity has been mistaken for sleep. Whistler used to say that if the
+General does not tell the world he has won the battle, the world will
+never hear of it. The trouble with Philadelphia is that it has kept its
+triumph to itself. But we have got so far from the old Friends that no
+harm can be done if Philadelphians begin to interpret their town's
+serenity to a world capable of confusing it with drowsiness. If America
+is ready to forget, if for long Philadelphians were as ready, it is high
+time we should remember ourselves and remind America of the services
+Philadelphia has rendered to the country, and its good taste in
+rendering them with so little fuss that all the country has done in
+return is to laugh at Philadelphia as a back number.
+
+
+V
+
+Philadelphians have grown accustomed to the laugh. We have heard it
+since we were in our cradles. We are used to have other Americans come
+to our town and,--in the face of our factory chimneys smoking along the
+Schuylkill and our ship-building yards in full swing on the Delaware,
+and our locomotives pouring out over the world by I do not know how many
+thousands from the works in Broad Street, and our mills going at full
+pressure in the "Little England" of Kensington, in Frankford and
+Germantown,--in the face of our busy schools and hospitals and
+academies,--in the face of our stores and banks and charities,--that is,
+in the face of our industry, our learning, and our philanthropy that
+have given tips to the whole country,--see only our sleep-laden eyes and
+hear only our sluggish snores. We know the foolish stories they tell. We
+have heard many more times than we can count of the Bostonian who
+retires to Philadelphia for complete intellectual rest, and the New
+Yorker who when he has a day off comes to spend a week in Philadelphia,
+and the Philadelphian who goes to New York to eat the snails he cannot
+catch in his own back-yard. We have heard until we have it by heart
+that Philadelphia is a cemetery, and the road to it, the Road to
+Yesterday. We are so familiar with the venerable _clich�_ that we can
+but wonder at its gift of eternal youth. Never was there a jest that
+wore so well with those who make it. The comic column is rarely complete
+without it, and it is forever cropping up where least expected. In the
+last American novel I opened Philadelphia was described as hanging on to
+the last strap of the last car to the sound of Gabriel's horn on
+Judgment Day; in the last American magazine story I read the
+Philadelphia heroine by her Philadelphia calm conquered the cowboys of
+the west, as Friends of old disarmed their judges in court. In the
+general Americanization of London, even the London papers have seized
+upon the slowness of Philadelphia as a joke for Londoners to roar at. Li
+Hung Chang couldn't visit Philadelphia without dozing through the
+ceremonies in his honour and noting the appropriateness of it in his
+diary. And so it goes on, the witticism to-day apparently as fresh as it
+was in the Stone Age from which it has come down to us.
+
+[Illustration: FRIENDS' GRAVEYARD, GERMANTOWN]
+
+If Philadelphians laugh, that is another matter--every man has the right
+to laugh at himself. But we have outlived our old affectation of
+indifference to our town, I am not sure that we are not pushing our
+profession of pride in it too far to the other extreme. I remember the
+last time I was home I went to a public meeting called to talk about the
+world's waterways, and no Philadelphian present, from the Mayor down,
+could talk of anything but Philadelphia and its greatness. But whatever
+may be our pose now, or next year, or the year after, there is always
+beneath it a substantial layer of affection, for we cannot help knowing,
+if nobody else does, what Philadelphia is and what Philadelphia has
+done. Certainly, it is because I know that I, for one, would so much
+rather be the Philadelphian I am, and my ancestors were not, than any
+other sort of American, that, as I have grown older, my love for my town
+has surprised me by its depth, and makes my confession of it now seem
+half pleasure, half duty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II: A CHILD IN PHILADELPHIA
+
+
+I
+
+If I made my first friendships from my perambulator, or trundling my
+hoop and skipping my rope, in Rittenhouse Square, as every Philadelphian
+should, they were interrupted and broken so soon that I have no memory
+of them.
+
+[Illustration: IN RITTENHOUSE SQUARE]
+
+It was my fate to be sent to boarding-school before I had time to lay in
+a store of the associations that are the common property of happier
+Philadelphians of my generation. I do not know if I was ever taken, as
+J. and other privileged children were, to the Pennsylvania Hospital on
+summer evenings to see William Penn step down from his pedestal when he
+heard the clock strike six, or to the Philadelphia Library to wait until
+Benjamin Franklin, hearing the same summons, left his high niche for a
+neighbouring saloon. I cannot recall the firemen's fights and the cries
+of negroes selling pop-corn and ice-cream through the streets that fill
+some Philadelphia reminiscences I have read. I cannot say if I ever went
+anywhere by the omnibus sleigh in winter, or to West Philadelphia by the
+stage at any time of the year. I never coasted down the hills of
+Germantown, I never skated on the Schuylkill. When my contemporaries
+compare notes of these and many more delightful things in the amazing,
+romantic, incredible Philadelphia they grew up in, it annoys me to find
+myself out of it all, sharing none of their recollections, save one and
+that the most trivial. For, from the vagueness of the remote past, no
+event emerges so clearly as the periodical visit of "Crazy Norah," a
+poor, harmless, half-witted wanderer, who wore a man's hat and top
+boots, with bits of ribbon scattered over her dress, and who, on her
+aimless rounds, drifted into all the Philadelphia kitchens to the
+fearful joy of the children; and my memory may be less of her personally
+than of much talk of her helped by her resemblance, or so I fancied, to
+a picture of Meg Merrilies in a collection of engravings of Walter
+Scott's heroines owned by an Uncle, and almost the first book I can
+remember.
+
+
+II
+
+But great as was my loss, I fancy my memories of old Philadelphia gain
+in vividness for being so few. One of the most vivid is of the
+interminable drive in the slow horse-car which was the longest part of
+the journey to and from my Convent school,--which is the longest part of
+any journey I ever made, not to be endured at the time but for the
+chanting over and over to myself of all the odds and ends of verse I had
+got by heart, from the dramas of _Little Miss Muffett_ and _Little Jack
+Horner_ to Poe's _Bells_ and Tennyson's _Lady of Shalott_--but in memory
+a drive to be rejoiced in, for nothing could have been more
+characteristic of Philadelphia as it was then. The Convent was in
+Torresdale on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Pennsylvania
+Depot--Philadelphia had as yet no Stations and Terminals--was in the
+distant, unknown quarter of Frankford. I believe it is used as a freight
+station now and I have sometimes thought that, for sentiment's sake, I
+should like to make a pilgrimage to it over the once well-travelled
+road. But the modern trolley has deserted the straight course of the
+unadventurous horse-car of my day and I doubt if ever again I could find
+my way back. The old horse-car went, without turn or twist, along Third
+Street. I started from the corner of Spruce, having got as far as that
+by the slower, more infrequent Spruce Street car, and after I had passed
+the fine old houses where Philadelphians--not aliens--lived, a good part
+of the route lay through a busy business section. But there has stayed
+with me as my chief impression of the endless street a sense of eternal
+calm. No matter how much solid work was being done, no matter how many
+fortunes were being made and unmade, it was always placid on the
+surface, uneventful and unruffled. The car, jingling along in leisurely
+fashion, was the one sign of animation.
+
+[Illustration: THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM THE GROUNDS]
+
+Or often, in spring and summer, I went by boat, from--so false is
+memory--I cannot say what wharf, up the Delaware. This was a pleasanter
+journey and every bit as leisurely and as characteristic in its way of
+Philadelphia life. For though I might catch the early afternoon boat, it
+was sure to be full of business men returning from their offices to
+their houses on the river. Philadelphians did not wait for the Main Line
+to be invented to settle in the suburbs. They have always had a fancy
+for the near country ever since Penn lived in state at Pennsbury, and
+Logan at Stenton; ever since Bartram planted his garden on the banks of
+the Schuylkill, and Arnold brought Peggy Shippen as his bride to Mount
+Pleasant; ever since all the Colonial country houses we are so proud of
+were built. I have the haziest memory of the places where the boat
+stopped between Philadelphia and Torresdale and of the people who got
+out there. But I cannot help remembering Torresdale for it was as
+prominent a stopping-place in my journey through youth as it is in the
+journey up the Delaware. The Convent was my home for years, and I had
+many friends in the houses down by the riverside and scattered over the
+near country. Their names are among the most familiar in my youthful
+recollections: the Macalisters, the Grants--one of my brothers named
+after the father--the Hopkins--another of my brothers marrying in the
+family--the Fishers, Keatings, Steadmans, Kings, Bories, Whelans. It was
+not often I could go or come without meeting somebody I knew on board. I
+am a cockney myself, I love the town, but I can understand that
+Philadelphians whose homes were in the country, especially if that
+country lay along the shores of the Delaware, liked to get back early
+enough to profit by it; that, busy and full of affairs as they might be,
+they not only liked but managed to, shows how far hustling was from the
+old Philadelphia scheme of things. Nowadays the motor brings the country
+into town and town into the country. But the miles between town and
+country were then lengthened into leagues by the leisurely boat and the
+leisurely horse-car which, as I look back, seem to set the pace of life
+in Philadelphia when I was young.
+
+
+III
+
+At first my holidays were spent mostly at the Convent. My Father, with
+the young widower's embarrassment when confronted by his motherless
+children, solved the problem the existence of my Sister and myself was
+to him by putting us where he knew we were safe and well out of his way.
+I do not blame him. What is a man to do when he finds himself with two
+little girls on his clumsy masculine hands? But the result was he had no
+house of his own to bring us to when the other girls hurried joyfully
+home at Christmas and Easter and for the long summer holiday. It hurt as
+I used to watch them walking briskly down the long path on the way to
+the station. And yet, I scored in the end, for Philadelphia was the more
+marvellous to me, visiting it rarely, than it could have been to
+children to whom it was an everyday affair.
+
+[Illustration: "ELEVENTH AND SPRUCE"]
+
+For years my Grandfather's house was the scene of the occasional visit.
+He lived in Spruce Street above Eleventh--the typical Philadelphia
+Street, straight and narrow, on either side rows of red brick houses,
+each with white marble steps, white shutters below and green shutters
+above, and along the red brick pavement rows of trees which made
+Philadelphia the green country town of Penn's desire, but the
+Philadelphian's life a burden in the springtime before the coming of the
+sparrows. Philadelphia, as I think of it in the old days at the season
+when the leaves were growing green, is always heavy with the odour of
+the evil-smelling ailantus and full of measuring worms falling upon me
+from every tree. My fear of "Crazy Norah" is hardly less clear in my
+early memories than the terror these worms were to the dear fragile
+little Aunt who had cared for me in my first motherless years, and who
+still, during my holidays, kept a watchful eye on me to see that I put
+my "gums" on if I went out in the rain and that I had the money in my
+pocket to stop at Dexter's for a plate of ice-cream. I can recall as if
+it were yesterday, her shrieks one Easter Sunday when she came home from
+church and found a green horror on her new spring bonnet and another on
+her petticoat, and her miserable certainty all through the early Sunday
+dinner that many more were crawling over her somewhere. But, indeed, the
+Philadelphians of to-day can never know from what loathsome creatures
+the sparrows have delivered them.
+
+My Grandfather's house was as typical as the street--one of the quite
+modest four-story brick houses that were thought unseemly sky-scrapers
+and fire-traps when they were first built in Philadelphia. I can never
+go by the old house of many memories--for sale, alas! the last time I
+passed and still for sale according to the last news to reach me even as
+I correct my proofs--without seeing myself as I used to be, arriving
+from the Convent, small, plain, unbecomingly dressed and conscious of
+it, with my pretty, always-becomingly-dressed because nothing was
+unbecoming to her, not-in-the-least-shy Sister, both standing in the
+vestibule between the inevitable Philadelphia two front doors, the outer
+one as inevitably open all day long. And I see myself, when, in answer
+to our ring, the servant had opened the inner one as well, entering in a
+fresh access of shyness the wide lofty hall, with the front and back
+parlours to the right; Philadelphians had no drawing-rooms then but were
+content with parlours, as Penn had been who knew them by no other name.
+Compared to the rich Philadelphian's house to-day, my Grandfather's
+looks very unpretending, but when houses like it, with two big parlours
+separated by folding doors, first became the fashion in Philadelphia,
+they passed for palaces with Philadelphians who disapproved of display,
+and the "tradesmen" living soberly in them were rebuked for aspiring to
+the luxury of princes. I cannot imagine why, for the old Colonial houses
+are, many of them, as lofty and more spacious, though it was the simple
+spaciousness of my Grandfather's and the loftiness of its ceilings that
+gave it charm.
+
+[Illustration: DRAWING ROOM AT CLIVEDEN]
+
+My Grandfather's two parlours, big as they were, would strike nobody
+to-day as palatial. It needs the glamour time throws over them for me to
+discover princely luxury in the rosewood and reps masterpieces of a
+deplorable period with which they were furnished, or in their decoration
+of beaded cushions and worsted-work mats and tidies, the lavish gifts of
+a devoted family. But I cannot remember the parlours and forget the
+respect with which they once inspired me. I own to a lingering affection
+for their crowning touch of ugliness, an ottoman with a top of the
+fashionable Berlin work of the day--a white arum lily, done by the
+superior talent of the fancy store, on a red ground filled in by the
+industrious giver. It stood between the two front windows, so that we
+might have the additional rapture of seeing it a second time in the
+mirror which hung behind it. Opposite, between the two windows of the
+back parlour, was a "Rogers Group" on a blue stand; and a replica, with
+variations, of both the ottoman and the "Rogers Group" could have been
+found in every other Philadelphia front and back parlour. I recall also
+the three or four family portraits which I held in tremendous awe,
+however I may feel about them now; and the immensely high vases, unique
+creations that could not possibly have been designed for any purpose
+save to ornament the Philadelphia mantelpiece; and the transparent
+lamp-shade, decorated with pictures of cats and children and landscapes,
+that at night, when the gas was lit, helped to keep me awake until I
+could escape to bed; and the lustre chandeliers hanging from the
+ceiling--what joy when one of the long prisms came loose and I could
+capture it and, looking through it, walk across the parlours and up the
+stairs straight into the splendid dangers of Rainbow Land!
+
+I had no time for these splendours on my arrival, nor, fortunately for
+me, was I left long to the tortures of my shyness. At the end of the
+hall, facing me, was the wide flight of stairs leading to the upper
+stories, and on the first landing, at their turning just where a few
+more steps led beyond into the back-building dining-room, my
+Grandmother, in her white cap and purple ribbons, stood waiting. In my
+memory she and that landing are inseparable. Whenever the door bell
+rang, she was out there at the first sound, ready to say "Come right up,
+my dear!" to whichever one of her innumerable progeny it might he. To
+her right, filling an ample space in the windings of the back stairs,
+was the inexhaustible pantry which I knew, as well as she, we should
+presently visit together. Though there could not have been in
+Philadelphia or anywhere quite such another Grandmother, even if most
+Philadelphians feel precisely the same way about theirs, she was typical
+too, like the house and the street. She belonged to the generation of
+Philadelphia women who took to old age almost as soon as they were
+mothers, put on caps and large easy shoes, invented an elderly dress
+from which they never deviated for the rest of their lives, except to
+exchange cashmere for silk, the everyday cap for one of fine lace and
+wider ribbons, on occasions of ceremony, and who as promptly forgot the
+world outside of their household and their family. I do not believe my
+Grandmother had an interest in anybody except her children, or in
+anything except their affairs; though this did not mean that she gave up
+society when it was to their advantage that she should not. In her stiff
+silks and costly caps, she presided at every dinner, reception, and
+party given at home, as conscientiously as, in her sables and demure
+velvet bonnet, she made and returned calls in the season.
+
+My other memories are of comfortable, spacious rooms, good, solid,
+old-fashioned furniture, a few more old and some better-forgotten new
+family portraits on the walls, the engraving of Gilbert Stuart's
+Washington over the dining-room mantelpiece, the sofa or couch in almost
+every room for the Philadelphia nap before dinner, the two cheerful
+kitchens where, if the servants were amiable, I sometimes played, and,
+above all, the most enchanting back-yard that ever was or could be--we
+were not so elegant in those days as to call it a garden.
+
+
+IV
+
+Since it has been the fashion to revive everything old in Philadelphia,
+most Philadelphians are not happy until they have their garden, as their
+forefathers had, and very charming they often make it in the suburbs.
+But in town my admiration has been asked for gardens that would have
+been lost in my Grandfather's back-yard, and for a few meagre plants
+springing up about a cold paved square that would have been condemned
+as weeds in his luxuriant flower beds.
+
+The kindly magnifying glasses of memory cannot convert the Spruce Street
+yard into a rival of Edward Shippen's garden in Second Street where the
+old chronicles say there were orchards and a herd of deer, or of
+Bartram's with its trees and plants collected from far and wide, or of
+any of the old Philadelphia gardens in the days when in Philadelphia no
+house, no public building, almost no church, could exist without a green
+space and great trees and many flowers about it, and when Philadelphians
+loved their gardens so well, and hated so to leave them, that there is
+the story of one at least who came back after death to haunt the shady
+walks and fragrant lawns that were fairer to her than the fairest
+Elysian Fields in the land beyond the grave. Much of the old beauty had
+gone before I was born, much was going as I grew from childhood to
+youth. My Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, has described the Philadelphia
+garden of his early years, "with vines twined over arbours, where the
+magnolia, honeysuckle and rose spread rich perfume of summer nights, and
+where the humming bird rested, and scarlet tanager, or oriole, with the
+yellow and blue bird flitted in sunshine or in shade." Though I go back
+to days before the sparrows had driven away not only the worms but all
+others of their own race, I recall no orioles and scarlet tanagers, no
+yellow and blue birds. Philadelphia's one magnolia tree stood in front
+of the old Dundas house at Broad and Walnut.
+
+All the same, my Grandfather's was a back-yard of enchantment. A narrow
+brick-paved path led past the kitchens; on one side, close to the wall
+dividing my Grandfather's yard from the next door neighbour's, was a
+border of roses and Johnny-jump-ups and shrubs--the shrubs my
+Grandmother used to pick for me, crush a little in her fingers, and tie
+up in a corner of my handkerchief, which was the Philadelphia way--the
+most effective way that ever was--to make them give out their sweetness.
+Beyond the kitchens, where the yard broadened into a large open space,
+the path enclosed, with a wider border of roses, two big grass plots
+which were shaded by fruit trees, all pink and white in the springtime.
+Wistaria hung in purple showers over the high walls. I am sure lilacs
+bloomed at the kitchen door, and a vine of Isabella grapes--the very
+name has an old Philadelphia flavour and fragrance--covered the verandah
+that ran across the entire second story of the back-building. If
+sometimes this delectable back-yard was cold and bare, in my memory
+it is more apt to be sweet and gay with roses, shrubs and
+Johnny-jump-ups,--summer and its pleasures oftener waiting on me there:
+probably because my visits to my Grandfather's were more frequent in the
+summer time. But I have vague memories of winter days, when the rose
+bushes were done up in straw, and wooden steps covered the marble in
+front, and ashes were strewn over the icy pavement, and snow was piled
+waist-high in the gutter.
+
+
+V
+
+From the verandah there was a pleasant vista, up and down, of the same
+back-yards and the same back buildings, just as from the front windows
+there was a pleasant vista, up and down, of the same red-brick fronts,
+the same white marble steps, the same white and green shutters,--only
+one house daring upon originality, and this was Bennett's, the
+ready-made clothes man, whose unusually large garden filled the opposite
+corner of Eleventh and Spruce with big country-like trees over to which
+I looked from my bedroom window. As a child, instinctively I got to know
+that inside every house, within sight and beyond, I would find the same
+front and back parlours, the same back-building dining-room, the same
+number of bedrooms, the same engraving of George Washington over the
+dining-room mantelpiece, the same big red cedar chest in the third story
+hall and, in summer, the same parlours turned into cool grey cellars
+with the same matting on the floor, the same linen covers on the chairs,
+the same curtainless windows and carefully closed shutters, the same
+white gauze over mirrors and chandeliers--to light upon an item for
+gauze "to cover pictures and glass" in Washington's household accounts
+while he lived in Philadelphia is one of the things it is worth
+searching the old archives for.
+
+[Illustration: BACK-YARDS, ST. PETER'S SPIRE IN THE DISTANCE]
+
+Instinctively, I got to know too that, in every one of these
+well-regulated interiors where there was a little girl, she must, like
+me, be striving to be neither seen nor heard all the long morning, and
+sitting primly at the front window all the long afternoon, and that, if
+she ever played at home it was, like me, with measured steps and
+modulated voice: at all times cultivating the calm of manner expected of
+her when she, in her turn, would have just such a red brick house and
+just such a delectable back-yard of her own. Thus, while the long months
+at the Convent kept me busy cultivating every spiritual grace, during
+the occasional holiday at Eleventh and Spruce I was well drilled in the
+Philadelphia virtues.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III: A CHILD IN PHILADELPHIA--CONTINUED
+
+
+I
+
+Naturally, I could not live in Spruce Street and not believe, as every
+Philadelphian should and once did, that no other kind of a house except
+the Spruce Street house was fit for a Philadelphian to live in. The
+Philadelphian, from infancy, was convinced by his surroundings and
+bringing-up that there was but one way of doing things decently and
+respectably and that was the Philadelphia way, nor can my prolonged
+exile relieve me from the sense of crime at times when I catch myself
+doing things not just as Philadelphians used to do them.
+
+I was safe from any such crime in my Grandfather's house. All
+Philadelphia might have been let in without fear. Had skeletons been
+concealed in the capacious cupboards, they would have been of the
+approved Philadelphia pattern. My Grandfather was not at all of
+Montaigne's opinion that order in the management of life is sottish, but
+looked upon it rather as "Heaven's first law." His day's programme was
+the same as in every red brick house with white marble steps and a
+back-yard full of roses and shrubs and Johnny-jump-ups. Everything at
+Eleventh and Spruce was done according to the same Philadelphia rules
+at the same hour, from the washing of the family linen on Monday, when
+Sunday's beef was eaten cold for dinner, to the washing of the front on
+Saturday morning, when Philadelphia streets from end to end were all
+mops and maids, rivers and lakes.
+
+When my Grandfather, with his family on their knees around him, began
+the day by reading morning prayers in the back-building dining-room, he
+could have had the satisfaction of knowing that every other Philadelphia
+head of a family was engaged in the same edifying duty, but I hope, for
+every other Philadelphia family's sake, with a trifle less awe-inspiring
+solemnity. After being present once at my Grandfather's prayers, nobody
+needed to be assured that life was earnest.
+
+He did not shed his solemnity when he rose from his knees, nor when he
+had finished his breakfast of scrapple and buckwheat cakes and left the
+breakfast table. He was as solemn in his progress through the streets to
+the Philadelphia Bank, at Fourth and Chestnut, of which he was
+President, and having said so much perhaps I might as well add his name,
+Thomas Robins, for in his day he was widely known and it is a
+satisfaction to remember, as widely appreciated both in and out of
+Philadelphia. His clothes were always of the most admirable cut and fit
+and of a fashion becoming to his years, he carried a substantial cane
+with a gold top, his stock was never laid aside for a frivolous modern
+cravat, his silk hat was as indispensable, and his slow walk had a
+dignity royalty might have envied. He was a handsome old man and a
+noticeable figure even in Philadelphia streets at the hour when John
+Welsh from the corner, and Biddles and Cadwalladers and Whartons and
+Peppers and Lewises and a host of other handsome old Philadelphians with
+good Philadelphia names from the near neighborhood, were starting
+downtown in clothes as irreproachable and with a gait no less dignified.
+The foreigner's idea of the American is of a slouchy, free-and-easy man
+for ever cracking jokes. But slouchiness and jokes had no place in the
+dictionary or the deportment of my Grandfather and his contemporaries,
+at a period when Philadelphia supplied men like John Welsh for its
+country to send as representatives abroad and there carry on the
+traditions of Franklin and John Adams and Jefferson. My Father--Edward
+Robins--inherited more than his share of this old-fashioned Philadelphia
+manner, making a ceremony of the morning walk to his office and the
+Sunday walk to church. But it has been lost by younger generations,
+more's the pity. In memory I would not have my Grandfather a shade less
+solemn, though at the time his solemnity put me on anything but easy
+terms with him.
+
+
+II
+
+The respectful bang of the front door upon my Grandfather's dignified
+back after breakfast was the signal for the family to relax. The cloth
+was at once cleared, my Grandmother and my Aunts--like all Philadelphia
+mothers and daughters--brought their work-baskets into the dining-room
+and sat and gossiped there until it was time for my Grandmother to go
+and see the butcher and the provision dealer, or for my Aunts to make
+those formal calls for which the morning then was the unpardonable hour.
+
+[Illustration: INDEPENDENCE SQUARE AND THE STATE HOUSE]
+
+It seems to me, in looking back, as if my Grandmother could never have
+gone out of the house except on an errand to the provision man, such an
+important part did it play in her daily round of duties. She never went
+to market. That was not the Philadelphia woman's business, it was the
+Philadelphia man's. My Grandfather, at the time of which I write, must
+have grown too old for the task, which was no light one, for it meant
+getting up at unholy hours every Wednesday and every Saturday, leaving
+the rest of the family in their comfortable beds, and being back again
+in time for prayers and eight o'clock breakfast. I cannot say how this
+division of daily labour was brought about. The century before, a short
+time as things go in Philadelphia, it was the other way round and the
+young Philadelphia woman at her marketing was one of the sights
+strangers in the town were taken to see. But in my time it was so much
+the man's right that as a child I believed there was something
+essentially masculine in going to market, just as there was in making
+the mayonnaise for the salad at dinner. A Philadelphia man valued his
+salad too highly to trust its preparation to a woman. It was almost a
+shock to me when my Father allowed my motherly little Aunt to relieve
+him of the responsibility in the Spruce Street house. And later on, when
+he re-married and again lived in a house of his own, and my Step-Mother
+made a mayonnaise quite equal to his or to any mere man's, not even to
+her would he shift the early marketing,--his presence in the Twelfth
+Street Market as essential on Wednesday and Saturday mornings as in the
+Stock Exchange every day--and his conscientiousness was the more
+astonishing as his genius was by no means for domesticity. Philadelphia
+women respected man's duties and rights in domestic, as in all, matters.
+I remember an elderly Philadelphian, who was stopping at Blossom's Hotel
+in Chester, where all Americans thirty years ago began their English
+tour, telling me the many sauces on the side table had looked so good
+she would have liked to try them and, on my asking her why in the world
+she had not, saying they had not been offered to her and she thought
+perhaps they were for the gentlemen. Only a Philadelphian among
+Americans could have given that answer.
+
+Towards three o'clock in the Spruce Street house, my Grandmother would
+be found, her cap carefully removed, stretched full-length upon the sofa
+in the dining-room. The picture would not be complete if I left out my
+Father's rage because the dining-room was used for her before-dinner nap
+as for almost every purpose of domestic life by the women of the family.
+I have often wondered where he got such an un-Philadelphia idea. In
+every house where there was a Grandmother, she was taking her nap at
+the same hour on the same sofa in the same dining-room. I could never
+see the harm. It was the most comfortable room in the house, without the
+isolation of the bedroom or the formality of the parlours.
+
+At four, my Grandfather returned from his day's work, the family
+re-assembled, holding him in sufficient awe never to be late, and dinner
+was served. The hour was part of the leisurely life of Philadelphia as
+ordered in Spruce Street. Philadelphians had dined at four during a
+hundred years and more, and my Grandfather, who rarely condescended to
+the frivolity of change, continued to dine at four, as he continued to
+wear a stock, until the end of his life. It was no doubt because of the
+contrast with Convent fare that the dinner in my recollection remains
+the most wonderful and elaborate I have ever eaten, though I rack my
+brains in vain to recall any of its special features except the figs and
+prunes on the high dessert dishes, altogether the most luscious figs and
+prunes ever grown and dried, and the decanter at my Grandfather's place
+from which he dropped into his glass the few drops of brandy he drank
+with his water while everybody else drank their water undiluted. When
+friends came to dinner, I recall also the Philadelphia decanter of
+Madeira, though otherwise no greater ceremony. Dinner was always as
+solemn an affair in my Grandfather's house as morning prayers or any act
+of daily life over which he presided, the whole house, at all times when
+he left it, relapsing into dressing-gown and slippered ease after the
+full-dress decorum his presence required of it.
+
+The eight o'clock tea is a more definite function in my memory, perhaps
+because the hours of waiting for it crept by so slowly. After dinner,
+the Aunts, my Father, the one Uncle who lived at home, vanished I never
+knew where, though no doubt Philadelphia supplied some amusement or
+occupation for the forlorn wreck four o'clock dinner made of the
+afternoon. But the interval was spent by my Grandfather and Grandmother
+at one of the front parlour windows, the old-fashioned Philadelphia
+afghan over their knees, their hands folded, while I, alone, my Sister
+having had the independence to vanish with the grown-ups, sat at the
+other, not daring to break the silence in which they looked out into the
+drowsy street for the people who seldom came and the events that never
+happened; nothing disturbing the calm of Spruce Street save the Sunday
+afternoon invasion of the colored people in their Sunday clothes from
+every near alley. It gives me a pang now to pass and see the window
+empty that once was always filled, in the hour before twilight, by those
+two dear grey heads.
+
+
+III
+
+As I grew a little older, I had the courage to bring a book to the
+window. It was there I read _The Lamplighter_ which I confuse now with
+the memory of our own lamplighter making his rounds; and _The Initials_
+with a haughty Hilda for heroine--she must have been haughty for all
+real heroines then were; and _Queechy_ and _The Wide, Wide World_ and
+_Faith Gartney's Girlhood_, against whose sentiment I am glad to say I
+revolted. And mixed up with these were Mrs. Southworth's _Lost Heiress_
+and the anonymous _Routledge_, light books for whose presence I cannot
+account in my Grandfather's serious house. Does anybody read _Routledge_
+now? Has anybody now ever heard of it? What trash it was, but, after the
+improving romances with a religious moral of the Convent Library, after
+Wiseman's edifying _Fabiola_ and Newman's scholarly--beyond my
+years--_Callista_, how I revelled in it, with what a choking throat I
+galloped through the lovesick chapters! I could recite pages of it to
+myself to relieve the dreariness of those long drives in the Third
+Street car, or the long waiting in the dreary station. To this day I
+remember the last sentence--"with his arm around my waist and my face
+hidden on his shoulder, I told him of the love, folly and pride that had
+so long kept me from him." Could _Queechy_, could _Faith Gartney's
+Girlhood_ have been more sentimental than that? I dare not look up the
+old books to see, lest their charm as well as their sentiment should
+fade in the light of a more critical age. Then Scott and Dickens, Miss
+Edgeworth, more often _Holiday House_, filled the hours before tea.
+After all, the old division of the day, the young generation would be
+ashamed to go back to, had its uses.
+
+[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH INTERIOR]
+
+
+IV
+
+The tea, when announced, was worth waiting, or putting down the most
+entrancing book, for. Had I my way I would make Philadelphia dine again
+at four o'clock for the sake of the tea--of the frizzled beef that only
+Philadelphia ever frizzled to a turn, the smoked salmon that only
+Philadelphia ever smoked as an art, the Maryland biscuits that ought to
+be called Philadelphia biscuits for they were never half so good in
+their native land, the home-made preserves put up in that sunshiny
+kitchen where lilacs bloomed at the door. After all this long quarter of
+a century, the smell of beef frizzling would take me back to Eleventh
+and Spruce on a winter evening as straight as the fragrance of the
+flowering bean carries me to Pompeii in the early springtime, or of
+garlic to the little sunlit towns of Provence at any season of the year.
+The tea was a triumph of simplicity, but when there were guests it
+became a feast. As a rule, it was the meal to which the children and
+grandchildren who did not live in the Spruce Street house were invited,
+and loved best to be invited. For on these occasions my Grandmother
+could be relied upon to provide stewed oysters, the masterpiece of
+Margaret, her old grey-haired cook; and oyster croquettes from
+Augustine's--my Grandfather would as soon have begun the day without
+prayers as my Grandmother have given a feast without the help of
+Augustine, that caterer of colour who was for years supreme in
+Philadelphia; brandy peaches that, like the preserves, had been put up
+at home, the brandy poured in with unexpected lavishness for so
+temperate a household; and little round cakes with white icing on
+top--what dear little ghosts from out a far past they seemed when, after
+a quarter of a century in a land where people know nothing of the
+delights of little round cakes with white icing on top, I ate them again
+at Philadelphia feasts. If the solemn, dignified Grandfather at one end
+of the table kept our enjoyment within the bounds of ceremony, we felt
+no restraint with the little old Grandmother who beamed upon us from the
+other, as she poured out the tea and coffee with hands trembling so
+that, in her later years, the man servant,--usually coloured and not to
+Philadelphia as yet known as butler or footman,--always stood close by
+to catch the tea or coffee pot when it fell, which it never did.
+
+
+V
+
+I recall more formal family reunions, above all the Golden Wedding, as
+impressive as a court function, the two old people enthroned at the far
+end of the front parlour, the sons and daughters and grandchildren
+approaching in a solemn line--an embarrassed line when it came to the
+youngest, always shy in the awful presence of the Grandfather--and
+offering, each in turn, their gifts. We were by no means a remarkable
+family, to the unprejudiced we may have seemed a commonplace one, my
+forefathers evidently having decided that leaving England for America
+was a feat remarkable enough to satisfy the ambitions of any one family
+and having then proceeded to rest comfortably on their respectable
+laurels, but we took each other with great seriousness. The oldest Aunt,
+who was married and lived in New York, received on her annual visit to
+Spruce Street the homage due to a Princess Royal, and no King or Emperor
+could have caused more of a flutter than my Grandfather when he honoured
+one of his children with a visit. Family anniversaries were scrupulously
+observed, the legend of family affection was kept up as conscientiously,
+whatever it cost us in discomfort, and there were times when we paid
+heavily. I would have run many miles to escape one Uncle who, when he
+met me in the street, would stop to ask how I was, and how we all were
+at home, and then would stand twisting his moustache in visible agony,
+trying to think what the affectionate intimacy between us that did not
+exist required him to say, while I thanked my stars that we were in the
+street and not in a house where he would have felt constrained to kiss
+me. We were horribly exact in this matter of kissing. There was a family
+legend of another Uncle from New York who once, when he came over for
+some family meeting, was so eager to do his duty by his nieces that he
+kissed not only all of them--no light task--but two or three neighbours'
+little girls into the bargain. I think, however, that every Philadelphia
+family took itself as seriously and that our scruples were not a
+monopoly brought with us from Virginia and Maryland. In a town where
+family names are handed down from generation to generation, so that a
+family often will boast, as ours did, not only a "Jr." but a "3d," and
+lose no opportunity to let the world know it, family feeling is not
+likely to be allowed to wilt and die.
+
+Every public holiday also was a family affair to be observed with the
+rigours of the family feast. Christmas for me, when I did not celebrate
+it at the Convent with Midnight Mass and a _Cr�che_ in the chapel and
+kind nuns trying to make me forget I had not gone home like other little
+girls, took me to the Spruce Street house in time to look on at the
+succession of Uncles and Aunts who dropped in on Christmas Eve and went
+away laden with bundles, and carrying in some safe pocket a collection
+of envelopes with a crisp new greenback in each, the sum varying from
+one hundred dollars to five according to the age of the child or
+grandchild whose name was on the envelope--my Grandfather gave with the
+fine patriarchal air he maintained in all family relations. The family
+appropriation of Thanksgiving Day and Washington's Birthday I did not
+grasp until after I left school, for while I was at the Convent they
+were both spent there, where they dwindled into insignificance compared
+to Reverend Mother's feast and its glories. As a rule, I must have been
+at the Convent as well for the Fourth of July, though I retain one
+jubilant vision of myself and a bag of torpedoes in the back-yard,
+solemnizing a little celebration among the roses. And I have larger
+visions of military parades in broiling sunshine and of the City Troop
+filling the quiet streets with their gorgeousness which awed me long
+before the knowledge of their historic origin and uniform inspired me
+with reverence.
+
+
+VI
+
+Other duties and pleasures and observances that for most Philadelphia
+children were scattered through the interminable year, were crowded into
+my short holiday: visits to the dentist, to Dr. Hopkins, Dr. White's
+assistant, it being a test of Philadelphia respectability to have one's
+teeth seen to by Dr. White or one of his assistants or students, and the
+regular appointment was as much of obligation for me as Mass on Sunday;
+visits to the Academy of Fine Arts in the old Chestnut Street building,
+as I remember set back at the end of a court that made of it a place
+apart, a consecrated place which I entered with as little anticipation
+of amusement as St. Joseph's Church hidden in Willing's Alley, and was
+the more surprised therefore to be entertained, as I must have been, by
+Benjamin West, for of no other painter there have I the faintest
+recollection; visits to the Academy of Natural Sciences, where I liked
+the rows upon rows of stuffed birds, and the strange things in bottles,
+and the colossal skeletons that filled me with the same delicious
+shivers as the stories of afreets and genii in _The Arabian Nights_;
+visits to Fairmount Park, leagues away, houses left behind before it
+was reached, where the mysterious machinery of the Waterworks was as
+terrifying as the skeletons, and I thought it much pleasanter outside
+under the blue sky; visits to the theatre--the most wonderful visits of
+all, for they took me out into the night that I knew only from stolen
+vigils in the Convent dormitory, or glimpses from the Spruce Street
+windows. Romance was in the dimly-lit streets, in the stars above, in
+the town after dark, which I was warned I was never to brave alone until
+I can laugh now to think how terrified I was the first time I came home
+late by myself, in my terror jumping into a street-car and claiming the
+protection of a contemptuous young woman whom work had not allowed to
+draw a conventional line between day and night.
+
+[Illustration: CLASSIC FAIRMOUNT]
+
+I have never got rid of that suggestion of romance, not so much in the
+theatre itself as in the going to it, and, to this day, a matin�e in
+broad daylight will bring back a little of the old thrill. But nothing
+can bring back to any theatre the glitter, the brilliancy, the splendour
+of the old Chestnut, the old Walnut, the old Arch, then already dingy
+with age I have no doubt, but transfigured by my childhood's ecstasies
+in them. Nothing can persuade me that any plays have been, or could be,
+written to surpass in beauty, pathos and humour, _Solon Shingle_, and
+_Arrah-na-Pogue_, and _Our American Cousin_, and _The Black Crook_, and
+_Ours_, though I have forgotten all but their names; that in opera Clara
+Louise Kellogg ever had a rival; that in gaiety and wit _La Grande
+Duchesse_ and _La Belle H�l�ne_ could be eclipsed; or that any actors
+could compete with Sothern and Booth and Mrs. Drew and the Davenports,
+and Charlotte Cushman as _Meg Merrilies_--there was a bit of good old
+melodramatic acting to make a small Convent girl's flesh creep!
+Shakespeare was redeemed by Booth from the dulness of the Convent
+reading-book and entered gloriously into my Convent life. For one happy
+winter, it was not I who led the long procession down to the refectory,
+though nobody could have suspected it, but the Ghost of Hamlet's Father,
+with, close behind me, in gloom absorbed, the Prince of Denmark,
+mistaken by the unknowing for the little girl, my friend, whose father,
+with more than the usual father's amiable endurance, had taken me with
+her and her sister to see the play of _Hamlet_ during the Christmas
+holidays.
+
+[Illustration: DOWN PINE STREET]
+
+The theatre has become part of the modern school course. If an actor
+like Forbes-Robertson gives a farewell performance of _Hamlet_, or a
+manager like Beerbohm Tree produces a patriotic melodrama, or the
+company from the Th��tre Fran�ais perform one of the rare classics that
+the young person may be taken to, I have seen a London theatre filled
+with school girls and boys. From what I hear I might imagine the theatre
+and the opera to be the most serious studies of every Philadelphia
+school. At the Convent I should have envied the modern students could I
+have foreseen their liberty, but they have more reason to envy me. The
+gilt has been rubbed too soon off their gingerbread, too soon has the
+tinsel of their theatre been tarnished. My Spartan training gave me a
+theatre that can never cease to be a Wonderland, just as it endowed me
+with a Philadelphia that will endure, until this world knows me no more,
+as a beautiful, peaceful town where roses bloom in the sunny back-yards,
+and people live with dignity behind the plain red brick fronts of its
+long, straight streets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV: AT THE CONVENT
+
+
+I
+
+As the theatre, in my memory, still gives the crowning glory to my
+holiday in Philadelphia, so, in looking back, the brief holiday seems
+the spectacle, the romance, the supreme moment, of my early years. The
+scene of my every-day life was that Convent of the Sacred Heart at
+Torresdale which was the end of the interminable ride in the Third
+Street horse-car and the shorter ride in the Pennsylvania Railroad
+train.
+
+The Philadelphian who did not live in the Convent would have seen it the
+other way round, for the Convent was unlike enough to Philadelphia to
+suggest the romance of the unusual. Only in one or two respects did it
+provide me with facts that every proper Philadelphian was brought up to
+know, and let me say again that because I had to find out the
+others--the more characteristically Philadelphia facts--for myself, I
+think they probably made a stronger impression upon me than upon the
+Philadelphian guiltless of ever straying, or of ever having been allowed
+to stray, from the approved Philadelphia path.
+
+
+II
+
+When the Ladies of the Sacred Heart decided to open a Convent in
+Philadelphia, an uncertain enterprise if it is considered how
+un-Catholic Philadelphia was, they began in a fairly modest way by
+taking a large house at Torresdale, with lawns and gardens and woods and
+a great old-fashioned barn, the country seat of a Philadelphian whose
+name I have forgotten. It stood to the west of the railroad, at a
+discreet distance from the little cluster of houses by the riverside
+that alone meant Torresdale to the Philadelphians who lived in them.
+
+The house, I can now see, was typical as I first knew it, the sort the
+Philadelphian built for himself in the suburbs at a period too removed
+from Colonial days for it to have the beauty of detail and historic
+interest of the Colonial house, and yet near enough to them for dignity
+of proportion and spaciousness to be desirable, if not essential to a
+Philadelphian's comfort. A wide, lofty hall ran from the front door to
+the back, on either side were two large airy rooms with space between
+for the broad main stairway, a noble structure, and the carefully
+concealed back stairway--half-way up which in my time was the little
+infirmary window where, at half past ten every morning, Sister Odille
+dispensed pills and powders to those in need of them. Along the entire
+front of the house was a broad porch,--the indispensable Philadelphia
+piazza--its roof supported by a row of substantial columns over which
+roses and honeysuckle clambered fragrantly and luxuriantly in the June
+sunshine. The house was painted a cheerful yellow that went well with
+the white of the woodwork about the windows and the porch: not a very
+beautiful type of house, but pleasant, substantial, luxurious, and
+making as little outward show of its luxury as the plain red brick town
+house of the wealthy Philadelphian.
+
+How comfortable a type of house it was to live in, I know from
+experience of another, not a school, within sight, a ten minutes' walk
+across the fields, and like it in design and arrangement and even
+colour, in everything except size,--which my Father took one summer: to
+me a most memorable summer as it was the first I spent outside the
+Convent limits from the beginning to the end of the long holiday. The
+jerry-builder had had no part in putting up the solid, well-constructed
+walls which stood firm against winter storms and winds, and were no less
+a protection from the torrid heat of a Philadelphia summer. But fashion
+can leave architecture no more alone than dress. Already, the newer
+group of houses down by the Delaware were built of the brown stone
+which, to my mind, dates the beginning of the Philadelphian's fall from
+architectural grace, the beginning of his distrust in William Penn's
+plans for his well-being and of his foolish hankering after the
+fleshpots of New York.
+
+[Illustration: LOUDOUN, MAIN STREET GERMANTOWN]
+
+The Convent, before I came to it, had been a victim to the brown stone
+fashion. With success, the pleasant old country house had grown too
+small for the school into which it had been converted, and a southern
+wing had been added: a long, low building with the Chapel at the far
+end, all built in brown stone and in a style that passed for Gothic and
+that a thousand times I could have wished based upon any other model.
+For the upper room in the wing, ambitiously christened by somebody
+Gothic Hall, had a high pointed roof that made it an ice-house in winter
+and, for our sins, it was used as the Dormitory of the Sacred Heart
+where I slept. I can recall mornings when the water was frozen in our
+pitchers while the big stove, in the middle of the high-pitched room,
+burned red hot as if to mock at us as, with numbed fingers, we struggled
+to make our beds and wash ourselves and button and hook on our clothes.
+And the builders had so contrived that summer turned our fine Gothic
+Dormitory into a fiery furnace. How many June nights, contrary to all
+the rules, have I hung out of the little, horribly Gothic window at the
+head of my alcove, gasping in the warm darkness that was so sweet and
+stifling with the fragrance of the flowers in Madame Huguet's garden
+just below.
+
+I had not been long at the Convent before another brown stone wing
+extended to the north and two stories were added to the main building
+which, for the sake of harmony, was now painted brown from top to
+bottom. In a niche on this new fa�ade, a statue of the Sacred Heart was
+set, and all semblance to the old country house was gone, except for the
+broad porch without and the well-proportioned rooms within. But these,
+and later improvements, additions and alterations cannot make me forget
+the Convent as it was when I first came to it, growing up about the
+simple, solidly-built, spacious yellow house that was once the
+Philadelphian's ideal of suburban comfort and so like the house where I
+spent my most memorable summer, so like, save for the size and the
+colour, my Great-Grandfather Ambrose White's old house on the Turnpike
+at Chestnut Hill, so like innumerable other country houses of the same
+date where I visited.
+
+
+III
+
+The Convent rule and discipline could not alter the changing of the
+seasons as Philadelphia ordered them. They might appear to us mainly
+regulated by feasts and fasts--All Saints and All Souls, the milestones
+on the road to Christmas; Lent and the month of St. Joseph heralding the
+approach of spring; the month of Mary and the month of the Sacred Heart,
+Ascension and Corpus-Christi, as ardent and splendid as the spring and
+summer days they graced. But, all the same, each season came laden with
+the pleasures held in common by all fortunate Philadelphia children who
+had the freedom of the country or the countrified suburbs.
+
+The school year began with the fall, when any night might bring the
+first frost and the first tingle in the air--champagne to quicken the
+blood in a school girl's veins, and make the sitting still through the
+long study and class hours a torture. The woods shone with gold; the
+Virginia creeper flamed on the front porch; sickel pears fell, ripe and
+luscious, from the tree close to the Chapel where it was against the law
+to go and pick them up but where no law in the world could have barred
+the way; chestnuts and hickory nuts and the walnuts that stained my
+fingers black to open offered a substantial dessert after as substantial
+a dinner as ever children were served with. But those were the joyful
+years when hunger never could be satisfied and digestion was equal to
+any surfeit of raw chestnuts--or raw turnips for that matter, if the
+season supplied no lighter dainties, or of next to anything that could
+be picked up and eaten. I know I drew the line only at the huge, white,
+oversweet mulberries strewing the grass by the swings in Mulberry Lane,
+that favourite scene of the war to the knife we waged under the name of
+Old Man and Bands, primitive games not to be outdone by the Tennis and
+Hockey of the more sophisticated modern school girl.
+
+The minute the Refectory was left for the noonday hour of recreation on
+a brisk autumn day, there was a wild scamper to the woods where, just
+beyond the gate that led into them, the hoary old chestnut trees spread
+their shade and dropped their fruit on either side the hill between the
+Poisonous Valley, a thrill in its deadly name, and the graveyard, few
+crosses then in the green enclosure which now, alas! is too well filled.
+The shadow of death lay so lightly upon us that I recall to-day only the
+delicious rustle of eager feet through the fallen leaves, and the
+banging of stone upon stone as hickory nuts cracked between them, I feel
+only the delicious pricking of the chestnut burrs in the happy, hardened
+fingers of the school girl. And these, anyway, are memories I share with
+every Philadelphian who, as a child, wandered in the suburbs or the
+near country when the woods were gold and scarlet, and the way through
+them was carpeted with leaves hiding rich stores of nuts for the seeker
+after treasure.
+
+But no Philadelphia child in the shelter of her own house could know the
+meaning of the Philadelphia winter as I knew it in the Convent, half
+frozen in that airy dormitory of the Sacred Heart, shivering in shawl
+and hood through early Mass in the icy Chapel, still huddled in my shawl
+at my desk or scurrying as fast as discipline would wink at through the
+windy passages. The heating arrangements, somehow, never succeeded in
+coping with the extreme cold of a severe winter in the large rooms and
+halls of the new wings, and I must confess that we were often most
+miserably uncomfortable. I cannot but wonder what the pampered school
+girls of the present generation in the same Convent would say to such
+discomfort. But it did us no harm. Indeed, though I shiver at the
+memory, I am sure it did us good. We came out the healthier and hardier
+for it, much as the Englishman does from his cold house, the coldest in
+the world. The old conditions of a hardier life, that either killed or
+cured, did far more to make a vigorous people than all the new-fangled
+eugenics ever can.
+
+If I had little of the comfort of the Philadelphia child in the
+Philadelphia house, I shared with him the outdoor pleasures which winter
+provided by way of compensation--the country white under snow for weeks
+and weeks, snowballs to be made and snow houses built, sliding to be
+had on the frozen lake, and coasting down the long hill just beyond the
+gate into the woods, when there were sleds to coast on. And what
+excitement in the marvellous snow-storms that have vanished with other
+marvels of my youth--the storms that put the new blizzard to shame, when
+the snow drifts were mountains high, and it took all the men on the
+farm, with Big John at their head, to clear a way through the near paths
+and roads. I recall one storm in particular when my Father, who had been
+making his periodical visit to my Sister and myself, left the Convent at
+six, was snowed up in his train, and never reached the dingy Depot in
+Frankford until three the next morning, and when for days we got out of
+the house only for a solemn ten minutes' walk each noon on the wide
+front porch, where it was a shocking breach of discipline to be seen at
+all other times except on Thursday and Sunday, the Convent visiting
+days. Of the inspiriting rigours of a Philadelphia winter I was never in
+ignorance.
+
+In the snow drifts and storms of winter Big John and his men were not
+more helpless than in the floods and slush that began with the first
+soft breath of the Philadelphia spring. Wearing our big shapeless
+overshoes, we waded through the puddles and jumped over the streams in
+the Convent paths and roads as, in town, Philadelphia children, with
+their "gums" on, jumped over the streams and waded through the puddles
+in the abominably paved streets. But then hope too began when the first
+spaces of green were uncovered by the melting snow. The first
+spring-beauty in the sunny spaces of the woods, the first flowery frost
+in the orchard, the first blooming of the tulip trees, were among the
+great events of the year. And what joy now in the new hunt!--what
+treasure of spring-beauties everywhere in the woods as the sun grew
+warmer, of shyer, retired hepaticas, of white violets running wild in
+the swampy fields beyond the lake, of sweet trailing arbutus, of
+Jacks-in-the-pulpit flourishing best in the damp thickets of the
+Poisonous Valley into which I never wandered without a tremor not merely
+because it was a forbidden adventure, but because, though I passed
+through it unscathed, I had seen so often the horrible and unsightly red
+rash one whiff from over its bushes and trees could bring out on the
+faces and hands of my schoolmates with a skin more sensitive than mine.
+Games lost their charm in the spring sunshine and our one pleasure was
+in the hunt, no longer for chestnuts and walnuts and hickory nuts, but
+solely for flowers, bringing back great bunches wilting in our hot
+little hands, to place before the shrine that aroused the warmest
+fervours of our devotion or was tended by the nun of our special
+adoration.
+
+[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO FAIRMOUNT AND THE WASHINGTON STATUE]
+
+And before we knew it, the spring-beauties and hepaticas and white
+violets and Jacks-in-the-pulpit disappeared from the woods, and the
+flowery frost from the orchard, and the great blossoms from the tulip
+trees, and summer was upon us--blazing summer when we lay perspiring on
+our little beds up there in Gothic Hall where a few months before we
+shivered and shook, perspiration streamed from our faces on our school
+books at the study hour, more a burden than ever as we drooped and
+drowsed in the heat;--blazing summer when the fragrance of the roses
+hung heavy over Madame Huguet's garden and mingled with the too sweet
+fragrance of the honeysuckle about the columns of the porch and over
+every door;--blazing summer when all day long meadows and gardens and
+lawns swooned under the pitiless sunshine and we, who had braved the
+winter cold undismayed, never put as much as our noses out of doors
+until the hour of sunset;--blazing summer when for many years I saw the
+other girls going home, the gaiety of sea and mountain and change
+awaiting them, while my Sister and I stayed on, desolate at heart
+despite the efforts of the nuns to help us forget, feeling forlornly
+forsaken as we watched the green burnt up into brown and the summer
+flowers wilt and die, and the drought turn the roads to dust, and all
+Nature parched as we parched with it. The holiday dragged terribly and,
+reversing the usual order of things, I counted the days until school
+would begin again. However, at least I can say that I saw the
+Philadelphia summer in its full terrors as every Philadelphia child ever
+born, for whom wealth or chance opens no gate of escape, must see it and
+did see it of old.
+
+And so for me in the Convent the seasons were the same as for the child
+in Philadelphia and its suburbs. And I learnt how cold Philadelphia can
+be, and how hot--if Penn, safe in England, was grateful for the greater
+nearness of his town to the sun, not a Philadelphian on the spot,
+sweltering through its midsummer heat, has ever yet shared his
+gratitude. And I learnt how beautiful Philadelphia is as it grows mild
+again after winter has done its worst, or as it cools off in the
+friendlier autumn sun. And not to know these facts is not to know
+Philadelphia.
+
+
+IV
+
+In the Convent regulation of daily life lay the unconquerable
+difference. Philadelphia has its laws and traditions that guide the
+Philadelphian through every hour and duty of the day, and the
+Philadelphian, who from the cradle does not obey these traditions and
+laws, can never be quite as other Philadelphians. The Sacred Heart is a
+French order, and the nuns imported their laws and traditions from
+France, qualified, modified, perhaps, on the way, but still with an
+unmistakable foreign flavour and tendency that could not pass
+unquestioned in a town where the first article of faith is that
+everybody should do precisely what everybody else does.
+
+I remember when the Rhodes scholars were first sent from America to
+Oxford a friend of mine professed serious concern for the future of the
+University should they introduce buckwheat cakes on Oxford breakfast
+tables. And, really, he was not as funny as he thought. A man is a good
+deal what his food makes him. The macaroni-fed Italian is not as the
+sausage-and-sauerkraut-fed German, nor the Hindu who thrives on rice as
+the Irishman bred upon potatoes. Never was a town more concerned with
+the Question of Food than Philadelphia and I now see quite plainly that
+I, beginning my day at the Convent on coffee and rolls, could not have
+been as the correct Philadelphia child beginning the day in Philadelphia
+or the suburbs on scrapple and buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. Thus,
+the line of separation was drawn while I was still in short skirts with
+my hair cropped close.
+
+The Convent day continued, as it began, with differences. I sat down at
+noon to the substantial French breakfast which at the Convent, as a
+partial concession to American ideals, became dinner. At half past
+three, like a little French girl, I had my _go�ter_, for which even the
+French name was retained--how well I remember the big, napkin-lined
+basket, full of hunks of good gingerbread, or big crackers, or sweet
+rolls, passed round by Sister Duffy, probably the most generous of all
+generous Irishwomen, who would have slipped an extra piece into every
+little hand if she could, but who was so shockingly cross-eyed that we
+got an idea of her as a disagreeable old thing, an ogress, always
+watching to see if we took more than our appointed share. Quite recently
+I argued it all out again with the few old Sisters left to greet me on
+my first and only visit to the Convent during thirty years and, purely
+for the sake of the sentiment of other days. I refused to believe them
+when they insisted that Sister Duffy, who now lies at peace in the
+little graveyard on the hillside in the woods, wasn't cross at all, but
+as tender as any Sister who ever waited on hungry little girls! I would
+have given a great deal could she have come back, cross-eyes and all,
+with her big basket of gingerbread to make me feel at home again, as I
+could not in the Visitors' dining-room where my _go�ter_ was set out on
+a neatly spread table, even though on one side of me was "Marie" of _Our
+Convent Days_, my friend who had been Prince of Denmark in our
+Booth-stricken period, and on the other Miss Repplier, the chronicler of
+our childish adventures. It was the first time we three had sat there
+together since more years than I am willing to count, and I think we
+were too conscious that youth now was no longer of the company not to
+feel the sadness as keenly as the pleasure of the reunion in our old
+home.
+
+_Go�ter_, with its associations, has sent me wandering far from the
+daily routine which ended, in the matter of meals, with a supper of meat
+and potatoes and I hardly know what, at half past six, when little
+Philadelphia girls were probably just finishing their cambric tea and
+bread-and-butter, and even the buns from Dexter's when these had been
+added as a special treat or reward. How could we, upon so much heavier
+fare, have seen things, how could we have looked upon life, just as
+those other little girls did?
+
+
+V
+
+We did not play, any more than we ate, like the child in Philadelphia or
+its suburbs. One memory of our playtime I have common to all
+Philadelphia children of my generation: the memory of Signor Blitz, on
+a more than usually blissful Reverend Mother's Feast, taking rabbits out
+of our hats and bowls of gold-fish out of his sleeve, and holding a long
+conversation with the immortal Bobby, the most prodigious puppet that
+ever conversed with any professional ventriloquist. But this was a rare
+ecstasy never repeated.
+
+[Illustration: MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN]
+
+What games the children in Rittenhouse Square and the Lanes of
+Germantown had, I cannot record, but of one thing I am sure: they did
+not go to the tune and the words of "_Sur le pont d'Avignon_," or "_Qu'
+est-ce qui passe ici si tard_," or "_Il �tait un avocat_." Nor, I fancy,
+were "_Malbrough s'en va-t'en guerre_" and "_Au clair de la lune, mon
+ami Pierrot_," the songs heard in the Philadelphia nursery. Nor is it
+likely that "_C'est le mois de Marie_," which we sang as lustily all
+through May as the devout in France sing it in every church and every
+cathedral from one end of their land to the other, was the canticle of
+pious little Catholic children celebrating the month of Mary at St.
+Joseph's or St. Patrick's. Nor outside the Convent could the Bishop on
+his pastoral rounds have been welcomed with the "_Vive! Vive! Vive!
+Monseigneur au Sacr� Coeur, Quel Bonheur!_" which, the title
+appropriately changed, was our form of welcome to every distinguished
+visitor. And, singing these songs and canticles, how could the
+associations and memories we were laying up for ourselves be the same as
+those of Philadelphia children whose ears and voices were trained on
+"Juanita" and "Listen to the Mocking Bird," or, it may be, "Marching
+through Georgia" and "Way down upon the Swanee River"? These things may
+make subtle distinctions, but they are distinctions that can never be
+overcome or outgrown.
+
+In study hours, as in playtime and at meals, we were seldom long out of
+this French atmosphere. French class was only shorter than English. If
+we were permitted to talk at breakfast, it was not at all that we might
+amuse ourselves, but that we might practise our French which did not
+amuse us in the least. Many of the nuns were French, often, it is true,
+French from Louisiana or Canada, but their English was not one bit more
+fluent on that account. Altogether, there was less of Philadelphia than
+of France in the discipline, the devotions, and the relaxations of the
+Convent.
+
+
+VI
+
+But, of all the differences, the most fundamental, I think, came from
+the fact that the Convent was a Convent and taught us to accept the
+conventual, the monastic interpretation of life. We were there in, not
+only a French, but a cloistered atmosphere--the atmosphere that
+Philadelphia least of all towns could understand. The Friends had
+attained to peace and unworldliness by staying in their own homes and
+fulfilling their duty as fathers and mothers of families, as men and
+women of business. But the nuns saw no way to achieve this end except
+by shutting themselves out of the world and avoiding its temptations.
+The Ladies of the Sacred Heart are cloistered. They leave the Convent
+grounds only to journey from one of their houses to another, for care is
+taken that they do not, by staying over long in one school, form too
+strong an attachment to place or person. Where would be the use of being
+a nun if you were not made to understand the value of sacrifice? Their
+pupils are, for the time, as strictly cloistered. Not for us were the
+walks abroad by which most girls at boarding school keep up with the
+times--or get ahead of them. We were as closely confined to the Convent
+grounds as the nuns, except during the holidays or when a friend or
+relation begged for us a special outing. It was not a confinement
+depending on high stone walls and big gates with clanging iron chains
+and bars. But the wood fences running with the board walk above the
+railroad and about the woods and the fields and the gardens made us no
+less prisoners--willing and happy prisoners as we might be, and were.
+This gave us, or gave me at any rate, a curious idea of the Convent as a
+place entirely apart, a place that had nothing to do with the near town
+or the suburb in which it stood--a blessed oasis in the sad wilderness
+of the world.
+
+There is no question that, as a result, I felt myself in anticipation a
+stranger in the wilderness into which I knew I must one day go from the
+oasis, and in which I used to imagine I should be as much of an exile
+as the Children of Israel in the desert. Of course I was not quite that
+when the time came, but that for an interval I was convinced I must be
+explains how unlike in atmosphere the Convent was to Eleventh and
+Spruce.
+
+In all sorts of little ways I was confirmed in this belief by life and
+its duties at the Convent. For all that concerned me nearly, for all
+that was essential to existence here below, Philadelphia seemed to me as
+remote as Timbuctoo. I got insensibly to think of myself first not as a
+Philadelphian, not as an American, but as a "Child of the Sacred
+Heart,"--the first question under all circumstances was what I should
+do, not as a Philadelphian, but as a Child of the Sacred Heart.
+
+[Illustration: ARCH STREET MEETING]
+
+I cannot say how much the mere name of the thing represented--the honour
+and the privilege--and there was not a girl who had been for any time a
+pupil who did not prize it as I did. And we were not given the chance to
+forget or belittle it. We were impressed with the importance of showing
+our appreciation of the distinction Providence had reserved for us--of
+showing it not merely by our increased faith and devotion, but by our
+bearing and conduct. We might be slack about our lessons. That was all
+right at a period when slackness prevailed in girls' schools and it was
+unfeminine, if not unladylike, to be too learned. But we were not let
+off from the diligent cultivation of our manners. Our faith and devotion
+were attended to in a daily half hour of religious instruction. But
+Sunday was not too holy a day for the Politeness Class that was held
+every week as surely as Sunday came round, in which we were taught all
+the mysteries of a Deportment that might have given tips to the great
+Turveydrop himself,--how to sit, how to walk, how to carry ourselves
+under all circumstances, how to pick up a handkerchief a passer-by might
+drop--an unspeakable martyrdom of a class when each unfortunate student,
+in turn, went through her paces with the eyes of all the school upon her
+and to the sound of the stifled giggles of the boldest. We never met one
+of our mistresses in the corridors that we did not drop a laboured
+curtsey--a shy, deplorably awkward curtsey when I met the Reverend
+Mother, Mother Boudreau, a large, portly, dignified nun from Louisiana
+and a model of deportment, who inspired me with a respectful fear I
+never have had for any other mortal. We could not answer a plain "Yes"
+or "No" to our mistresses, but the "Madam" must always politely follow.
+"Remember" was a frequent warning, "remember that wherever, or with
+whom, you may be, to behave like children of the Sacred Heart!" A Child
+of the Sacred Heart, we were often told, should be known by her manners.
+And so impressed were we with this precept that I remember a
+half-witted, but harmless, elderly woman whom the nuns, in their
+goodness, had kept on as a "parlour boarder" after her school days were
+over, telling us solemnly that when she was in New York and went out
+shopping with her sister, the young men behind the counter at Stewart's
+would all look at her with admiring eyes and whisper to each other, "Is
+it not easy to see that Miss C. is a Child of the Sacred Heart?"
+
+[Illustration: THE TRAIN SHED, BROAD STREET STATION]
+
+Seriously, the training did give something that nothing else could, and
+an admirable training it was for which girls to-day might exchange more
+than one brain-bewildering course at College and be none the worse for
+it. In my own case, I admit, I should not mind having had more of the
+other training, as it has turned out that my work in life is of the sort
+where a quick intelligence counts for more than an elegant deportment.
+But I can find no fault with the Convent for neglect. Girls then were
+not educated to work. If you had asked any girl anywhere what was
+woman's mission, she would have answered promptly--had she been
+truthful--"to find a husband as soon as possible;" if she were a Convent
+girl,--a Child of the Sacred Heart--she would have added, "or else to
+become a nun." Her own struggles to fit herself for any other career the
+inconsiderate Fates might drive her into, so far from doing her any
+harm, were the healthiest and most bracing of tonics. Granted an average
+mind, she could teach herself through necessity just the important
+things school could not teach her through a routine she didn't see the
+use of. She emerged from the ordeal not only heroically but
+successfully, which was more to the point. A young graduate from Bryn
+Mawr said to me some few days ago that when she looked at her mother and
+the women of her mother's generation and realized all they had
+accomplished without what is now called education, she wondered whether
+the girls of her generation, who had the benefit of all the excess of
+education going, would or could accomplish more, or as much. To tell the
+truth, I wonder myself. But then it may be said that I, belonging to
+that older generation, am naturally prejudiced.
+
+
+VII
+
+There are moments when, reflecting on all I lost as a Philadelphian, I
+am half tempted to regret my long years of seclusion, busy about my soul
+and my manners, at the Convent. A year or so would not have much
+mattered one way or the other. I led, however, no other life save the
+Convent life until I was seventeen. I knew no other standpoint save the
+Convent standpoint.
+
+But the temptation to regret flies as quickly as it comes. I loved the
+life too well at the time, I love it too well in the retrospect, to have
+wanted then, or to want now, to do without it. It was a happy life to
+live, though I would not have been a school girl had I not, with the
+school girl's joy in the morbid, liked nothing better than to pose as
+the unhappiest of mortals--to be a school girl was to be misunderstood I
+would have vowed, had I, in my safe oasis, ever heard the expression or
+had the knowledge to guess at its meaning. I loved every stone in the
+house, brown and ugly as every stone might be, I loved every tree in
+the woods whether or no it dropped pleasant things to devour, I loved
+every hour of the day whatever might be its task. I had a quick memory,
+study was no great trouble to me, and I enjoyed every class and
+recitation. I enjoyed getting into mischief--I wore once only the Ribbon
+for Good Conduct--and I enjoyed being punished for it. In a word, I got
+a good deal out of my life, if it was not exactly what a girl was sent
+to school to get. And it is as happy a life to remember, with many
+picturesque graces and absurdities, joys and sorrows, that an
+uninterrupted existence at Eleventh and Spruce could not have given.
+
+I have no desire to talk sentimental nonsense about my school days
+having been my happiest. That sort of talk is usually twaddle. It was
+not as school that I loved the Convent, though as school it had its
+unrivalled attractions; it was as home. When the time came to go from it
+I suffered that sharp pang felt by most girls on leaving home for
+school. I remember how I, who affected a sublime scorn for the cry-baby,
+blubbered like one myself when I was faced with the immediate prospect
+of life in Philadelphia. How well I recall my despair--how vividly I see
+the foolish scene I made in the empty Refectory, shadowy in the dusk of
+the June evening, where I was rehearsing the valedictory of the
+Graduating Class which I had been chosen to recite, and where, after the
+first few lines I broke down to my shame, and sniffled and gurgled and
+sobbed in the lap of the beloved mistress who was doing her best to
+comfort me, and also to keep me from disgracing her, as I should have
+done by any such scene on the great day itself.
+
+If the Convent stands for so much in my memory, it would be ungrateful
+to regret the years I spent in it. The sole reason would be my loss, not
+as a student, but as a Philadelphian, for this loss was the price I
+paid. But the older I grow, the better I realize that to the loss I owe
+an immeasurable gain. For as a child I never got so accustomed to
+Philadelphia as not to see it at all. The thing we know too well is
+often the thing we see least clearly, or we should not need the
+philosopher to remind us that that is best which nearest lieth. All
+through my childhood and early youth I saw Philadelphia chiefly from the
+outside, and so saw it with more awe and wonder and lasting delight than
+those Philadelphians who, in childhood and early youth, saw it only from
+the inside,--too near for it to come together into the picture that
+tells.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V: TRANSITIONAL
+
+
+I
+
+And so it was with a great fear in my heart that, in the course of time
+and after I had learned as little as it was decent for Philadelphia
+girls to learn in the days before Bryn Mawr, I left the Convent
+altogether for Philadelphia. I can smile now in recalling the old fear,
+but it was no smiling matter at seventeen: a weeping matter rather, and
+many were the tears I shed in secret over the prospect before me. My
+holidays had not revealed Philadelphia to me as a place of evil and many
+dangers. But as I was to live there, it represented the world,--the
+sinful world, worse, the unknown world, to battle with whose temptations
+my life and training at the Convent had been the preparation.
+
+[Illustration: ST PETER'S, INTERIOR]
+
+It added to the danger that sin could wear so peaceful an aspect and
+temptation keep so comfortably out of sight. During an interval, longer
+than I cared to have it, for I did not "come out" at once as a
+Philadelphia girl should and at the Convent I had made few Philadelphia
+friends, my personal knowledge of Philadelphia did not go much deeper
+than its house fronts. For the most part they bore the closest family
+resemblance to those of Eleventh and Spruce, with the same suggestion of
+order and repose in their well-washed marble steps and neatly-drawn
+blinds. My Father had then moved to Third Street near Spruce, and there
+rented a red brick house, one-half, or one-third, the size of my
+Grandfather's, but very like it in every other way, to the roses in the
+tiny back-yard and to the daily family routine except that, with a
+courageous defiance of tradition I do not know how we came by, we dined
+at the new dinner hour of six and said our prayers in the privacy of our
+bedrooms. The Stock Exchange was only a minute away, and yet, at our
+end, Third Street had not lost its character as a respectable
+residential street. We had for neighbours old Miss Grelaud and the
+Bullitts and, round the corner in Fourth Street, the Wisters and Bories
+and Schaumbergs,--with what bated breath Philadelphia talked of the
+beauty and talents of Miss Emily Schaumberg, as she still was!--and many
+other Philadelphia families who had never lived anywhere else. Life went
+on as silently and placidly and regularly as at the Convent. I seemed
+merely to have exchanged one sort of monastic peace for another and the
+loudest sound I ever heard, the jingling of my old friend the horse-car,
+was not so loud as to disturb it.
+
+If I walked up Spruce Street, or as far as Pine and up Pine, silence and
+peace enfolded me. Peace breathed, exuded from the red brick houses with
+their white marble steps, their white shutters below and green above,
+their pleasant line of trees shading the red brick pavement. The
+occasional brown stone front broke the uniformity with such brutal
+discord that I might have imagined the devil I knew was waiting for me
+somewhere lurked behind it, and have seen in its pretentious aping of
+New York fashion the sin in which Philadelphia, as the Sinful World,
+must abound. I cannot say why it seemed to me, and still seems, so
+odious, for there were other interruptions to the monotony I delighted
+in--the beautiful open spaces and great trees about the Pennsylvania
+Hospital and St. Peter's; the old Mint which, with its severe classical
+fa�ade, seemed to reproach the frivolity of the Chestnut Street store
+windows on every side of it; General Paterson's square grey house with
+long high-walled garden at Thirteenth and Locust; the big yellow Dundas
+house at Broad and Walnut, with its green enclosure and the magnolia for
+whose blossoming I learnt to watch with the coming of spring; that other
+garden with wide-spreading trees opposite my Grandfather's at Eleventh
+and Spruce: old friends these quickly grew to be, kindly landmarks on
+the way when I took the walks that were so solitary in those early days,
+through streets where it was seldom I met anybody I knew, for the
+Convent had made me a good deal of a stranger in my native town,--where
+it was seldom, indeed, I met anybody at all.
+
+
+II
+
+When I went out, I usually turned in the direction of Spruce and Pine,
+for to turn in the other, towards Walnut, was to be at once in the
+business part of the town where Philadelphia women preferred not to be
+seen, having no desire to bridge over the wide gulf of propriety that
+then yawned between the sex and business. Except for the character of
+the buildings and the signs at the doors, I might not have been
+conscious of the embarrassing difference between this and my more
+familiar haunts. Bankers' and stock-brokers' offices were on every side,
+but the Third Street car did not jingle any louder as it passed, my way
+was not more crowded, peace still enveloped me. I gathered from my
+Father, who was a broker, that the Stock Exchange, when buying and
+selling had to be done on the spot and not by telephone as in our
+degenerate days, was now and then a scene of animation, and it might be
+of noise and disorder, more especially at Christmas, when a brisker
+business was done in penny whistles and trumpets than in stocks and
+shares. But the animation overflowed into Third Street only at moments
+of panic, to us welcome as moments of prosperity for they kept my Father
+busy--we thrived on panics--and then, once or twice, I saw staid
+Philadelphians come as near running as I ever knew them to in the open
+street.
+
+[Illustration: THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM PINE STREET]
+
+Now and then youth got the better of me and I sought adventure in the
+unadventurous monotony of Walnut Street where the lawyers had their
+offices, the courts not having as yet migrated up to Broad Street. It
+was usually lost in heavy legal slumber and if my intrusion was bold, at
+least nobody was about to resent it. Nor could there be a doubt of the
+eminent respectability into which I intruded. The recommendation to
+Philadelphia of its lawyers was not the high esteem in which they were
+held throughout the country, but their social standing at home--family
+gave distinction to the law, not the law to family. Approved
+Philadelphia names adorned the signs at almost every office door and not
+for some years was the evil day to dawn when the well-known Philadelphia
+families who inherited the right of the law would be forced to fight for
+it with the alien and the Jew. For me, I think I am at an age when I may
+own that the irreproachable names on the signs were not the principal
+attraction. Sometimes, from one of the somnolent offices, a friendly
+figure would step into the somnolent street to lighten me on my way, and
+it was pleasanter to walk up Walnut in company than alone. When I went
+back the other day, after many years and many changes for Philadelphia
+and myself, I found most of the familiar signs gone, but at one door I
+was met by a welcome ghost--but, was it the ghost of that friendly
+figure or of my lonely youth grasping at romance or its shadow? How many
+years must pass, how many experiences be gone through, before a question
+like that can be asked!
+
+If I followed Third Street beyond Walnut to Chestnut, I was in the
+region of great banks and trust companies and newspaper offices and the
+old State House and the courts. I had not had the experience, or the
+training, to realize what architectural monstrosities most of the new,
+big, heavy stone buildings were, nor the curiosity to investigate what
+went on inside of them, but after the quiet red brick houses they
+seemed to have business written all over them and the street, compared
+to Spruce and Walnut, appeared to my unsophisticated eyes so thronged
+that I did not have to be told it was no place for me. It was plain that
+most women felt as I did, so careful were they to efface themselves. I
+remember meeting but few on Chestnut Street below Eighth until Mr.
+Childs began to devote his leisure moments and loose change to the
+innocent amusement of presenting a cup and saucer to every woman who
+would come to get it, and as most women in Philadelphia, or out of it,
+are eager to grab anything they do not have to pay for, many visited him
+in the _Ledger_ office at Sixth and Chestnut.
+
+[Illustration: SECOND STREET MARKET]
+
+As I shrank from doing what no other woman did, and, as the business end
+of Chestnut Street did not offer me the same temptation as Walnut, I
+never got to know it well,--in fact I got to know it so little that my
+ignorance would seem extraordinary in anybody save a Philadelphian, and
+it remained as strange to me as the street of a foreign town. I could
+not have said just where my Grandfather's Bank was, not once during that
+period did I set my foot across the threshold of the State House,
+unwilling as I am to confess it. But perhaps I might as well make a full
+confession while I am about it, for the truth will have to come out
+sooner or later. Let me say then, disgraceful as I feel it to be, that
+though I spent two years at least in the Third Street house, with so
+much of the beauty of Philadelphia's beautiful past at my door, it was
+not until some time afterwards, when we had gone to live up at
+Thirteenth and Spruce, that I began to appreciate the beauty as well as
+my folly in not having appreciated it sooner. St. Peter's Church and the
+Pennsylvania Hospital I could not ignore, many of my walks leading me
+past them. But I was several years older before I saw Christ Church,
+inside or out. The existence of the old Second Street Market was unknown
+to me; had I been asked I no doubt would have said that the Old Swedes
+Church was miles off; I was unconscious that I was surrounded by houses
+of Colonial date; I was blind to the meaning and dignity of great gables
+turned to the street, and stately Eighteenth Century doorways, and
+dormer windows, and old ironwork, and a patchwork of red and black
+brick; I was indifferent to the interest these things might have given
+to every step I took at a time when, too often, every step seemed
+forlornly barren of interest or its possibility. Into the old
+Philadelphia Library on Fifth Street I did penetrate once or twice, and
+once or twice sat in its quiet secluded alcoves dipping into musty
+volumes: a mere accident it must have been, my daily reading being
+provided for at the easy-going, friendly, pleasantly dingy, much more
+modern Mercantile Library in Tenth Street. But the memory of these
+visits, few as they were, is one of the strongest my Third Street days
+have left with me, and I think, or I hope, I must have felt the charm of
+the old town if I may not have realized that I did, for I can never look
+back to myself as I was then without seeing it as the background to all
+my comings and goings--a background that lends colour to my colourless
+life.
+
+
+III
+
+I can understand my ignorance and blindness and indifference, if I
+cannot forgive them. All my long eleven years at the Convent I had had
+the virtue of obedience duly impressed upon me, and, though there custom
+led me easily into the temptation of disobedience, when I returned to
+Philadelphia I was at first too frightened and bewildered to defy
+Philadelphia's laws written and especially unwritten, for in these I was
+immediately concerned. I was the more bewildered because I had come away
+from the Convent comfortably convinced of my own importance, and it was
+disconcerting to discover that Philadelphia, so far from sharing the
+conviction, dismissed me as a person of no importance whatever. I had
+also my natural indolence and moral cowardice to reckon with. I have
+never been given to taking the initiative when I can avoid it and it is
+one of my great grievances that, good and thorough American as I am, I
+should have been denied my rightful share of American go. Anyway, I did
+not have to stay long in Philadelphia to learn for myself that the
+Philadelphia law of laws obliged every Philadelphian to do as every
+other Philadelphian did, and that every Philadelphian was too much
+occupied in evading what was not the thing in the present to bother to
+cultivate a sentiment for the past. Moreover, I had to contend against
+what the Philadelphians love to call the Philadelphia inertia, while all
+the time they talk about it they keep giving substantial proofs of how
+little reason there is for the talk. The Philadelphia inertia only means
+that it is not good form in Philadelphia to betray emotion on any
+occasion or under any circumstance. The coolness, or indifference, of
+Philadelphians at moments and crises of great passion and excitement has
+always astonished the outsider. If you do not understand the
+Philadelphia way, as I did not then, you take the Philadelphian's talk
+literally and believe the beautiful Philadelphia calm to be more than
+surface deep, as I did who had not the sense as yet to see that, even if
+this inertia was real, it was my business to get the better of it and to
+develop for myself the energy I imagined my town and its people to be
+without. I have often thought that the Philadelphia calm is a little
+like the London climate that either conquers you or leaves you the
+stronger for having conquered it.
+
+
+IV
+
+If one of Philadelphia's unwritten laws closed my eyes to what was most
+worth looking at when I took my walks abroad, another, no less
+stringent, limited those walks to a small section of the town. On the
+map Philadelphia might stretch over a vast area with the possibility of
+spreading indefinitely, but for social purposes it was shut in to the
+East and the West by the Delaware and the Schuylkill, to the North and
+the South by a single line of the old rhyming list of the streets:
+"Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine." I have not the antiquarian
+knowledge to say who drew that rigid line, or when what had been all
+right for Washington and Provosts of the University and no end of
+distinguished people became all wrong for ordinary mortals--I have heard
+the line ridiculed, but never explained. No geographical boundary has
+been, or could be, more arbitrary, but there it was, there it is, and
+the Philadelphian who crosses it risks his good name. Nor can the
+stranger, though unwarned, disregard it with impunity. I remember when I
+met Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist, the first friend I made in London, and she
+told me the number of the house away out North Twenty-second Street
+where she lived for two years in Philadelphia, I had a moment of
+Philadelphia uncertainty as to whether her literary distinction could
+outbalance her social indiscretion. Philadelphia never had a doubt, but
+was serenely unconscious of her presence during her two years there. And
+yet she had then edited and published, with the help of the Rossettis,
+her husband's _Life of Blake_ which had brought her fame in England, and
+her up-town house must have been one of the most interesting to visit.
+Walt Whitman was a daily guest and few American men of letters passed
+through Philadelphia without finding their way to it. Philadelphia,
+however, would scruple going to Heaven were Heaven north of Market
+Street.
+
+It is an absurd prejudice, but I am not sure if I have got rid of it
+now or if I ever shall get rid of it, and when I was too young to see
+its absurdity I would as soon have questioned the infallibility of the
+Pope. It was decreed that nobody should go north of Market or south of
+Pine; therefore I must not go; the reason, probably, why I never went to
+Christ Church--a pew had not been in my family for generations to excuse
+my presence in North Second Street--why I never, even by accident,
+passed the Old Swedes or the Second Street Market. It was bad enough to
+cross the line when I could not help myself. I am amused now--though my
+sensitive youth found no amusement in it--when I think of my annoyance
+because my Great-Grandfather, on my Mother's side, old Ambrose White
+whose summer home was in Chestnut Hill, lived not many blocks from the
+Meeting House and the Christ Church Burial Ground where Franklin lies,
+in one of those fine old Arch Street houses in which Friends had lived
+for generations since there had been Arch Street houses to live in.
+Besides, Mass and Vespers in the Cathedral led me to Logan Square, to my
+dismay that religion should lead where it was as much as my reputation
+was worth to be met. I have wondered since if it was as compromising for
+the Philadelphian from north of Market Street to be found in Rittenhouse
+Square.
+
+[Illustration: FOURTH AND ARCH STREETS MEETING HOUSE]
+
+Outwardly I could see no startling difference between the forbidden
+Philadelphia and my Philadelphia--"there is not such great odds, Brother
+Toby, betwixt good and evil as the world imagines," I might have said
+with Mr. Shandy had I known that Mr. Shandy said it or that there was a
+Mr. Shandy to say anything so wise. The Philadelphia rows of red brick
+houses, white marble steps, white shutters below and green above, rows
+of trees shading them, were much the same north of Market Street and
+south of Pine, except that south of Pine the red brick houses shrank and
+the white marble and white shutters grew shabby, and north of Market
+their uniformity was more often broken by brown stone fronts which,
+together with the greater width of many of the streets, gave a richer
+and more prosperous air than we could boast down our way. But it was not
+for Philadelphians, of all people, to question why, and it must have
+been two or three years later, when I was less awed by Philadelphia,
+that I went up town of my own free will and out of sheer defiance. I can
+remember the time when an innocent visit to so harmless a place as
+Girard College appeared to me in the light of outrageous daring. That is
+the way in my generation we were taught and learned our duty in
+Philadelphia.
+
+My excursions to the suburbs, except to Torresdale, were few, which was
+my loss for no other town's suburbs are more beautiful, and they were
+not on Philadelphia's Index. Time and the alien had not yet driven the
+Philadelphian out to the Main Line as an alternative to "Chestnut,
+Walnut, Spruce and Pine," but many had country houses there; Germantown
+was popular, Chestnut Hill and Torresdale were beyond reproach. My
+Father, however, who cultivated most of Philadelphia's prejudices, was
+unexpectedly heterodox in this particular. He could not stand the
+suburbs--poor man, he came to spending suburban summers in the end--and
+of them all he held Germantown most sweepingly in disfavour. I cannot
+remember that he gave a reason for his dislike. It may be that its
+grey-stone houses offended him as an infidelity to Philadelphia's red
+brick austerity. But he could never speak of it with patience and from
+him I got the idea that it was the abyss of the undesirable. One of the
+biggest surprises of my life was, when I came to look at it with my own
+eyes, to find it as desirable a place as beauty and history can make.
+
+
+V
+
+The shopping I had not the money to do would have kept me within a more
+exclusive radius, for a shopping expedition restricted the Philadelphian
+who had any respect for herself to Chestnut Street between Eighth and
+Fifteenth. Probably I was almost the only Philadelphian who knew there
+were plenty of cheap stores in Second Street, but that I bought the
+first silk dress I ever possessed there was one of the little
+indiscretions I had the sense to keep to myself. A bargain in Eighth
+Street might be disclosed as a clever achievement, if not repeated too
+often. The old Philadelphia name and the historic record of
+Lippincott's, for generations among the most successful Philadelphia
+publishers, would have permitted a periodical excursion into Market
+Street, even if unlimited latitude, anyway, had not been granted to
+wholesale houses in the choice of a street. The well-known reliability
+of Strawbridge and Clothier might warrant certain purchases up-town and
+a furniture dealer as reliable, whose name and address I regret have
+escaped me, sanction the housekeeper's penetrating still further north.
+But it was safer, everything considered, to keep to Chestnut Street, and
+on Chestnut Street to stores approved by long patronage--you were
+hall-marked "common" if you did not, and the wrong name on the inside of
+your hat or under the flap of your envelope might be your social
+undoing. The self-respecting Philadelphian would not have bought her
+needles and cotton anywhere save at Mustin's, her ribbons anywhere save
+at Allen's. She would have scorned the visiting card not engraved by
+Dreka. She would have gone exclusively to Bailey's or Caldwell's for her
+jewels and silver; to Darlington's or Homer and Colladay's for her
+gloves and dresses; to Sheppard's for her linen; to Porter and Coates,
+after Lippincott's, for her books; to Earle's for her pictures;--prints
+were such an exotic taste that Gebbie and Barrie could afford to hide in
+Walnut Street, and the collector of books such a rarity that Tenth, or
+was it Ninth? was as good as any other street for the old book store
+where I had so unpleasant an experience that I could not well forget it
+though I have forgotten its proprietor's name. A sign in the window said
+that old books were bought, and one day, my purse as usual empty but my
+heart full of hope, I carried there two black-bound, gilt-edged French
+books of the kind nobody dreams of reading that I had brought home
+triumphantly as prizes from the Convent: but I and my poor treasures
+were dismissed with such contempt and ridicule that my spirit was broken
+and I could not summon up pluck to carry them to Leary's, in Ninth
+Street, who were more liberal even than Charles Lamb in their
+definition, and to whom anything printed and bound was a book to be
+bought and sold.
+
+If hunger overtook the shopper, she would have eaten her oyster stew
+only at Jones's on Eleventh Street or Burns's on Fifteenth; or if the
+heat exhausted her, she would have cooled off on ice-cream only at
+Sautter's or Dexter's, on soda-water only at Wyeth's or Hubbell's. The
+hours for shopping were as circumscribed as the district. To be seen on
+Chestnut Street late in the afternoon, if not unpardonable, was
+certainly not quite the thing.
+
+
+VI
+
+Shopping without money had no charm and could never help to dispose of
+my interminable hours. The placid beauty of the shopless streets was of
+a kind to appeal more to age than youth. I wonder to this day at the
+time I allowed to pass before I shook off my respect for Philadelphia
+conventions sufficiently to relieve the dulness of my life by straying
+from the Philadelphia beaten track. The most daring break at first was a
+stroll on Sunday afternoon over to West Philadelphia and to Woodland's.
+Later, when, with a friend, I went on long tramps through the Park, by
+the Wissahickon, to Chestnut Hill, it was looked upon as no less
+unladylike on our part than the new generation's cigarette and demand
+for the vote on theirs. But if I did my duty, I was sadly bored by it.
+Often I turned homeward with that cruel aching of the heart the young
+know so well, longing for something, anything, to happen on the way to
+interrupt, to disorganize, to shatter to pieces the daily routine of
+life. I still shrink from the sharp pain of those cool, splendid October
+days when Philadelphia was aglow and quiveringly alive, and with every
+breath of the brisk air came the desire to be up and away and doing--but
+away where in Philadelphia?--doing what in Philadelphia? I still shrink
+from the sharp pain of the first langourous days of spring when every
+Philadelphia back-yard was full of perfume and every Philadelphia street
+a golden green avenue leading direct to happiness could I have found the
+way along its bewildering straightness.
+
+[Illustration: JOHNSON HOUSE, GERMANTOWN]
+
+If youth only knew! There was everywhere to go, everything to do, every
+happiness to claim. Philadelphia waited, the Promised Land of action and
+romance, had I not been hide-bound by Philadelphia conventions, absorbed
+in Philadelphia ideals, disdaining all others with the intolerance of my
+years. According to these conventions and ideals, there was but one
+adventure for the Philadelphia girl who had finished her education and
+arrived at the appointed age--the social adventure of coming out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI: THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE
+
+
+I
+
+Let me say at once that I know no adventure is more important for the
+Philadelphian, and that mine was scarcely worth the name as these things
+go in Philadelphia.
+
+It is the one adventure that should be roses all the way, but for me it
+was next to no roses at all. To begin with, I was poor. My Father had
+lost his money in the years of upheaval following the Civil War and had
+never got it back again. Nowadays this would not matter. A girl of
+seventeen, when she comes home from school, can turn round, find
+something to do, and support herself. She could in the old days too, if
+she was thrown on her own resources. I had friends no older than myself
+who taught, or were in the Mint--that harbour of refuge for the young or
+old Philadelphia lady in reduced circumstances. But my trouble was that
+I was not supposed to be thrown on my own resources. A Philadelphia
+father would have felt the social structure totter had he permitted his
+daughter to work as long as he was alive to work for her. When he had
+many daughters and luck went against him, the advantage of this attitude
+was less obvious to them than to him. Exemplary as was the theory, which
+I applaud my Father for acting up to since it happened to be his, it
+had its inconvenience when put into practice. To be guarded from the
+hardship of labour by the devoted father did not always put money into
+the daughter's pocket.
+
+[Illustration: THE CUSTOMS HOUSE]
+
+Had I been more at home in Philadelphia, my poverty might not have stood
+so much in my light. A hundred years before Gouverneur Morris had
+praised Philadelphia, which in its respect for "virtuous poverty" he
+thought so much more generous than other capitals where social splendour
+was indispensable, and in this the town had not changed. It was to
+Philadelphia's credit that a girl's social success did not depend on the
+length of her dressmaker's bill or the scale of her entertaining. More
+than one as poor as I would have a different story to tell. But I
+suffered from having had no social training or apprenticeship. The
+Convent had been concerned in preparing me for society in the next
+world, not in this, and I had stayed in the Convent too long to make the
+many friendships that do more than most things to launch a girl on her
+social career--too long, for that matter, to know what society meant.
+
+It was a good thing that I did not know, did not realize what was ahead
+of me, that I allowed myself to be led like a Philadelphian to the
+slaughter, for a little experience of society is good for everybody.
+Unless men are to live like brutes--or like monks--they must establish
+some sort of social relations, and if the social game is played at all,
+it should be according to the rules. Nowhere are the rules so rigorous
+as in Philadelphia, nowhere in America based upon more inexorable, as
+well as dignified, traditions, and I do not doubt that because of the
+stumbling blocks in my path, I learned more about them than the
+Philadelphia girl whose path was rose-strewn. Were history my mission,
+it would be amusing to trace these traditions to their source--first
+through the social life of the Friends who, however, are so exclusive
+that should this part of the story ever be told, whether as romance or
+history, it must come from the inside; and then, through the gaieties of
+the World's People who flatter themselves they are as exclusive, and who
+have the name for it, and whose exclusiveness is wholesale license
+compared to that of the Friends:--through the two distinct societies
+that have lived and flourished side by side ever since Philadelphia was.
+But my concern is solely with the gaieties as I, individually, shared in
+them. Now that I have outlived the discomforts of the experience, I can
+flatter myself that, in my small, insignificant fashion, I was helping
+to carry on old and fine traditions.
+
+
+II
+
+The most serious of these discomforts arose from the question of
+clothes, a terrifying question under the existing conditions in the
+Third Street house, involving more industrious dress-making upstairs in
+the third story front bedroom than I cared about, and a waste of
+energies that should have been directed into more profitable channels. I
+sewed badly and was conscious of it. At the Convent, except for the
+necessity of darning my stockings, I had been as free from this sort of
+toiling as a lily of the field, and yet I too had gone arrayed, if
+hardly with the same conspicuous success, and, in my awkward hands, the
+white tarlatan--who wears tarlatan now?--and the cheap silk from Second
+Street, which composed my coming out trousseau, were not growing into
+such things of beauty as to reconcile me to my new task.
+
+[Illustration: UNDER BROAD STREET STATION AT FIFTEENTH STREET]
+
+As unpleasant were the preliminary lessons in dancing forced upon me by
+my family when, in my pride of recent graduation with honours, it
+offended me to be thought by anybody in need of learning anything. One
+evening every week during a few months, two or three friends and cousins
+joined me in the Third Street parlour to be drilled into dancing shape
+for coming out by Madame Martin, the large, portly Frenchwoman who, in
+the same crinoline and heelless, sidelaced shoes, taught generations of
+Philadelphia children to dance. Even the Convent could not do without
+her, though there, to avoid the sinfulness of "round dances," we had,
+under her tuition, waltzed and polkaed hand in hand, a method which my
+family feared, if not corrected, might lead to my disgrace.
+
+I seem rather a pathetic figure as I see myself obediently stitching and
+practising my steps without an idea of the true meaning and magnitude of
+the adventure I was getting ready for, or a chance of being set about it
+in the right way. That right way would have been for somebody to give a
+party or a dance or a reception especially for me to come out at. But
+nobody among my friends and relations was obliging enough to accept the
+responsibility, and at home my Father could not get so far as to think
+of it. He would have needed too disastrous a panic in Third Street to
+provide the money. Madame Martin's lessons were already an extravagance
+and when, on top of them, he had gone so far as to pay for my
+subscription to the Dancing Class, and, in a cabless town, for the
+carriage, fortunately shared with friends, to go to it in, he had done
+all his bank account allowed him to do to start me in life.
+
+It would be as useful to explain that the sun rises in the east and sets
+in the west as to tell a Philadelphian that the Dancing Class to which I
+refer was not of the variety presided over by Madame Martin, but one to
+which Philadelphians went to make use of just such lessons as I had been
+struggling with for weeks. The origin of its name I never knew, I never
+asked, the Dancing Class being one of the Philadelphia institutions the
+Philadelphian took for granted: then, as it always had been and still
+is, I believe, a distinguished social function of the year. To belong to
+it was indispensable to the Philadelphian with social pretensions. It
+was held every other Monday, if I remember--to think I should have a
+doubt on a subject of such importance!-and the first of the series was
+given so early in the winter that with it the season may be said to have
+opened. Perhaps this fact helped my family to decide that it was at the
+Dancing Class I had best make my first appearance.
+
+
+III
+
+Youth is brave out of sheer ignorance. When the moment came, it never
+occurred to me to hesitate or to consider the manner of my introduction
+to the world. I was content that my Brother should be my sole chaperon.
+I rather liked myself in my home-made white tarlatan, feeling very much
+dressed in my first low neck. I entertained no misgivings as to the fate
+awaiting me, imagining it as inevitable for a girl who was "out" to
+dance and have a good time as for a bird to fly once its wings were
+spread. If there were men to dance with, what more was needed?--it never
+having entered into my silly head that it was the girl's sad fate to
+have to wait for the man to ask her, and that sometimes the brute
+didn't.
+
+I had to go no further than the dressing-room at the Natatorium, where
+the Dancing Class then met, to learn that society was not so simple as I
+thought. I have since been to many strange lands among many strange
+people, but never have I felt so much of a stranger as when I, a
+Philadelphian born, doing conscientiously what Philadelphia expected of
+me, was suddenly dropped down into the midst of a lot of Philadelphia
+girls engaged in the same duty. There was a freemasonry among them I
+could not help feeling right away--the freemasonry that went deeper than
+the chance of birth and the companionship of duty--the freemasonry that
+came from their all having grown up together since their perambulator
+days in Rittenhouse Square, having learned to dance together, gone to
+children's parties together, studied at Miss Irwin's school together,
+spent the summer by the sea and in the mountains together, in a word,
+from their having done everything together until they were united by
+close bonds, the closer for being undefinable, that I, Convent bred,
+with not an idea, not a habit, not a point of view, in common with them,
+could not break through. I never have got quite over the feeling, though
+time has modified it. There is no loneliness like the loneliness in a
+crowd, doubly so if all the others in the crowd know each other. In the
+dressing-room that first evening it was so overwhelming to discover
+myself entirely out of it where I should have been entirely in, that,
+without the stay and support of my friend, of old the Prince of Denmark
+to my Ghost of Hamlet's Father, and her sister, who had come out under
+more favourable conditions, I do not think I could have gone a step
+further in the great social adventure.
+
+As it was, with my heart in my boots, my hand trembling on my Brother's
+arm, to the music of Hassler's band, I entered the big bare hall of the
+Natatorium, and was out with no more fuss and with nobody particularly
+excited about it save myself.
+
+[Illustration: THE PHILADELPHIA CLUB, THIRTEENTH AND WALNUT STREETS]
+
+Things were a little better once away from the dressing-room. My Brother
+was gay, had been out for two or three years, knew everybody. If he
+could not introduce me to the women he could introduce the men to me,
+and the freemasonry existing among them from their all having gone to
+the Episcopal Academy and the University of Pennsylvania together, from
+their all having played cricket and baseball and football, or gone
+hunting together, from their all belonging to the same clubs, was not
+the kind from which I need suffer. Besides, those were the days when it
+was easy for the Philadelphia girl to get to know men, to make friends
+of them, without the Philadelphia gossip pouncing upon her and the
+Philadelphia father asking them their intentions--they could call upon
+her as often as they liked and the Philadelphia father would retreat
+from the front and back parlours, she could go out alone with them and
+the Philadelphia father would not interfere, knowing they had been
+brought up to see in themselves her protectors, especially appointed to
+look out for her. Some signs of change I might have discerned had I been
+observant. More than the five o'clock tea affectation was to come of the
+new coquetting with English fashions. Enough had already come for me to
+know that if my Brother now and then asked me to go to the theatre, it
+was not for the pleasure of my company, but because a girl he wanted to
+take would not accept if he did not provide a companion for the sake of
+the proprieties. I am sure the old Philadelphia way was the most
+sensible. Certainly it was the most helpful if you happened to be a girl
+coming out with next to no friends among the women in what ought to have
+been your own set, with no chaperon to see that you made them, and, at
+the Dancing Class, with no hostess to keep a protecting eye on you but,
+instead, patronesses too absorbed in their triumphs to notice the less
+fortunate straggling far behind.
+
+Well, anyway, if honesty forbids me to call myself a success, it is a
+satisfaction to remember that I did not have to play the wall-flower,
+which I would have thought the most terrible disaster that could befall
+me. To have to sit out the German alone would have been to sink to such
+depths of shame that I never afterwards could have held up my head. It
+was astonishing what mountains of despair we made of these social
+molehills! I can still see the sad faces of the girls in a row against
+the wall, with their air of announcing to all whom it might concern:
+"Here we are, at your service, come and rescue us!" But there was
+another dreadful custom that did give me away only too often. When a man
+asked a girl beforehand to dance the German, Philadelphia expected him
+to send her a bunch of roses: always the same roses--Boston buds,
+weren't they called?--and from Pennock's on Chestnut Street if he knew
+what was what. To take your place roseless was to proclaim that you had
+not been asked until the eleventh hour. It was not pleasant. However, if
+I went sometimes without the roses, I always had the partner. I had even
+moments of triumph as when, one dizzy evening before the assembled
+Dancing Class, I danced with Willie White.
+
+It is not indiscreet to mention so great a person by name and, in doing
+so, not presuming to use it so familiarly--he was the Dancing Class, as
+far as I know, he had no other occupation; and his name was _Willie_,
+not _William_, not _Mr._ White. Willie, as Philadelphians said it, was
+a title of honour, like the Coeur de Lion or the Petit Caporal bestowed
+upon other great men--the measure of the estimate in which social
+Philadelphia held him. Bean Nash in the Pump Room at Bath was no
+mightier power than Willie White in the Dancing Class at the Natatorium.
+He ruled it, and ruled it magnificently: an autocrat, a tyrant, under
+whose yoke social Philadelphia was eager to thrust its neck. What he
+said was law, whom he approved could enter, whom he objected to was
+without redress, his recognition of the Philadelphian's claims to
+admission was a social passport. He saw to everything, he led the
+German, and I do not suppose there was a girl who, at her first Dancing
+Class her first winter, did not, at her first chance, take him out in
+the German as her solemn initiation. That is how I came to enjoy my
+triumph, and I do not remember repeating it for he never condescended to
+take me out in return. But still, I can say that once I danced with
+Willie White at the Dancing Class--And did I once see Shelley plain?
+
+
+IV
+
+There were other powers, as I was made quickly to understand--not only
+the powers that all Biddles, Cadwalladers, Rushes, Ingersolls, Whartons,
+in a word all members of approved Philadelphia families were by
+Philadelphia right, but a few who had risen even higher than that
+splendid throng and were accepted as their leaders. It was not one of
+the most brilliant periods in the social history of Philadelphia. Mrs.
+Rush had had no successor, no woman presided over what could have been
+given the name of Salon as she had. Even the Wistar parties, exclusively
+for men, discontinued during the upheaval of the Civil War, had not yet
+been revived. But, notwithstanding the comparative quiet and depression,
+there were a few shining social lights.
+
+Had I been asked in the year of my coming out who was the greatest woman
+in the world, I should have answered, without hesitation, Mrs. Bowie.
+She, too, may be mentioned by name without indiscretion for she, too,
+has become historical. She was far from beautiful at the date to which I
+refer, she was no longer in her first youth, was inclined to stoutness
+and I fear had not learned how to fight it as women who would be in the
+fashion must learn to-day. She was not rich and the fact is worth
+recording, so characteristic is it of Philadelphia. The names of leaders
+of society in near New York usually had millions attached to them, those
+there allowed to lead paid a solid price for it in their entertaining.
+But Mrs. Bowie's power depended upon her personal fascination--with
+family of course to back it--which was said to be irresistible. And yet
+not to know her was to be unknown. Intimacy with her was to have
+arrived. At least a bowing acquaintance, an occasional invitation to her
+house, was essential to success or its dawning. She entertained modestly
+as far as I could gather from my experience,--as far as I can now
+depend on my memory--gave no balls, no big dinners; if there were
+select little dinners, I was too young and insignificant to hear of
+them. I never got farther than the afternoon tea to which everybody was
+invited once every winter, a comfortless crush in her small house, with
+next to nothing to eat and drink as things to eat and drink go according
+to the lavish Philadelphia standard. But that did not matter. Nothing
+mattered except to be there, to be seen there. I was tremendously
+pleased with myself the first time the distinction was mine, though of
+my presence in her house Mrs. Bowie was no doubt amiably unconscious. I
+never knew her to recognize me out of it, though I sometimes met her
+when she came informally to see one of my Aunts who was her friend, or
+to give me the smile at the Dancing Class that would have raised my
+drooping spirits. The only notice she ever spared me there was to
+express to my Brother--who naturally, brother-like, made me
+uncomfortable by reporting it to me--her opinion of my poor,
+unpretentious, home-made, Second Street silk as an example of the
+absurdity of a long train to dance in, which shows how completely she
+had forgotten who I was.
+
+Her chief rival, if so exalted a personage could have a rival, was Mrs.
+Connor, from whom also a smile, a recognition, was equivalent to social
+promotion. Her fascination did not have to be explained. She was an
+unqualified beauty, though the vision I have retained is of beauty in
+high-necked blue velvet and chinchilla, which I could not have enjoyed
+at the Dancing Class or any evening party. I realise as I write that in
+the details of Philadelphia's social history I would come out badly from
+too rigid an examination.
+
+
+V
+
+To Mrs. Connor's I was never asked with or without the crowd. But other
+houses were opened to me, other invitations came, for, if I had not
+friends, my family had. My white tarlatan and my Second Street silk had
+grown shabby before the winter was half over. At many parties I got to
+know what a delightful thing a Philadelphia party was, and if I had gone
+to one instead of many I should have known as well. Philadelphia had a
+standard for its parties as for everything, and to deviate from this
+standard, to attempt originality, to invent the "freak" entertainments
+of New York, would have been excessively bad form. The same card printed
+by Dreka requested the pleasure of your company to the same Philadelphia
+house--the Philadelphia hostess would not have stooped to invite you to
+the Continental or the Girard, the LaPierre House or the Colonnade,
+which were the Bellevue and the Ritz of my day--where you danced in the
+same spacious front and back parlours, with the same crash on the floor,
+to the same music by Hassler's band: where you ate the same Terrapin,
+Croquettes, Chicken Salad, Oysters, Boned Turkey, Ice cream, little
+round Cakes with white icing on top, and drank the same Fish-House Punch
+provided by the same Augustine; where the same Cotillon began at the
+same hour with the same figures and the same favours and the same
+partners; where there was the same dressing-room in the second story
+front and the same Philadelphia girls who froze me on my arrival and on
+my departure. There was no getting away from the same people in
+Philadelphia. That was the worst of it. The town was big enough for a
+chance to meet different people in different houses every evening in the
+week, but by that arbitrary boundary of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and
+Pine," it has made itself socially into a village with the pettiness and
+limitations of village life. I have never wondered that Philadelphians
+are as cordial to strangers as everybody who ever came to Philadelphia
+knows them to be--that Philadelphia doors are as hospitable as Thackeray
+once described them. Philadelphians have reason to rejoice and make the
+most of it when occasionally they see a face they have not been seeing
+regularly at every party they have been to, and hear talk they have not
+listened to all their lives.
+
+[Illustration: THE NEW RITZ-CARLTON; THE FINISHING TOUCHES; THE WALNUT
+STREET ADDITION HAS SINCE BEEN MADE]
+
+Sometimes it was to the afternoon reception the card engraved by Dreka
+invited me, and then again it was to meet the same people and--in the
+barbarous mode of the day--to eat the same Croquettes, Chicken Salad,
+Terrapin, Boned Turkey, Ice-cream, and little round Cakes with white
+icing on top, and to drink the same Punch from Augustine's at five
+o'clock in the afternoon, and at least risk digestion in a good cause.
+But rarely did the card engraved by Dreka invite me to dinner, and I
+could not have been invited to anything I liked better. I have always
+thought dinner the most civilized form of entertainment. It may have
+been an entertainment Philadelphia preferred to reserve for my elders,
+and, if I am not mistaken, the most formal dinners, or dinners with any
+pretence to being public, were then usually men's affairs, just as the
+Saturday Club, and the Wistar parties had been, and the Clover Club, and
+the Fish-House Club were: from them women being as religiously excluded
+as from the dinners of the City Companies in London, or from certain
+monasteries in Italy and the East. Indeed, as I look back, it seems to
+me that woman's social presence was correct only in private houses and
+at private gatherings. Nothing took away my breath so completely on
+going back to Philadelphia after my long absence as the Country Clubs
+where men and women now meet and share their amusements, if it was not
+the concession of a dining-room to women by a Club like the Union League
+that, of old, was in my esteem as essentially masculine as the
+Philadelphia Lady thought the sauces at Blossom's Hotel in Chester.
+
+But there were plenty of other things to do which I did with less rather
+than more thoroughness. I paid midday visits, wondering why duty should
+have set me so irksome a task. I received with friends on New Year's
+Day--an amazing day when men paid off their social debts and made, at
+some houses, their one call of the year, joining together by twos and
+threes and fours to charter a carriage, or they would never have got
+through their round, armed with all their courage either to refuse
+positively or to accept everywhere the glass of Madeira or Punch and the
+usual masterpiece from Augustine's. It was another barbarous custom, but
+an old Philadelphia custom, and Philadelphia has lost so many old
+customs that I could have wished this one spared. I went to the concerts
+of the Orpheus Club. I went to the Opera and the Theatre when I was
+asked, which was not often. I passed with the proper degree of
+self-consciousness the Philadelphia Club at Thirteenth and Walnut, the
+same row of faces always looking out over newspapers and magazines from
+the same row of windows. And I did a great many things that were
+pleasant and a great many more that were unpleasant, conscientiously
+rejecting nothing social I was told to do when the opportunity to do it
+came my way. But it all counted for nothing weighed in the balance with
+the one thing I did not do--I never went to the Assembly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII: THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE: THE ASSEMBLY
+
+
+I
+
+I am too good a Philadelphian to begin to talk about the Assembly in the
+middle of a chapter. It holds a place apart in the social life of
+Philadelphia of which annually it is the supreme moment, and in my
+record of my experiences of this life, however imperfect, I can treat it
+with no less consideration. It must have a chapter apart.
+
+To go to the Assembly was the one thing of all others I wanted to do,
+not only on the general principle that the thing one wants most is the
+thing one cannot have, but because to go to the Assembly was the thing
+of all others I ought to have done. There could be no question of that.
+You were not really out in Philadelphia if you did not go; only the
+Friends could afford not to. And Americans from other towns felt much
+the same way about it, they felt they were not anybody if they were not
+invited, and they moved heaven and earth for an invitation, and prized
+it, when received, as highly as a pedigree. A few honoured guests were
+always at the Assembly.
+
+[Illustration: THE HALL, STENTON]
+
+Philadelphians who are not on the Assembly list may pretend to laugh at
+it, to despise it, to sneer at the snobbishness of people who endeavour
+to draw a social line in a country where everybody is as good as
+everybody else and where those on the right side may look down but those
+on the wrong will not be induced to look up. And not one among those who
+laugh and sneer would not jump at the chance to get in, were it given
+them, at the risk of being transformed into snobs themselves. For the
+Assembly places the Philadelphian as nothing else can. It gives him what
+the German gets from his quarterings or the Briton from an invitation to
+Court. The Dancing Class had its high social standard, it required
+grandfathers as credentials before admission could be granted, the
+archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania supplied no more
+authoritative assurance of Philadelphia respectability than its
+subscription list, but the Dancing Class was lax in its standard
+compared to the Assembly. I am not sure what was the number, what the
+quality, of ancestors the Assembly exacted, but I know that it was as
+inexorable in its exactions as the Council of Ten. It would have been
+easier for troops of camels to pass through the eye of a needle than for
+one Philadelphian north of Market Street to get through the Assembly
+door. I am told that matters are worse to-day when Philadelphia society
+has increased in numbers until new limits must be set to the Assembly
+lest it perish of its own unwieldiness. The applicants must produce not
+only forefathers but fathers and mothers on the list, and the
+Philadelphian whose name was there more than a century and a half ago
+cannot make good his rights if his parents neglected to establish
+theirs. And to be refused is not merely humiliation, but humiliation
+with Philadelphia for witness, and the misery and shame that are the
+burden of the humiliated.
+
+It is foolish, I admit, society is too light a matter to suffer for; it
+is cruel, for the social wound goes deep. But were it ten times more
+foolish, ten times more cruel, I would not have it otherwise.
+Philadelphians preserve their State House, their Colonial mansions and
+churches; why should they not be as careful of their Assembly, since it
+has as historic a background and as fine Colonial and Revolutionary
+traditions? They are proud of having their names among those who signed
+the Declaration of Independence; why should they not take equal--or
+greater--pride in figuring among the McCalls and Willings and Shippens
+and Sims and any number of others on the first Assembly lists, since
+these are earlier in date? Besides, to such an extremity have the
+changes of the last quarter of a century driven the Philadelphian that
+he must make a good fight for survival in his own town. When I think of
+how mere wealth is taking possession of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and
+Pine," how uptown is marrying into it, how the Jew and the alien are
+forcing their way in, I see in loyalty to the traditions of the Assembly
+of Philadelphian's strongest defence of the social rights which are his
+by inheritance. Should he let go, what would there be for him to catch
+on to again?
+
+[Illustration: "PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE
+INHABITANTS THEREOF"]
+
+It would be different if what Philadelphia was getting in exchange were
+finer, or as fine. But it is not. The old exclusiveness, with its
+follies, was better, more amusing, than the new tendency to do away with
+everything that gave Philadelphia society its character. It was the
+charm and the strength of Philadelphia society that it had a character
+of its own and was not just like Boston or New York or Baltimore
+society. Nobody, however remote was their mission from social matters,
+could visit Philadelphia without being impressed by this difference,
+whether it was to discover, with John Adams, that Philadelphians had
+their particular way of being a happy, elegant, tranquil, polite people,
+or, with so unlikely an observer as Matthew Arnold, that "the leading
+families in Philadelphia were much thought of," and that Philadelphia
+names saying nothing to an Englishman said everything to every American.
+Who you were counted in Philadelphia, as what you knew in Boston, or
+what you were worth in New York, and there was not an American of old
+who did not accept the fact and respect it. Philadelphia society clung
+to the Philadelphia surface of tranquillity, of untroubled repose
+whatever might be going on beneath it, and in my time I would not like
+to say how disturbing and agitating were the scandals and intrigues that
+were said to be going on. They were rarely made public. It was not in
+Philadelphia as in London where next to everybody you meet has been or
+is about to be divorced, though it might be that next to everybody you
+met was not making it a practice to keep to the straight and narrow
+path, to be as innocent as everybody looked. Logan Square could have
+told tales, if the Divorce Court could not.
+
+[Illustration: BED ROOM, STENTON, THE HOME OF JAMES LOGAN]
+
+But now Philadelphia has strayed from its characteristic exclusiveness;
+gone far to get rid of even the air of tranquillity. With the modern
+"Peggy Shippen" and "Sally Wister" alert to give away its affairs in the
+columns of the daily paper, it could not keep its secrets to itself if
+it wanted to. And it does not seem to want to--that is the saddest part
+of the whole sad transformation. It rather likes the world outside to
+know what it is doing and, worse, it takes that world as its model. Its
+aim apparently is to show that it can be as like every other town as two
+peas, so that, drinking tea to music at the Bellevue, dancing at the
+Ritz, lunching and dining and playing golf and polo at the Country
+Clubs, the visitor can comfortably forget he is not at home but in
+Philadelphia. The youth of Philadelphia have become eager to desert the
+Episcopal Academy and the University for Groton or St. Paul's, Harvard
+or Yale, in order that they may be trained to be not Philadelphians but,
+as they imagine, men of the world, forgetting the distinction there has
+hitherto been in being plain Philadelphians. At the moment when in far
+older towns of Europe people are striving to recover their character by
+reviving local costumes, language, and customs, Philadelphians are
+deliberately throwing theirs away with their old traditions. The
+Assembly is one of their few rare possessions left, and strict as they
+are with it in one way, in another they are playing fast and loose with
+it, holding it, as if it were a mere modern dance, at a fashionable
+hotel.
+
+
+II
+
+If I now regret, as I do, never having gone to the Assembly, it is
+because of all that it represents, all that makes it a classic. But at
+the time, my regret, though as keen, was because of more personal
+reasons. I could have borne the historic side of my loss with
+equanimity, it was the social side of it that broke my heart. I have had
+many bad quarters of an hour in my life, but few as poignant as that
+which followed the appearance at our front door of the coloured man who
+distributed the cards for the Assembly--far too precious to be trusted
+to the post--and who came to leave one for my Brother. It was an
+injustice that oppressed me with a sense of my wrongs as a woman and
+might have set me window-smashing had window-smashing as a protest been
+invented. Why should the Assembly be so much easier for men? My Brother
+had but to put on the dress suit he had worn it did not matter how many
+years, and as he was, like every other American young man, at work and
+an independent person altogether--a millionaire I saw in him--the price
+of the card in an annual subscription was his affair and nobody else's.
+But, in my case the price was not my affair. I had not a cent to call my
+own, I was not at work, I was denied the right to work, and, the
+Assembly coming fairly late in the season, my white tarlatan and Second
+Street silk showed wear and tear that unfitted them for the most
+important social function of the winter. Philadelphia women dressed
+simply, it is true; that used to be one of the ways the Quaker influence
+showed itself; they boasted then that their restraint in dress
+distinguished them from other American women. But simplicity does not
+mean cheapness or indifference. The Friends took infinite pains with
+their soft brown and silvery grey silks, with their delicate fichus and
+Canton shawls. The well-dressed Philadelphia woman knows what she has to
+pay for the elegance of her simplicity. And the Assembly has always
+called for the finest she could achieve, from the day when Franklin was
+made to feel the cost to him if his daughter was to have what she needed
+to go out "in decency" with the Washingtons in Philadelphia.
+
+[Illustration: THE TUNNEL IN THE PARK]
+
+I had the common sense to understand my position and not to be misled by
+the poverty-stricken, but irresistible Nancies and Dollies who were
+enjoying a vogue in the novels of the day and who encircled empty bank
+accounts and big families with the halo of romance. To read about the
+struggles with poverty of the irresistible young heroine might be
+amusing, but I had no special use for them as a personal experience. It
+would have been preposterous for me to think for a moment that, without
+a decent gown, I could go to the Assembly and, to do myself justice, I
+did not think it. But by this time I knew what coming out and being out
+meant and, therefore, I appreciated the social drawback it must be for
+me not to be able to go. It explained, as nothing hitherto had, how far
+I was from being caught up in the whirl, and it is only the whirl that
+keeps one going in society--that makes society a delightful profession,
+and I think I realized this truth better than the people so
+extravagantly in the Philadelphia whirl as to have no time to think
+about it. All that winter I never got to the point of being less
+concerned as to where the next invitation was to come from than as to
+how I was to accept all that did come. There is no use denying that I
+was disappointed and suffered from the disappointment. One pays a
+heavier price for the first foolish illusion lost than for all the
+others put together, no matter how serious they are.
+
+
+III
+
+When the season was over, I had as little hope of keeping up in other
+essential ways. If society then adjourned from Philadelphia because the
+heat made it impossible to stay at home, it was only to start a new
+Philadelphia on the porch of Howland's Hotel at Long Branch or, as it
+was just then beginning to do, at Bar Harbor and in the camps of the
+Adirondacks, or, above all, at Narragansett. "It may be accepted as an
+incontrovertible truth," Janvier says in one of his Philadelphia
+stories, "that a Philadelphian of a certain class who missed coming to
+the Pier for August would refuse to believe, for that year at least, in
+the alternation of the four seasons; while an enforced absence from that
+damply delightful watering-place for two successive summers very
+probably would lead to a rejection of the entire Copernican system." If
+Philadelphians went abroad, which was much more exceptional then than
+now, it was to meet each other. I know hotels in London to-day where, if
+you go in the afternoon, it is just like an afternoon reception in
+Philadelphia, and hotels in Paris where at certain seasons you find
+nobody but Philadelphians talking Philadelphia, though the Philadelphian
+has not disappeared who does not want to travel because he finds
+Philadelphia good enough for him. And it has always been like that.
+
+But I could not follow Philadelphia society in the summer time any more
+than I could go with it to the Assembly in the winter. I had reason to
+consider myself fortunate if I travelled as far as Mount Airy or
+Chestnut Hill out of the red brick oven Philadelphia used to be--is now
+and ever shall be!--from June to September. It was an event if I got off
+with the crowd--the linen-dustered, wilting-collared crowds; surely we
+are not so demoralized by the heat nowadays?--to Cape May or Atlantic
+City, to enjoy the land breeze blowing, from over the Jersey swamps,
+clouds of mosquitoes before it so that nobody could stir out of doors
+without gloves and a veil. These, however, were not the summer joys
+society demanded of me. The further I went into the social game, the
+less I got from it, and I had decided that for the poor it was not
+worth the candle at the end of the first year, or was it the second?
+That I should be uncertain shows how little my heart was in the business
+of going out.
+
+[Illustration: THE BOAT HOUSES ON THE SCHUYLKILL]
+
+I did not necessarily give up every amusement because I did not go out.
+In fact, I cannot recall a dance that amused me as much as many a
+boating party on the Schuylkill in the gold of the June afternoon, or
+many a walking party through the Park in the starlit summer night. There
+also remained, had I chosen, the staid entertainment of the women who,
+for one reason or other, had retired from the gayer round, and whose
+amusements consisted of more intimate receptions, teas, without number,
+sewing societies. And it was the period when Philadelphia was waking up
+to the charms of the higher education for women,--to the dissipations of
+"culture." I had friends who filled their time by studying for the
+examinations Harvard had at last condescended to allow them to pass, or
+try to pass; others found their sober recreation by qualifying
+themselves as teachers and teaching in a large society formed to impart
+learning by correspondence: all these women keeping their occupation to
+themselves as much as possible, not wishing to make a public scandal in
+Philadelphia which had not accustomed itself to the spectacle of women
+working unless compelled to;--all this quite outside of the University
+set, which must have existed, if I did not know it, as the Bryn Mawr set
+exists to-day, but which, as far as my experience went, was then never
+heard of except by the fortunate and privileged few who belonged to it.
+
+But this new amusement required effort, and experience had not made me
+in love with the amusement that had to be striven for, that had to be
+paid for by exertion of any kind. There was an interval when
+Philadelphia would have been searched in vain for another idler as
+confirmed as I. Having found nothing to do, I proceeded to do it with
+all my might. I stood in no need of the poet's command to lean and loaf
+at my ease, though I am afraid I leaned and loafed so well as to neglect
+the other half of his precept and to forget to invite my soul. To those
+years I now look back as to so much good time lost in a working life all
+too short at the best.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII: A QUESTION OF CREED
+
+
+I
+
+I may not have understood at the time, but I must have been vaguely
+conscious that if so often I felt myself a stranger in my native town,
+it was not only because of the long years I had been shut up in
+boarding-school, but because that boarding-school happened to be a
+Convent.
+
+There were schools in Philadelphia and schools out of it as useful as
+Rittenhouse Square in laying the foundation for profitable friendships.
+Miss Irwin's furnished almost as good social credentials as a Colonial
+Governor in the family. But a Philadelphia Convent did the other thing
+as successfully. It was not the Convent as a Convent that was objected
+to. In Paris, it could lend distinction: the fact that, at the mature
+age of six, I spent a year at Conflans, might have served me as a social
+asset. In Louisiana, or Maryland, a Philadelphia girl could see its door
+close upon her, and not despair of social salvation. Everything depended
+upon where the Convent was. In some places, it had a social standing, in
+others it had none, and Philadelphia was one of the others. In France,
+in Louisiana, in Maryland, to be a Catholic was to be at the top of the
+social scale, approved by society; in Pennsylvania, it was to be at the
+bottom, despised by society.
+
+This was another Philadelphia fact I accepted on faith. It was not until
+I began to think about Philadelphia that I saw how consistent
+Philadelphians were in their inconsistency. Their position in the matter
+was what their past had made it, and the inconsistency is in their
+greater liberality to-day. For Pennsylvania has never been Catholic, has
+never had an aristocratic Catholic tradition like England: to the
+Friends there, all the aristocracy of the traditional kind belongs. The
+people--the World's People--who rushed to Pennsylvania to secure for
+themselves the religious liberty William Penn offered indiscriminately
+to everybody, found they could not enjoy it if Catholics were to profit
+by it with them. They had not been there any time when, as one of the
+early Friends had the wit to see and to say, they "were surfeited with
+liberty," and the Friends, who refused to all sects alike the privilege
+of expressing their religious fervour in wood piles for witches and
+prison cells for heretics, could not succeed in depriving them of their
+healthy religious prejudice which, they might not have been able to
+explain why, concentrated itself upon the Catholic. Episcopalians
+approved of a doctrine of freedom that meant they could build their own
+churches where they would. Presbyterians and Baptists objected so little
+to each other that, for a while, they could share the same pulpit.
+Moravians put up their monasteries where it suited them best. Mennonites
+took possession of Germantown. German mystics were allowed to search in
+peace for the Woman in White and wait hopefully for the Millennium on
+the banks of the Wissahickon. Later on Whitefield set the whole town of
+Philadelphia to singing psalms, and Philadelphia refrained from
+interfering with what must have been an intolerable nuisance. Even Jews
+were welcome--their names are among early legislators and on early
+Assembly lists. Catholics, alone, they all agreed, had no right to any
+portion of Penn's gift, and popular opinion is often stronger than the
+law. Whatever ill will they had to spare from the Catholics, they
+reserved for the Friends to whom they owed everything--if Pennsylvania
+was "a dear Pennsylvania" to Penn, a good part of the blame lay with the
+"drunken crew of priests" and the "turbulent churchmen" whom he
+denounced in one of those letters to Logan, which are among the saddest
+ever written and published to the world.
+
+After religious passions had run their course, the religious prejudice
+against the Catholic was handed down as social prejudice, which was all
+it was in my day when Philadelphians, who would question the social
+standing of a Catholic in Philadelphia simply because he was a Catholic,
+could accept him without question in the Catholic town of Baltimore or
+New Orleans simply because he was one. The Catholic continued to pay a
+heavy price socially for his religion in Philadelphia where it was not
+the thing to be a Catholic, where it never had been the thing, where it
+got to be less the thing as successive Irish emigrations crowded the
+Catholic churches. I fancy at the period of which I am writing
+Philadelphians, if asked, would have said that Catholicism was for
+Irish servants--for the illiterate. I remember a book called _Kate
+Vincent_ I used to read at a Protestant Uncle's, where it may purposely
+have been placed in my way. Does anybody else remember it?--a story of
+school life with a heroine of a school girl who, in the serene
+confidence of her sixteen or seventeen summers, refuted all the learned
+Doctors of the Church by convicting a poor little Irish slavey of
+ignorance for praying to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints. I think I
+must have forgotten it with many foolish books for children read in my
+childhood had not Kate Vincent been so like Philadelphians in her calm
+superiority, though, fortunately, Philadelphians did not share her
+proselytising fervour. They went to the other extreme of lofty
+indifference and for them the Catholic churches in their town did not
+exist any more than the streets of little two-story houses south of
+Pine, a region into which they would not have thought of penetrating
+except to look up somebody who worked for them.
+
+
+II
+
+I might have learned as much during my holidays at my Grandfather's had
+I been given to reflection during my early years. My Father was a
+convert with the convert's proverbial ardour. He had been baptised in
+the Convent chapel with my Sister and myself--I was eight years old at
+the time--and many who were present declared it the most touching
+ceremony they had ever seen. However, to the family, who had not seen
+it, it was anything but touching. They were all good members of the
+Episcopal Church and had been since they landed in Virginia; moreover,
+one of my Father's brothers was an Episcopal clergyman and Head Master
+of the Episcopal Academy, Philadelphia's bed-rock of religious
+respectability. The baptism was only conditional, for the Catholic
+Church baptizes conditionally those who have been baptized in any church
+before, but even so it must have been trying to them as a precaution
+insolently superfluous. I do not remember that anything was ever said,
+or suggested, or hinted. But there was an undercurrent of disapproval
+that, child as I was, I felt, though I could not have put it into words.
+One thing plain was that when we children went off to our church with my
+Father, we were going where nobody else in my Grandfather's house went,
+except the servants, and that, for some incomprehensible reason, it was
+rather an odd sort of thing for us to do, making us different from most
+people we knew in Philadelphia.
+
+[Illustration: THE PULPIT, ST. PETER'S]
+
+Nor had I the chance to lose sight of this difference at the Convent.
+The education I was getting there, when not devoted to launching my soul
+into Paradise, was preparing me for the struggle against the temptations
+of the world which, from all I heard about it, I pictured as a horrible
+gulf of evil yawning at the Convent gate, ready to swallow me up the
+minute that gate shut behind me. To face it was an ordeal so alarming in
+anticipation that there was an interval when I convinced myself it would
+be infinitely safer, by becoming a nun, not to face it at all. If I
+stopped to give the world a name, it was bound to be Philadelphia, the
+place in which I was destined to live upon leaving the Convent. I knew
+that it was Protestant, as we often prayed for the conversion of its
+people, I the harder because they included my relations who if not
+converted could, my catechism taught me, be saved only so as by the
+invincible ignorance with which I hardly felt it polite to credit them.
+To what other conclusion could I come, arguing logically, than that
+Philadelphia was the horrible gulf of evil yawning for me, and that in
+this gulf Protestants swarmed, scattering temptation along the path of
+the Catholic who walked alone among them?--an idea of Philadelphia that
+probably would have surprised nobody more than the nuns who were
+training me for my life of struggle in it.
+
+The gulf of the world did not seem so evil once it swallowed me up, but
+that socially the Catholic walked in it alone, there could be no
+mistake. When eventually I left school and began going out on my modest
+scale, I could not fail to see that the people I met in church were not,
+as a rule, the people I met at the Dancing Class, or at parties, or at
+receptions, or on that abominable round of morning calls, and this was
+the more surprising because Philadelphians of the "Chestnut, Walnut,
+Spruce and Pine" set were accustomed to meeting each other wherever they
+went. Except for the small group of those Philadelphia families of
+French descent with French names who were not descendants of the
+Huguenots, and here and there a convert like my Father, and an
+occasional native Philadelphian who, unaccountably, had always been a
+Catholic, the congregation, whether I went to the Cathedral or St.
+John's, to St. Joseph's or St. Patrick's, was chiefly Irish, as also
+were the priests when they were not Italians.
+
+Fashion sent the Philadelphian to the Episcopal Church. It could not
+have been otherwise in a town as true to tradition as Philadelphia had
+not ceased to be in my young days. No sooner had Episcopalians settled
+in Philadelphia than, by their greater grandeur of dress and manner,
+they showed the greater social aspirations they had brought with them
+from the other side--the Englishman's confidence in the social
+superiority of the Church of England to all religion outside of it.
+Presbyterians are said to have had a pretty fancy in matters of wigs and
+powdered and frizzled hair, which may also have been symbolic, for they
+followed a close fashionable second. Baptists and Methodists, on the
+contrary, affected to despise dress and, while I cannot say if the one
+fact has anything to do with the other, I knew fewer Baptists and
+Methodists than Catholics. By my time the belief that no one could be "a
+gentleman" outside the Church of England, or its American offshoot, was
+stronger than ever, and fashion required a pew at St. Mark's or Holy
+Trinity or St. James's, if ancient lineage did not claim one at St.
+Peter's or Christ Church; though old-fashioned people like my
+Grandfather and Grandmother might cling blamelessly to St. Andrew's
+which was highly respectable, if not fashionable, and new-fashioned
+people might brave criticism with the Ritualists at St. Clement's. As
+for Catholics, a pew down at St. Joseph's in Willing's Alley or, worse
+still, up town at the Cathedral in Logan Square, put them out of the
+reckoning, at a hopeless disadvantage socially, however better off they
+might be for it spiritually. That the Cathedral was in Logan Square was
+in itself a social offence of a kind that society could not tolerate. At
+the correct churches every function, every meeting, every Sunday-school,
+every pious re-union, as well as every service, became a fashionable
+duty; and at the church door after service on Sunday, a man with whom
+one had danced the night before might be picked up to walk on Walnut
+Street with, which was a social observance only less indispensable than
+attendance at the Assembly and the Dancing Class.
+
+[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, LOGAN SQUARE]
+
+I recall the excitement of girls of my age, their feeling that they had
+got to the top of everything, the first time they took this sacramental
+walk, if not with a man which was the crowning glory, at least with a
+woman who was prominent, or successful, in society. But I believe I
+could count the times I joined in the Walnut Street procession on Sunday
+morning. As long as I lived in Third Street, my usual choice of a church
+lay between St. Joseph's, the Jesuit church in Willing's Alley with its
+air of retirement, and St. Mary's on Fourth Street, where the orphans
+used to come from Seventh and Spruce and sometimes sing an anthem that,
+for any save musical reasons, I delighted in, and where we had a pew.
+After we moved from Third Street, our pew was at the Cathedral, more
+distinguished from the clerical standpoint, for there we sat under the
+Bishop. No matter which our church, High Mass was long: I could not have
+got to the appointed part of Walnut Street in time, had I found at the
+door the companion to go there with me. There was nothing to do but to
+walk home alone or sedately at my Father's side, and one's Father,
+however correct he might be under other circumstances, was not the right
+person for these occasions. On Sundays I could not conceal from myself
+that I was socially at a discount. The reflection that this was where I,
+as a Catholic, scored, should have consoled me, for if the Episcopalian
+was performing a social duty when he went to church, I, as a Catholic,
+was making a social sacrifice, and sacrifice of some sort is of the
+essence of religion.
+
+
+III
+
+If I could but have taken the trouble to be interested, it must also
+have occurred to me to wonder why St. Joseph's, where I went so often,
+was hidden in an obscure alley. In Philadelphia, the town of straight
+streets crossing each other at right angles, it is not easy for a
+building of the kind to keep out of sight. But not one man in a hundred,
+not one in a thousand, who, passing along Third Street, looked up
+Willing's Alley, dreamt for a minute that somewhere in that alley,
+embedded in a network of brokers' and railroad offices, carefully
+concealing every trace of itself, was a church with a large
+congregation. Most churches in Philadelphia, as everywhere, like to
+display themselves prominently with an elaborate fa�ade, or a lofty
+steeple, or a green enclosure, or a graveyard full of monuments. St.
+Peter's, close by, fills a whole block. Christ Church stands flush with
+the pavement. The simplest Meeting-House, by the beautiful trees that
+overshadow it or the high walls that enclose it or the bit of green at
+its door, will not let the passer-by forget it. But St. Joseph's,
+evidently, did not want to be seen, did not want to be remembered;
+evidently hesitated to show that its doors were wide and hospitably open
+to all the world in the beautiful fashion of the Catholic Church. There
+was something furtive about it, an air of mystery, it was almost as if
+one were keeping a clandestine appointment with religion when one turned
+from the street into the humble alley, and from the alley into the
+silence of the sanctuary.
+
+[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH, FROM SECOND STREET]
+
+Perhaps I thought less about this mysterious aloofness because, once in
+the church, I felt so much at home. I do not mind owning now, though I
+would not have owned it then for a good deal, that after my return from
+the Convent, I had the uncomfortable feeling of being a stranger not
+only in my town, but in my family. I had been in the Convent eleven
+years and until this day when I look back to my childhood, it is the
+Convent I remember as home. St. Joseph's seemed a part of the Convent,
+therefore of home, that had strayed into the town by mistake. In some
+ways it was not like the Convent, greatly to my discomfort. The chapel
+there was dainty in detail, exquisitely kept, the altars fresh with
+flowers from the Convent garden, and for congregation the nuns and the
+girls modestly and demurely veiled. But nothing was dainty about St.
+Joseph's,--men are as untidy in running a church as in keeping a
+house--it was not well kept, the flowers were artificial and tawdry, and
+the congregation was largely made up of shabby old Irishwomen. The
+priests--Jesuits--were mostly Italian, with those unpleasant habits of
+Italian priests that are a shock to the convent-bred American when she
+first goes to Italy. They had, however, the virtue of old friends, their
+faces were familiar, I had known them for years at the Convent which
+they had frequently visited and where, by special grace, they had
+refrained from some of the unpleasant habits that offended me at St.
+Joseph's.
+
+There was Father de Maria, tall, thin, with a wonderful shock of white
+hair, a fine ascetic face and a kindly smile, not adapted to shine in
+children's society--too much of a scholar I fancied though I may have
+been wrong--and with an effect of severity which I do not think he
+meant, but which had kept me at a safe distance when he came to see us
+at Torresdale. But he had come, I could not remember the time when I had
+not known him, and that was in his favour.
+
+There was Father Ardea, a small, shrinking, dark man, from whom also it
+was more comfortable to keep at a safe distance, so little had he to
+say and such a trick of looking at you with an "Eh? Eh?" of expectation,
+as if he relied upon you to supply the talk he had not at his own
+command. But I could have forgiven him worse, so pleasant a duty did he
+make of confession. His penances were light and his only comment was
+"Eh? Eh? my child? But you didn't mean it! You didn't mean it!" until I
+longed to accuse myself of the Seven Deadly Sins with the Unpardonable
+Sin thrown in, just to see if he would still assure me that I didn't
+mean it.
+
+There was Father Bobbelin--our corruption I fancy of Barbelin--a
+Frenchman, short and fat, sandy-haired, with a round smiling face: the
+most welcome of all. He was always very snuffy, and always ready to hand
+round his snuff-box if talk languished when he went out to walk with us,
+which I liked better than Father Ardea's embarrassing "Eh? Eh?" It was
+to Father Bobbelin an inexhaustible joke, and the only other I knew him
+to venture upon resulted in so unheard-of a breach of discipline that
+ever after we saw less of him and his snuff-box. He was walking with us
+down Mulberry Avenue one afternoon, the little girls clustered about him
+as they were always sure to be, and the nun in charge a little behind
+with the bigger, more sedate girls. When we got to the end of the
+Avenue, the carriage gate leading straight out into the World was open
+as it had never been before, as it never was again. Father Bobbelin's
+fat shoulders shook with laughter. He opened the gate wider. "Now,
+children," he said, "here's your chance. Run for it!" And we did, we ran
+as if for our lives, though no children could have loved their school
+better or wanted less to get away from it. One or two ran as far as the
+railroad, the most adventurous crossed it, and were making full tilt for
+the river before all were caught and brought back and sent to bed in
+disgrace. After that Father Bobbelin visited us only in our class-room.
+
+And there were other priests whose names escape me, but not their
+home-like faces. Now and then Jesuits who gave Missions and who had
+conducted the retreats at the Convent, appeared at St. Joseph's,--Father
+Smarius, the huge Dutchman, so enormous they used to tell us at the
+Convent that he had never seen his feet for twenty years, who had
+baptized my Father and his family in the Convent chapel; and Father
+Boudreau, the silent, shy little Louisianian, whom I remember so well
+coming with Father Smarius one June day to bless, and sprinkle Holy
+Water over that big yellow and white house close to the Convent which my
+Father had taken for the summer; and Father Glackmeyer, and Father
+Coghlan, and with them others whose presence helped the more to fill St.
+Joseph's with the intimate convent atmosphere.
+
+
+IV
+
+These old friends and old associations took away from the uneasiness it
+might otherwise have given me to find the church, for which I had
+exchanged the Convent chapel, hidden up an alley as if its existence
+were a sin. But overlook it as I might, this was the one important fact
+about St. Joseph's which, otherwise, had no particular interest. It did
+not count as architecture, it boasted of no beauty of decoration: an
+inconspicuous, commonplace building from every point of view, of which I
+consequently retain but the vaguest memory. As I write, I can see, as if
+it were before me, the Convent chapel, its every nook and corner, almost
+its every stone, this altar here, that picture there, the confessional
+in the screened-off space where visitors sat, the dark step close to the
+altar railing where I carried my wrongs and my sorrows. But try as I
+may, I cannot see St. Joseph's as it was, cannot see any detail, nothing
+save the general shabbiness and untidiness that shocked my convent-bred
+eyes. Could it have appealed by its beauty, like the old Cathedrals of
+Europe, or, for that matter, like the old churches of Philadelphia, no
+doubt I should be able to recall it as vividly as the Convent chapel.
+Because I cannot, because it impressed me so superficially, I regret the
+more that I had not the sense to appreciate the interest it borrowed
+from the romance of history and the beauty of suffering--the history of
+the Catholic religion in Philadelphia which I might have read in this
+careful hiding of its temple; the suffering of the scapegoat among
+churches, obliged to keep out of sight, atoning for their intolerance in
+a desert of secrecy, letting no man know where its prayers were said or
+its services held. Catholics had to practise their religion like
+criminals skulking from the law. Members of a Protestant church might
+dispute among themselves to the point of blows, but they never thought
+of interfering with the members of any other church, except the
+Catholic, against which they could all cheerfully join. There were times
+when the Friends, most tolerant of men, were influenced by this general
+hostility, and I rather think the worst moment in Penn's life was when
+he was forced to protest against the scandal of the Mass in his town of
+Brotherly Love.
+
+[Illustration: FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SEVENTH STREET AND WASHINGTON
+SQUARE]
+
+The marvel is that Catholics ventured out of their hiding-places as soon
+as they did. They had emerged so successfully by Revolutionary times
+that the stranger in Philadelphia could find his way to "the Romish
+chapel" and enjoy the luxury of knowing that he was not as these poor
+wretches who fingered their beads and chanted Latin not a word of which
+they understood. The Jesuits have the wisdom of their reputation. When
+they built their church the Colonies had for some years been the United
+States, and hatred was less outspoken, and persecution was more
+intermittent, but they believed discretion to be the better part of
+valour and the truest security in not challenging attack. That is why
+they built St. Joseph's in Willing's Alley where the visitor with a
+dramatic sense must be as thrilled by it as by the secret chapels and
+underground passages in old Elizabethan mansions and Scott's novels.
+Philadelphia gave the Jesuits a proof of their wisdom when, within a
+quarter of a century, Young America, in a playful moment, burnt down as
+much as it could of St. Michael's and St. Augustine's; churches which
+had been built bravely and hopefully in open places. Young America
+believed in a healthy reminder to Catholics, that, if they had not been
+disturbed for some time, it was not because they did not deserve to be.
+
+Philadelphia had got beyond the exciting stage of intolerance before I
+was born. There were no delicious tremors to be had when I heard Mass at
+St. Joseph's or went to Vespers at St. Mary's. There was no ear alert
+for a warning of the approach of the enemy, no eye strained for the
+first wisp of smoke or burst of flame. With churches and convents
+everywhere--convents intruding even upon Walnut Street and Rittenhouse
+Square--with a big Cathedral in town and a big Seminary at Villanova,
+Catholics were in a fair way to forget it had ever been as dangerous for
+them as for the early Christians to venture from their catacombs. Their
+religion had become a tame affair, holding out no prospect of the
+martyr's crown. Only the social prejudice survived, but it was the more
+bitter to fight because, whether the end was victory or defeat, it
+appeared so inglorious a struggle to be engaged in.
+
+One good result there was of this social ostracism. I leave myself out
+of the argument. Religion, I have often heard it said, is a matter of
+temperament. As this story of my relations to Philadelphia seems to be
+resolving itself into a general confession, I must at least confess my
+certainty that I have not and never had the necessary temperament,
+that, moreover, the necessary temperament is not to be had by any effort
+of will power, depending rather upon "the influence of the unknown
+powers." But I am not totally blind, nor was I in the old days when,
+many as were the things I did not see, my eyes were still open to the
+effect of social opposition on Catholics with the temperament. It made
+them more devout, at times more defiant. I know churches that are in
+themselves alone a reward for faith and fidelity--who would not be a
+Catholic in the dim religious light of Chartres Cathedral, or in the
+sombre splendours of Seville and Barcelona? But St. Joseph's and St.
+Mary's, St. Patrick's and St. John's gave no such reward, nor did the
+Cathedral in its far-away imitation of the Jesuit churches of Italy and
+France. In these arid, unemotional interiors, emotion could not kindle
+piety which, if not fed by more spiritual stuff, was bound to flicker
+and go out. This is why the Philadelphian who, in those unattractive
+churches and in spite of the social price paid, remained faithful, was
+the most devout Catholic I have ever met at home or in my wanderings.
+
+
+V
+
+For his spiritual welfare, it might have been better had the conditions
+remained as I knew them. But even at that period, the signs of weakening
+in the social barrier must have jumped to my eyes had I had eyes for the
+fine shades. Catholics among themselves had begun to put up social
+barriers, so much further had Philadelphia travelled on the road to
+liberty.
+
+Religiously, one of their churches was as good as another, but not
+socially. St. Mark's, from its superior Episcopal heights, might look
+down equally upon St. Patrick's and St. John's, but the Catholic with a
+pew at St. John's did not at all look upon the Catholic with a seat at
+St. Patrick's as on the same social level as himself. St. Patrick's name
+alone was sufficient to attract an Irish congregation, and the Irish who
+then flocked to Philadelphia were not the flower of Ireland's
+aristocracy. St. John's, by some unnamed right, claimed the Catholics of
+social pretensions--the excellence of its music may have strengthened
+its claim. I know that my Father, who was a religious man, did not
+object to having the comfort of religion strengthened by the charms of
+Gounod's Mass well sung, and, at the last, he drifted from the Cathedral
+to St. John's.
+
+[Illustration: OLD SWEDES' CHURCH]
+
+The Cathedral necessarily was above such distinctions, as a Cathedral
+should be, and it harboured an overflow from St. Patrick's and St.
+John's both. But it was the Cathedral, rather than St. John's, that did
+most to weaken the foundations of the social prejudice against the
+Catholic. The Bishop there was Bishop Wood, and Bishop Wood, like my
+Father a convert, was no Irish emigrant, no Italian missionary, but came
+from the same old family of Philadelphia Friends as J. Some people
+think that Quakerism and Catholicism are more in sympathy with each
+other than with other creeds because neither recognizes any half way,
+each going to a logical extreme. Whether Bishop Wood thought so, I am
+far from sure, but he had himself gone from one extreme to the other
+when he became a Catholic, and the religious step had its social
+bearing. With his splendid presence and splendid voice, he must have
+added dignity to every service at the Cathedral, but he did more than
+that: in Philadelphia eyes he gave it the sanction of Philadelphia
+respectability. The Catholic was no longer quite without Philadelphia's
+social pale.
+
+I had no opportunity, because of my long absence, to watch the gradual
+breakdown, but I saw that the barrier had fallen when I got back to
+Philadelphia. Never again will Philadelphia children think they are
+doing an odd thing when they go to Mass, never again need the
+Philadelphia girl fresh from the Convent fancy herself alone in the
+yawning gulf of evil that opens at the Convent gate. I should not be
+surprised if an eligible man from the Dancing Class or Assembly list can
+to-day be picked up at the door of more than one Catholic church for the
+Sunday Walk on Walnut Street. St. John's has risen, new and resplendent,
+if ugly, from its ashes; St. Patrick's has blossomed forth from its
+architectural insignificance into an imposing Romanesque structure. The
+Cathedral has been new swept and garnished--not so large perhaps as I
+once saw it, for I have been to St. Paul's and St. Peter's and many a
+Jesuit church in the meanwhile, but more ornate, with altars and
+decorations that I knew not, and with Mr. Henry Thouron's design on one
+wall as a promise of further beauty to come. The difference confronted
+me at every step--and saddened me, though I could not deny that it meant
+improvement. But the change, as change, displeased me in a Philadelphia
+that ceases to be my Philadelphia when it ceases to preserve its old
+standards and prejudices as jealously as its old monuments. For the sake
+of the character I loved, I could wish Philadelphia as far as ever from
+hope of salvation by anything save its own invincible ignorance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX: THE FIRST AWAKENING
+
+
+I
+
+I had been out, I do not remember how long, but long enough to confirm
+my belief in the Philadelphia way of doing things as the only way, when
+I found that Philadelphia was involved in an enterprise for which its
+history might give the reason but could furnish no precedent. To
+Philadelphians who were older than I, or who had been in Philadelphia
+while I was getting through the business of education at the Convent,
+the Centennial Exposition probably did not come as so great a surprise.
+Having since had experience of how these matters are ordered, I can
+understand that there must have been some years of leading up to it. But
+I seem to have heard of it first within no time of its opening, and just
+as I had got used to the idea that Philadelphia must go on for ever
+doing things as it always had done them, because to do them otherwise
+would not be right or proper.
+
+The result was that, at the moment, I saw in the Centennial chiefly a
+violent upheaval shaking the universe to the foundations, with
+Philadelphia emerging, changed, transformed, unrecognizable, plunging
+head-foremost into new-fangled amusements, adding new duties to the
+Philadelphian's once all-sufficing duty of being a Philadelphian,
+inventing new attractions to draw to its drowsy streets people from the
+four quarters of the globe, and, more astounding, giving itself up to
+these innovations with zest.
+
+[Illustration: INDEPENDENCE HALL: THE ORIGINAL DESK ON WHICH THE
+DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE WAS SIGNED AND THE CHAIR USED BY THE
+PRESIDENT OF CONGRESS, JOHN HANCOCK, IN 1776 (BOTH ON PLATFORM)]
+
+I looked on at the preparations,--as at most things, to my infinite
+boredom,--from outside: a perspective from which they appeared to me
+little more than a new form of social diversion. For they kept my gayer
+friends, who were well on the inside, busy going to Centennial balls at
+the Academy of Music in the Colonial dress which was as essential for
+admission as a Colonial name or a Colonial family tree, while I stayed
+at home and, seeing what lovely creatures powder and patches and paniers
+made of Philadelphia girls with no more pretence to good looks than I,
+felt a little as I did when the coloured dignitary rang at our front
+door with the Assembly card that was not for me. And between the balls,
+the same friends were immersed in Centennial Societies and Centennial
+Committees and Centennial Meetings and Centennial Subscriptions and
+Centennial Petitions, Philadelphia women for the first time admitted,
+and pining for admission, into public affairs; while I was so far apart
+from it all that I remember but one incident in connection with the
+Centennial orgy of work, and this as trivial as could be. When we moved
+into the Third Street house we had found in possession a cat who left us
+in no doubt of her disapproval of our intrusion, but who tolerated us
+because of the convenience of the ground floor windows from which to
+watch for her enemies among the dogs of the neighbourhood, and for the
+comfort of certain cupboards upstairs during the infancy of her
+kittens. She kept us at a respectful distance and we never ventured upon
+any liberties with her. Those of our friends who did, heedless of her
+growls, were sure to regret it. Our family doctor carried the marks of
+her teeth on his hand for many a day. It happened that once, when two
+Centennial canvassers called, she was the first to greet them and was
+unfavourably impressed by the voluminous furs in which they were
+wrapped. When I came downstairs she was holding the hall, her eyes
+flaming, her tail five times its natural size, and I understood the
+prudence of non-interference. The canvassers had retreated to the
+vestibule between the two front doors and, as I opened the inner door,
+another glance at the flaming eyes and indignant tail completed their
+defeat and they fled without explaining the object of their visit. I
+must indeed have been removed from the Centennial delirium and turmoil
+to have retained this absurd encounter as one of my most vivid memories.
+
+
+II
+
+Upon the Centennial itself I looked at closer quarters. I was as removed
+from it officially, but not quite so penniless less and friendless as
+never to have the chance to visit it. Inexperienced and untravelled as I
+was, it opened for me vistas hitherto undreamed of and stirred my
+interest as nothing in Philadelphia had until then. As I recall it, that
+long summer is, as it was at the time, a bewildering jumble of first
+impressions and revelations--Philadelphia all chaos and confusion,
+functions and formalities, spectacles and sensations--buildings
+Philadelphia could not have conceived of in its sanity covering acres of
+its beautiful Park, a whole shanty town of huge hotels and cheap
+restaurants and side-shows sprung up on its outskirts--marvels in the
+buildings, amazing, foreign, unbelievable marvels, the Arabian Nights
+rolled into one--interminable drives in horribly crowded street-cars to
+reach them--lunches of Vienna rolls and Vienna coffee in Vienna caf�s,
+as unlike Jones's on Eleventh Street or Burns's on Fifteenth as I could
+imagine--dinners in French restaurants that, after Belmont and
+Strawberry Mansion, struck me as typically Parisian though I do not
+suppose they were Parisian in the least--the flaring and glaring of
+millions of gas lamps under Philadelphia's tranquil skies--a delightful
+feeling of triumph that Philadelphia was the first American town to do
+what London had done, what Paris had done, and to do it so
+splendidly--burning heat, Philadelphia apparently bent on proving to the
+unhappy visitor what the native knew too well, that, when it has a mind
+to, it can be the most intolerably hot place in the world--sweltering,
+demoralized crowds--unexpected descents upon a household as quiet as
+ours of friends not seen for years and relations never heard
+of--brilliant autumn days--an atmosphere of activity, excitement and
+exultation that made it good to be alive and in the midst of Centennial
+celebrations without bothering to seek in them a more serious end than a
+season's amusement.
+
+[Illustration: PHILADELPHIA FROM BELMONT]
+
+
+III
+
+But, without bothering, I could not escape a dim perception that
+Philadelphia had not turned itself topsy-turvy to amuse me and the
+world. Things were in the air I could not get away from. The very words
+Centennial and Colonial were too new in my vocabulary not to start me
+thinking, little given as I was to thinking when I could save myself the
+trouble. And however lightly I might be inclined to take the whole
+affair, the rest of Philadelphia was so far from underestimating it that
+probably the younger generation, used to big International Expositions
+and having seen the wonders of the Centennial eclipsed in Paris and
+Chicago and St. Louis and its pleasures rivalled in an ordinary summer
+playground like Coney Island or Willow Grove, must wonder at the
+innocence of Philadelphia in making such a fuss over such an everyday
+affair. But in the Eighteen-Seventies the big International Exposition
+was not an everyday affair. Europe had held only one or two, America had
+held none, Philadelphia had to find out the way for itself, with the
+whole country watching, ready to jeer at the sleepy old town if it went
+wrong. As I look back, though I realize that the Centennial buildings
+were not architectural masterpieces--how could I help realising it with
+Memorial Hall still out there in the Park as reminder?--though I realise
+that Philadelphia prosperity did not date from the Centennial, that
+Philadelphians had not lived in a slough of inertia and ignorance until
+the Centennial pulled them out of it: all the same, I can see how fine
+an achievement it was, and how successful in jerking Philadelphians from
+their comfortable rut of indifference to everything going on outside of
+Philadelphia, or to whether there was an outside for things to go on in.
+
+I know that I was conscious of the jerk in my little corner of the rut.
+The Centennial, for one thing, gave me my first object lesson in
+patriotism. There was no special training for the patriot when I was
+young--no school drilling, with flags, to national music. An American
+was an American, not a Russian Jew, a Slovak, or a Pole, and patriotism
+was supposed to follow as a matter of course. It did, but I fancy with
+many, as with me, after a passive, unintelligent sort of fashion. I knew
+about the Declaration of Independence, but had anybody asked for my
+opinion of it, I doubtless should have dismissed it as a dull page in a
+dull history book, a difficult passage to get by heart. But I could not
+go on thinking of it in that way when so remote an occasion as its
+hundredth birthday was sending Philadelphia off its head in this mad
+carnival of excitement. In little, as in big, matters I was constantly
+brought up against the fact that things did not exist simply because
+they were, but because something had been. An old time-worn story that
+amused the Philadelphian in its day is of the American from another
+town, who, after listening to much Philadelphia talk, interrupted to
+ask: "But what is a Biddle?" I am afraid I should have been puzzled to
+answer. For a Biddle was a Biddle, just as Spruce Street was Spruce
+Street, just as Philadelphia was Philadelphia. That had been enough in
+all conscience for the Philadelphian, but the Centennial would not let
+it be enough for me any longer.
+
+My first hint that Philadelphia and Spruce Street and a Biddle needed a
+past to justify the esteem in which we held them, came from the
+spectacle of Mrs. Gillespie towering supreme above Philadelphians with
+far more familiar names than hers at every Centennial ball and in every
+Centennial Society, the central figure in the Centennial preparations
+and in the Centennial itself. I did not know her personally, but that
+made no difference. There was no blotting out her powerful presence, she
+pervaded the Centennial atmosphere. She remains in the foreground of my
+Centennial memories, a tall, gaunt woman, not especially gracious,
+apparently without a doubt of her right to her conspicuous position,
+ready to resent the effrontery of the sceptic who challenged it had
+there been a sceptic so daring, anything but popular, and yet her rule
+accepted unquestioningly for no better reason than because she was the
+descendant of Benjamin Franklin, and I could not help knowing that she
+was his descendant, for nobody could mention her without dragging in his
+name. It revolutionized my ideas of school and school books, no less
+than of Philadelphia. I had learned the story of Benjamin Franklin and
+the kite, just as I had learned the story of George Washington and the
+cherry tree, and of General Marion and the sweet potatoes, and other
+anecdotes of heroes invented to torment the young. And now here was
+Franklin turning out to be not merely the hero of an anecdote that bored
+every right-minded school-girl to death, but a person of such
+consequence that his descendant in the third or fourth generation had
+the right to lord it over Philadelphia. There was no getting away from
+that any more than there was from Mrs. Gillespie herself and,
+incidentally, it suggested a new reason for Biddles and Cadwalladers and
+Whartons and Morrises and Norrises and Logans and Philadelphia families
+with their names on the Assembly list. That they were the resplendent
+creatures Philadelphia thought them was not so elementary a fact as the
+shining of the sun in the heavens; they owed it to their ancestors just
+as Mrs. Gillespie owed her splendour to Franklin; and an ancestor
+immediately became the first necessity in Philadelphia.
+
+[Illustration: THE DINING ROOM, STENTON]
+
+The man who is preoccupied with his ancestors has a terrible faculty of
+becoming a snob, and Philadelphians for a while concerned themselves
+with little else. They devoted every hour of leisure to the study of
+genealogy, they besieged the Historical Society in search of
+inconsiderate ancestors who had neglected to make conspicuous figures of
+themselves and so had to be hunted up, they left no stone unturned to
+prove their Colonial descent. It must have been this period that my
+Brother, Grant Robins, irritated with our forefathers for their mistake
+in settling in Virginia half a century before there was a Philadelphia
+to settle in and then making a half-way halt in Maryland, hurried down
+to the Eastern Shore to get together what material he could to keep us
+in countenance in the town of my Grandfather's adoption. It was soothing
+to find more than one Robins among the earliest settlers of Virginia and
+mixed up with Virginia affairs at an agreeably early date. But what
+wouldn't I have given to see our name in a little square on one of the
+early maps of the City of Philadelphia as I have since seen J.'s? And
+the interest in ancestors spread, and no Englishman could ever have been
+so eager to prove that he came over with the Conqueror as every American
+was to show that he dated back to William Penn, or the first Virginia
+Company, or the Dutch, or the Mayflower; no Order of Merit or Legion of
+Honour could have conferred more glory on an American than a Colonial
+Governor in the family; no aristocracy was more exclusive than the
+American founded on the new societies of Colonial Dames and Sons and
+Daughters of Pennsylvania and of every other State.
+
+It was preposterous, I grant, in a country whose first article of faith
+is that all men are born equal, but Americans could have stood a more
+severe attack of snobbishness in those days, the prevailing attitude of
+Americans at home being not much less irreverent than that of the
+Innocents Abroad. In Philadelphia it was not so much irreverence as
+indifference. The habit of Philadelphians to depreciate their town and
+themselves, inordinate as, actually, was their pride in both, had not
+been thrown off. Why they ever got into the habit remains to me and to
+every Philadelphian a problem. Some think it was because the rest of the
+country depreciated them; some attribute it to Quaker influence, though
+how and why they cannot say; and some see in it the result of the
+Philadelphia exclusiveness that reduces the social life of Philadelphia
+to one small group in one small section of the town so that it is as
+small as village life, and has the village love of scandal, the village
+preoccupation with petty gossip, the little things at the front door
+blotting out the big things beyond. A more plausible reason is that
+Philadelphians were so innately sure of themselves--so sure that
+Philadelphia was _the_ town and Philadelphians _the_ aristocracy of the
+world--that they could afford to be indifferent. But whatever the cause,
+this indifference, this depreciation, was worse than a blunder, it was a
+loss in a town with a past so well worth looking into and being proud of
+and taking care of.
+
+A few Philadelphians had interested themselves in their past, otherwise
+the Historical Society would not have existed, but they were
+distressingly few. I can honestly say that up to the time of the
+Centennial it had never entered into my mind that the past in
+Philadelphia had a value for every Philadelphian and that it was every
+Philadelphian's duty to help preserve any record that might survive of
+it--that the State House, the old churches, the old streets where I took
+my daily walks were a possession Philadelphia should do its best not to
+part with--and I was such a mere re-echo of Philadelphia ideas and
+prejudices that I know most Philadelphians were as ignorant and as
+heedless. But almost the first effort of the new Dames and Sons and
+Daughters was to protect the old architecture, the outward sign and
+symbol of age and the aristocracy of age, and they made so much noise in
+doing so that even I heard it, even I became conscious of a research as
+keen for a past, or a genealogy in the familiar streets and the familiar
+buildings as in the archives of Historical Societies.
+
+If the Centennial had done no more for Philadelphia than to put
+Philadelphians to this work, it would have done enough. But it did do
+more. The pride of family, dismissed by many as pure snobbishness, awoke
+the sort of patriotism that Philadelphia, with all America, was most in
+need of if the real American was not to be swept away before the hordes
+of aliens beginning then to invade his country. In my opinion, the
+Colonial Dames, for all their follies, are doing far more to keep up the
+right American spirit than the flaunting of the stars and stripes in the
+alien's face and the lavishing upon him of the Government's paternal
+attention. The question is how long they can avoid the pitfall of
+exaggeration.
+
+
+IV
+
+If there was one thing in those days I knew less of than the past in
+Philadelphia, it was the present outside of it. Of my own country my
+knowledge was limited to an occasional trip to New York, an occasional
+visit to Richmond and Annapolis, an occasional summer month in Cape May
+and Atlantic City. Travelling is not for the poor. Rich Philadelphians
+travelled more, but from no keen desire to see their native land. The
+end of the journey was usually a social function in Washington or
+Baltimore, in New York or Boston, upon which their presence conferred
+distinction, though they would rather have dispensed with it than let it
+interfere with the always more important social functions at home. Or
+else the heat of summer drove them to those seashore and mountain
+resorts where they could count upon being with other Philadelphians, and
+the winter cold sent them in Lent to Florida, when it began to be
+possible to carry all Philadelphia there with them.
+
+[Illustration: DOWN THE AISLE AT CHRIST CHURCH]
+
+My knowledge of the rest of the world was more limited. I had been in
+France, but when I was such a child that I remembered little of it
+except the nuns in the Convent at Paris where I went to school, and the
+Garden of the Tuileries I looked across to from the Hotel Meurice. Nor
+had going abroad as yet been made a habit in Philadelphia. There was
+nothing against the Philadelphian going who chose to and who had the
+money. It defied no social law. On the contrary, it was to his social
+credit, though not indispensable as the Grand Tour was to the Englishman
+in the Eighteenth Century. I remember when my Grandfather followed the
+correct tourist route through England, France, and Switzerland, his
+children considered it an event of sufficient importance to be
+commemorated by printing, for family circulation, an elaborately got up
+volume of the eminently commonplace letters he had written home--a
+tribute, it is due to him to add, that met with his great astonishment
+and complete disapproval. I can recall my admiration for those of my
+friends who made the journey and my regret that I had made it when I was
+too young to get any glory out of it; also, my delight in the trumpery
+little alabaster figures from Naples and carved wood from Geneva and
+filigree jewellery from the Rue de Rivoli they brought me back from
+their journey: the wholesale distribution of presents on his return
+being the heavy tax the traveller abroad paid for the distinction of
+having crossed the Atlantic--a tax, I believe, that has sensibly been
+done away with since the Philadelphian's discovery of the German Bath,
+the London season, and the economy of Europe as reasons for going abroad
+every summer.
+
+I was scarcely more familiar with the foreigner than with his country.
+Philadelphia had Irish in plenty, as many Germans as beer saloons, or so
+I gathered from the names over the saloon doors, and enough Italians to
+sell it fruit and black its boots at street corners. But otherwise,
+beyond a rare Chinaman with a pigtail and a rarer Englishman on tour,
+the foreigner was seldom seen in Philadelphia streets or in Philadelphia
+parlours. In early days Philadelphia had been the first place the
+distinguished foreigner in the country made for. It was the most
+important town and, for a time, the capital. But after Washington
+claimed the diplomat and New York strode ahead in commerce and size and
+shipping, Philadelphia was too near each for the traveller to stop on
+his way between them, unless he was an actor, a lecturer, or somebody
+who could make money out of Philadelphia.
+
+I feel sorry for the sophisticated young Philadelphian of to-day who
+cannot know the emotion that was mine when, of a sudden, the Centennial
+dumped down "abroad" right into Philadelphia, and the foreigner was
+rampant. The modern youth saunters into a World's Fair as casually as
+into a Market Street or Sixth Avenue Department Store, but never had the
+monotony of my life been broken by an experience so extraordinary as
+when the easy-going street-car carried me out of my world of red brick
+into the heart of England, and France, and Germany, and Italy, and
+Spain, and China, and Japan, where I rubbed elbows with yellow Orientals
+in brilliant silks, and with soldiers in amazing uniforms--I who had
+seen our sober United States soldiers only on parade--and with people
+who, if they wore ordinary clothes, spoke all the languages under the
+sun. It was extraordinary even to meet so many Americans who were not
+Philadelphians, all talking American with to me a foreign accent,
+extraordinary to see such familiar things as china, glass, silks,
+stuffs, furniture, carpets, transformed into the unfamiliar, unlike
+anything I had ever seen in Chestnut Street windows or on Chestnut
+Street counters, so extraordinary that the most insignificant details
+magnified themselves into miracles, to the mere froth on top of the cup
+of Vienna coffee, to the fatuous song of a little Frenchman in a
+side-show, so that to this day, if I could turn a tune, I could still
+sing the "Ah! Ah! Nicolas!" of its foolish refrain.
+
+
+V
+
+Travelling, I should have seen all the Centennial had to show and a
+thousand times more, but slowly and by degrees, losing the sense of the
+miraculous with each new marvel. The Centennial came as one
+comprehensive revelation--overwhelming evidence that the Philadelphia
+way was not the only way. And this I think was a good thing for me, just
+as for Philadelphia it was a healthy stimulus. But the Centennial did
+not give me a new belief in exchange for the old; it did nothing to
+alter my life, nothing to turn my sluggish ambition into active
+channels. And big as it was, it was not as big as Philadelphia thought.
+I do believe that Philadelphians who had helped to make it the splendid
+success it proved, looked upon it as no less epoch-making than the
+Declaration of Independence which it commemorated. But epoch-making as
+it unquestionably was, it was not so epoch-making as all that. For some
+years Philadelphians had a way of saying "before" and "after" the
+Centennial, much as Southerners used to talk of "before" and "after" the
+War: with the difference that for Philadelphians all the good dated
+from "after." But manufacturing and commerce had been heard of "before."
+Cramp's shipyard did not wait for its first commission until the
+Centennial, neither did Baldwin's Locomotive Works, nor the factories in
+Kensington; Philadelphia was not so dead commercially that it was out of
+mere compliment important railroads made it the chief centre on their
+route. All large International Expositions are bound to do good by the
+increased knowledge that comes with them of what the world is producing
+and by the incentive this knowledge is to competition, and as the
+Centennial was the first held in America it probably accomplished more
+for the country than those that followed. But I do not have to be an
+authority on manufacture and commerce to see that they flourished before
+the Centennial; I have learned enough about art since to know that its
+existence was not first revealed to Philadelphia by the Centennial. The
+Exhibition had an influence on art which I am far from undervaluing. Its
+galleries of paintings and prints, drawings and sculptures, were an aid
+in innumerable ways to artists and students who previously had had no
+facilities for seeing a representative collection. It threw light on the
+arts of design for the manufacturer. But we knew a thing or two about
+beauty down in Philadelphia before 1876, though beauty was a subject to
+which we had ceased to pay much attention, and from the Centennial we
+borrowed too many tastes and standards that did not belong to us. It
+set Philadelphia talking an appalling lot of rubbish about art, and the
+new affectation of interest was more deplorable than the old frank
+indifference.
+
+[Illustration: THE BRIDGE ACROSS MARKET STREET FROM BROAD STREET
+STATION]
+
+I was as ignorant of art as the child unborn, but not more ignorant than
+the average Philadelphian. The old obligatory visits to the Academy had
+made but a fleeting impression and I never repeated them when the
+obligation rested solely with me. I had never met an artist, never been
+in a studio. The result was that the Art Galleries at the Centennial
+left me as blank and bewildered as the Hall of Machinery. Of all the
+paintings, the one I remembered was Luke Fildes's picture of a milkmaid
+which I could not forget because, in a glaring, plush-framed
+chromo-lithograph, it reappeared promptly in Philadelphia dining-and
+bedrooms, the most popular picture of the Centennial--a popularity in
+which I can discern no signs of grace. Nor can I discern them in the
+Eastlake craze, in the sacrifice of reps and rosewood to Morris and of
+Berlin work to crewels, in the outbreak of spinning-wheels and
+milking-stools and cat's tails and Japanese fans in the old simple,
+dignified Philadelphia parlour; in the nightmare of wall-papers with
+dadoes going half-way up the wall and friezes coming halfway down, and
+every square inch crammed full of pattern; in the pretence and excess of
+decoration that made the early Victorian ornament, we had all begun to
+abuse, a delight to the eye in its innocent unpretentiousness. And if to
+the Centennial we owe the multiplication of our art schools, how many
+more artists have come out of them, how much more work that counts?
+
+However, the good done by the Centennial is not to be sought in the
+solid profits and losses that can be weighed in a practical balance. It
+went deeper. Philadelphia was the better for being impressed with the
+reason of its own importance which it had taken on faith, and for being
+reminded that the world outside of Philadelphia was not a howling
+wilderness. I, individually, gained by the widening of my horizon and
+the stirring of my interest. But the Centennial did not teach me how to
+think about, or use, what I had learned from it. When it was at an end,
+I returned placidly to my occupation of doing nothing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X: THE MIRACLE OF WORK
+
+
+I
+
+In the story of my life in Philadelphia, and my love for the town which
+grew with my knowledge of it, my beginning to work was more than an
+awakening: it was an important crisis. For work first made me know
+Philadelphia as it is under the surface of calm and the beauty of age,
+first made me realize how much it offers besides the social adventure.
+
+Personally, the Centennial had left me where it found me. It had amused
+me vastly, but it had inspired me with no desire to make active use of
+the information and hints of which it had been so prodigal. My interest
+had been stimulated, awakened, but I did not know Philadelphia any the
+better for it, I did not love Philadelphia any the better. I had got no
+further than I was in my scheme of existence, into which work, or
+research, or interest, on my part had not yet entered, but I had reached
+a point where that aimless scheme was an insufferable bore. From the
+moment I began to work, I began to see everything from the standpoint of
+work, and it is wonderful what a fresh and invigorating standpoint it
+is. I began to see that everything was not all of course and matter of
+fact, that everything was worth thinking about. Work is sometimes said
+to help people to put things out of their minds, but it helps them more
+when it puts things into their minds, and this is what it did for me.
+Through work I discovered Philadelphia and myself together.
+
+
+II
+
+It strikes me as one of the little ironies of life that for the first
+inducement to work, and therefore the first incentive to my knowledge
+and love of Philadelphia, I should have been indebted to my Uncle,
+Charles Godfrey Leland, who, in 1880, when the Centennial excitement was
+subsiding, settled again in Philadelphia after ten years abroad, chiefly
+in England. Philadelphia welcomed him with its usual serenity, betrayed
+into no expression of emotion by the home-coming of one of its most
+distinguished citizens who, in London, had been received with the open
+arms London, in expansive moments, extends to the lion from America. The
+contrast, no doubt, was annoying, and my Uncle, of whom patience could
+not be said to be the predominating virtue, was accordingly annoyed and,
+on his side, betrayed into anything but a serene expression of his
+annoyance. Many smaller slights irritated him further until he worked
+himself up into the belief that he detested Philadelphia, and he was apt
+to be so outspoken in criticism that he succeeded in convincing me,
+anyway, that he did. Later, when I read his _Memoirs_, I found in them
+passages that suggest the charm of Philadelphia as it has not been
+suggested by any other writer I know of, and that he could not have
+written had he not felt for the town an affection strong enough to
+withstand that town's easy indifference. But during the few years he
+spent in Philadelphia after his return he was uncommonly successful in
+hiding his affection, a fact which did not add to his popularity.
+
+[Illustration: STATE HOUSE YARD]
+
+From his talk, I might have been expected to borrow nothing save dislike
+for Philadelphia. But his influence did not begin and end with his talk.
+There never was a man--except J.--who had such a contempt for idleness
+and such a talent for work. He could not endure people about him who did
+not work and, as I was anxious to enjoy as much of his company as I
+could, for I had found nobody in Philadelphia so entertaining, and as by
+work I might earn the money to pay for the independence I wanted above
+all things, I found myself working before I knew it.
+
+I had my doubts when he set me to drawing but, my time being wholly my
+own and frequently hanging drearily on my hands, my ineffectual attempts
+to make spirals and curves with a pencil on a piece of paper, attempts
+that could not by the wildest stretch of imagination be supposed to have
+either an artistic or a financial value, did not strike me as a
+disproportionate price for the pleasure and stimulus of his
+companionship. Besides, he held the comfortable belief that anybody who
+willed to do it, could do anything--accomplishment, talent, genius
+reduced by him to a question of will. His will and mine combined,
+however, could not make a decorative artist of me, but he was so kind
+as not to throw me over for ruthlessly shattering his favourite theory.
+He insisted that I should write if I could not draw.
+
+I had my doubts about writing too. I have confessed that I was not given
+to thinking and therefore I had nothing in particular to say, nor were
+words to say it in at my ready disposal, for, there being one or two
+masters of talk in the immediate home circle, I had cultivated to the
+utmost my natural gift of silence. Nor could I forget two literary
+ventures made immediately upon my leaving the Convent, before the
+blatant conceit of the prize scholar had been knocked out of me--one, an
+essay on Fran�ois Villon, my choice of a maiden theme giving the measure
+of my intelligence, the second a short story re-echoing the last love
+tale I had read--both MSS., neatly tied with brown ribbon to vouch for a
+masculine mind above feminine pinks and blues, confidently sent to
+_Harper's_ and as confidently sent back with the Editor's thanks and no
+delay. But my Uncle would not let me off. I must stick at my task of
+writing or cease to be his companion, and so relapse into my old Desert
+of Sahara, thrown back into the colourless life of a Philadelphia girl
+who did not go out and who had waited to marry longer than her parents
+thought considerate or correct. Of all my sins, of none was I more
+guiltily conscious than my failure to oblige my family in this respect,
+for of none was I more frequently and uncomfortably reminded by my
+family. I scarcely ever went to see my Grandmother at this period that
+from her favourite perch on the landing outside the dining-room, she did
+not look at me anxiously and reproachfully and ask, "Any news for me, my
+dear?" and she did not have to tell me there was but one piece of news
+she cared to hear.
+
+Luckily, writing, my substitute for marriage, was an occupation I was
+free to take up if I chose, as the work it involved met with no
+objection from my Father. It was only when work took a girl where the
+world could not help seeing her at it, that the Philadelphia father
+objected. To write in the privacy of a third-story front bedroom, or of
+a back parlour, seemed a ladylike way of wasting hours that might more
+profitably have been spent in paying calls and going to receptions. If
+this waste met with financial return, it could be hushed up and the
+world be none the wiser. The way in which my friends used to greet me
+after I was fairly launched is characteristic of the Philadelphia
+attitude in the matter--"always scribbling away, I suppose?" they would
+say with amiable condescension.
+
+I could not dismiss my scribbling so jauntily. The record of my
+struggles day by day might help to keep out of the profession of
+journalism and book-making many a young aspirant as ardent as I was, and
+with as little to say and as few words to say it in. Experience has
+taught me to feel, much as Gissing felt, about the "heavy-laden who sit
+down to the cursed travail of the pen," but nobody could have made me
+feel that way then, and I am not sure I should care to have missed my
+struggles, exhausting and heart-rending as they were. During my
+apprenticeship when nothing, not so much as a newspaper paragraph, came
+from my mountain of labour, the Philadelphia surface of calm told
+gloomily on my nerves. Ready to lay the blame anywhere save on my
+sluggish brain, and moved by my Uncle's vehement denunciations, I vowed
+to myself a hundred times that a sleepy place, a dead place, like
+Philadelphia did not give anybody the chance to do anything. I changed
+my point of view when at last my "scribbling away" got into print.
+
+
+III
+
+My first appearance was with a chapter out of a larger work upon which I
+had been engaged for months. My Uncle, whose ideas were big, had
+insisted that I must begin straight off with a book, something
+monumental, a _magnum opus_; no writer was known who had not written a
+book; and to be known was half the battle. I was in the state of mind
+when I would have agreed to publish a masterpiece in hieroglyphics had
+he suggested it, and I arranged with him to set to work upon my book
+then and there, though I was decidedly puzzled to know with what it was
+to deal. I think he was too, my literary resources and tendencies not
+being of the kind that revealed themselves at a glance. But he declared
+that there was not a subject upon which a book could not be written if
+one only went about it in the right way, and in a moment of
+inspiration, seeking the particular subject suitable to my particular
+needs, he suddenly, and to me to this day altogether incomprehensibly,
+hit upon Mischief. There, now, was a subject to make one's reputation
+on, none could be more original, no author had touched it--what did I
+think of Mischief?
+
+What did I think? Had I been truthful, I should have said that I thought
+Mischief was the special attribute of the naughty child who was spanked
+well for it if he got his deserts. But I was not truthful. I said it was
+the subject of subjects, as I inclined to believe it was before I was
+done with it, by which time I had persuaded myself to see in it the one
+force that made the world go round--the incentive to evolution, the root
+of the philosophies of the ages, the clue to the mystery of life.
+
+My days were devoted to the study of Mischief and, for the purpose, more
+carefully divided up and regulated than they ever had been at the
+Convent. Hours were set aside for research--I see myself and my
+sympathetic Uncle overhauling dusty dictionaries and encyclop�dias at
+the long table in the balcony of the dusty Mercantile Library where
+nobody dreamed of disturbing us; I see him at my side during shorter
+visits to the Philadelphia Library where we were forever running up
+against people we knew who did disturb us most unconscionably; I see him
+tramping with me down South Broad Street to the Ridgway Library, that
+fine mausoleum of the great collections of James Logan and Dr. Rush,
+where our coming awoke the attendants and exposed their awkwardness in
+waiting upon unexpected readers, and brought Mr. Lloyd Smith out of his
+private room, excited and delighted actually to see somebody in the huge
+and well-appointed building besides himself and his staff. Hours were
+reserved for reading at home, for it turned out that I could not
+possibly arrive at the definition of Mischief without a stupendous
+amount of reading in a stupendous variety of books of any and all kinds
+from Mother Goose to the Vedas and the Koran, from Darwin to Eliphas
+Levi. Hours, and they were the longest, were consecrated to my
+writing-table, putting the results of research and reading into words,
+defining Mischief in its all-embracing, universe-covering aspect, hewing
+the phrases from my unwilling brain as the blocks of marble are hewn out
+of the quarry. As I write, my old MSS. rises before me like a ghost, a
+disorderly ghost, erased, rewritten, pieces added in, pieces cut out,
+every scratched and blotted line bearing testimony to the toil that
+produced it. I can see now that I would have done better to begin with a
+more obvious theme, coming more within my limited knowledge and
+vocabulary. My task was too laborious for the fine frenzy, or the
+inspired flights, reputed to be the reward of the literary life. It was
+all downright hard labour, and so coloured my whole idea of the business
+of writing, that I have never yet managed to sit down to my day's work
+without the feeling which I imagine must be the navvy's as he starts out
+for his day's digging in the streets.
+
+In the course of time order grew out of the chaos. A chapter of my
+monumental work on Mischief was finished. It was made ready in a neat
+copy with hardly an erasure and, having an air of completeness in
+itself, was sent as a separate article to _Lippincott's Magazine_, for I
+decided magnanimously that, as I was a Philadelphian, Philadelphia
+should have the first chance. I had no doubts of it as a prophetic
+utterance, as a world-convulsing message, but the Editor of
+_Lippincott's_ had. He refused it.
+
+How it hurt, that prompt refusal! All my literary hopes came toppling
+over and I saw myself condemned to the old idleness and dependence. But
+our spirits when we are young go up as quickly as they go down. I
+recalled stories I had heard of great men hawking about their MSS. from
+publisher to publisher. Carlyle, I said to myself, had suffered and
+almost every writer of note--it was a sign of genius to be refused.
+Therefore,--the logic of it was clear and convincing--the refusal proved
+me a genius! A more substantial reassurance was the publication of the
+same article, done over and patched up and with the fine title of
+_Mischief in the Middle Ages_, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ a very few
+months later. And when, on top of this, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the
+Editor of the _Atlantic_, wrote and told me he would be pleased to have
+further articles from me; when, in answer to a letter my Uncle had
+insisted on my writing. Oliver Wendell Holmes promised me his interest
+in Mischief as I proposed to define it. I saw the world at my feet
+where, to my sorrow, I have never seen it since that first fine moment
+of elation.
+
+The spectacle of myself in print set Philadelphia dancing before my eyes
+and turned the world a bit unsteady. But it did not relieve the labour
+of writing. Within the next year or two seven or eight chapters did get
+done and were published as articles in the _Atlantic_, but the world is
+still the poorer for the _magnum opus_ that was to bring me fame. The
+fact was that in the making, it brought me mighty little money. My first
+cheque only whetted my appetite, but, in fairness to myself I must
+explain, through no more sordid motive than my desire to become my own
+bread-winner. The newspapers offered a wider scope at less expense of
+time and labour, and my Uncle not only relaxed so far as to allow me
+intervals from the bigger undertaking for simpler tasks, but gave me the
+benefit of his experience as a newspaper man. In the old days, before he
+had gone to live in London, he had had the run of almost every newspaper
+office in town, and he opened their doors for me. Thanks to his
+introduction, Philadelphia, at this stage of my progress, conspired to
+put work into my hands, and writing for Philadelphia papers taught me in
+a winter more about Philadelphia than I had learned in all the years I
+had already spent there. I marvelled that I could have thought it dead
+when it was so alive. I seemed to feel it quiver under my feet at every
+step, shaking me into speed, and filling me with pity for the sedate
+pace at which my Father and the Philadelphians of his generation walked
+through its pulsating streets.
+
+
+IV
+
+My first newspaper commissions came from the _Press_ and adventure
+accompanied them--the adventure of business letters in my morning's
+mail, of proofs, of visits to the office--adventures that far too soon
+became the commonplaces of my busy days as journalist. But my outlook
+upon life in Philadelphia had, up till then, been bounded by the brick
+walls of a Spruce Street house, and the editorial office, that holds no
+surprise for me now, held nothing save surprise when I was first
+summoned to it. I was bewildered by the disorder, stunned by the
+noise--boys coming and going, letters and telegrams pouring in, piles of
+proofs mounting up on the desk, baskets overflowing with MSS., floors
+strewn with papers, machinery throbbing close by, a heavy smell of
+tobacco over everything, and in the midst of the confusion--lounging,
+working, answering questions, tearing open letters and telegrams,
+correcting proof, and yet managing to talk with me,--Moses P. Handy, the
+editor, a red man in my memory of him, red hair, red beard, red cheeks,
+whose cordiality I could not flatter myself was due to his eagerness for
+my contributions, so engrossed was he in talking of the Eastern Shore of
+Maryland from which he came and in which my family had made their
+prolonged stay on the way from Virginia to Philadelphia. The Eastern
+Shore may be a good place to come away from, but the native never
+forgets that he did come from it and he never fails to hail his fellow
+exile as brother.
+
+My next commission I owed to the _Evening Telegraph_, for which I made a
+remarkable journey to Atlantic City: a voyage of discovery, though the
+report of it did not paralyse the Philadelphia public. I was deeply
+impressed by my exercise of my faculty of observation thus tested on
+familiar ground, but I am afraid it left the Editor indifferent, and, as
+in his case the Eastern Shore was not a friendly link between us, he
+expressed no desire for a second article or for a second visit. I have
+regretted it since, the Editor being Clarke Davis, whom not to know was,
+I believe, not to have arrived so far in Philadelphia journalism as I
+liked to think I had.
+
+[Illustration: THE PENITENTIARY]
+
+A more remarkable journey followed to New York for I wish I could
+remember what paper; or perhaps it is just as well I cannot, the
+adventure adding to the reputation neither of the paper nor of myself.
+The object was to attend the press view of an important exhibition of
+paintings, and at that stage of my education I doubt if I could have
+told a Rembrandt from a Rubens, much less a Kenyon Cox from a Church, a
+Chase from a Blum, which was more immediately to the point. I had my
+punishment on the spot, for my hours in the Gallery may be counted the
+most humiliating of my life. My ignorance would not let me lose sight of
+it for one little second. J. had gone with me--how I came to know him I
+mean to tell further on--but he had no press ticket, a stern man at the
+door refused to admit him without one, and I was alone in my
+incompetency to wrestle with it as I could. Had he not returned with me
+to Philadelphia in the afternoon and devoted the interval in the train
+to throwing light upon my obscure and agonised notes, my copy could not
+have been delivered that evening as agreed. I know now that the paper
+would have come out all the same the next morning, but in my misery it
+did not seem possible that it could, and besides I was from the first,
+as through my many years of journalism, scrupulous to be on time with my
+copy and to keep to my agreements. That was my first experience in art
+criticism. I have tried to atone for it by years of conscientious work,
+but few Philadelphia papers can say as much for themselves. In those I
+see from time to time, the art criticism usually reads as if
+Philadelphia editors had lost nothing of their old amiability in handing
+it over to young ladies to get their journalistic training on.
+
+I was given also my chance in two newspaper ventures Philadelphia made
+in the early Eighteen-Eighties. One was the _American_, a weekly on the
+lines of the New York _Nation_. Mr. Howard Jenkins, the editor, sent me
+books for review, and not the first baby, not the first baby's first
+tooth, could be as extraordinary a phenomenon as the first book sent for
+the purpose from the editorial office. Mine, as I have never forgotten,
+as I never could forget, was Howard Pyle's _Robin Hood_, and when Mr.
+Jenkins wrote me that "Mr. Pyle's folks" were pleased with what I had
+written, I thought I had got to the very top of the tree of journalism.
+That I had got no further than a step from the bottom, and upon that had
+none too secure a foothold, I was reminded when the second book for
+review lay open before me.
+
+The other venture was _Our Continent_, also a weekly, but illustrated,
+edited by Judge Tourgee. Of my contributions, I remember chiefly an
+article on Shop Windows, which suggests that I was busy with what I
+might call a more pretentious kind of reporting. My subjects and my
+manner of treating them may have been what they were,--of no special
+value to anybody but myself. But to myself I cannot exaggerate their
+value. I was learning from them all the time.
+
+[Illustration: ON THE READING AT SIXTEENTH STREET]
+
+It was an education just to learn what a newspaper was. Heretofore I had
+accepted it as a thing that came of itself, arriving in the morning with
+the milk and the rolls for breakfast. I knew as little of its origin as
+the town boy knew of where the milk comes from in the _Punch_ story that
+I do not doubt was old when _Punch_ was young. Milk he had always seen
+poured from a can, our newspaper we had always had from the nearest
+news-agent. It was very simple. A newspaper appeared on the
+breakfast-table of a well-regulated Philadelphia house just as the water
+ran when the tap was turned on in the bath-room, or the gas burned when
+lit by a match. But after one article, after one visit to a newspaper
+office, after one journey to Atlantic City or New York, the newspaper
+did not seem so simple. I began to understand that it would not have
+got as far as Spruce Street had it not been for an army of people
+writing, printing, correcting proof, tearing from one end of the
+town--of the world--to the other; without colossal machinery throbbing
+night and day, without an immeasurable consumption of tobacco. I began
+to understand the organization required to bring the army of people and
+the colossal machines into such perfect harmony that the daily miracle
+of the newspaper on the breakfast-table might be worked--to understand
+too that the miracle-working organization had not been created in a day,
+that behind the daily paper was not merely the toiling of its staff and
+its machines but a long history of striving, experiment, development.
+
+I cannot say I went profoundly into the history, I was too engrossed in
+contributing my delightful share to the newspaper as it was, but to go
+superficially sufficed to show me in Philadelphia a spirit of enterprise
+altogether new to me. I had discovered only shortly before Philadelphia
+as the scene of the first Colonial Congress, and the Declaration of
+Independence, and the first big International Exposition in America, and
+now I added to these other discoveries the fact that Philadelphia had
+been the first American town to publish a daily paper, the last
+discovery bringing me face to face with Benjamin Franklin who, it
+appeared, besides flying that tiresome kite and being the ancestor of
+Mrs. Gillespie, was the first printer and publisher of the paper that
+set an example for all America. Tranquil the Philadelphian was by
+repute, but he rolled up his sleeves and pitched in when the moment
+came. Philadelphia's famous calm was but skin deep over its seething
+mass of workers, its energy, its toiling, its triumph. When I reflected
+on what was going on at night in every newspaper office in town, it
+seemed to me as unbelievable that, on the verge of this volcano of work,
+Philadelphians could keep on dancing at parties, at the Dancing Class,
+at the Assembly, as that men and women should have danced at Brussels on
+the eve of Waterloo. And newspaper-making was one only of Philadelphia's
+innumerable industries. That thought gave me the scale of the labour
+that goes to keep the machinery of life running.
+
+
+V
+
+Of some of the other industries I got to know a little. My Uncle who, as
+I have said, was a man of ideas and who had his fair proportion of
+Philadelphia energy, included among his many interests the subject of
+education. He deplored existing systems and methods. My belief is that
+the systems and methods might be of the best and education would still
+be a mistake, vulgarizing the multitude to whom it does not belong and
+encouraging in them a prejudice against honest work. My Uncle did not
+think as I do,--that I do not think now as he did frightens me as a
+disloyalty to his memory. But he could not overlook the distaste for
+manual work that had grown out of too much attention to books and as he
+never let his theories exhaust themselves in words, he lost no time in
+persuading the Board of Education to put this particular one to a
+practical test. Doubts of their methods had assailed the Board, but no
+way out of the difficulty had been suggested until he came and said,
+"Set your children, your boys and girls, who are forgetting how to use
+their hands, to work at the Minor Arts." It struck them as a suggestion
+that warranted the experiment anyway, especially as the cost would be
+comparatively small. My Uncle had been back in Philadelphia not much
+more than a year when classes were put in his charge and a
+schoolroom--the school-house at Broad and Locust--at his disposal, and
+he inaugurated the study of the Arts and Crafts in Philadelphia with the
+Industrial Art School, as he had in London with the Home Arts. His sole
+payment was the pleasure of the experiment, a pleasure which few
+theorists succeed in securing. I, however, was paid by the City in solid
+dollars and cents for the fine amateurish inefficiency with which I
+helped him to manage the classes, recommended by him, whose
+consideration was as practical for my pockets which the _Atlantic_,
+backed by newspapers, had not filled to repletion.
+
+[Illustration: LOCUST STREET EAST FROM BROAD STREET]
+
+This is not the place for the history of his experiment. It is known.
+The school has passed from the experimental stage into a permanent
+institution, though in the passing my Uncle has been virtually
+forgotten,--often the fate of the man who sets a ball of reform rolling.
+Of all this I have elsewhere made the record. I am at present concerned
+with the influence the school had upon me and the unexpected extent to
+which it widened my knowledge of Philadelphia and Philadelphia
+activities.
+
+How Philadelphia was educated was not a question that had kept me awake
+at nights. The Philadelphia girl of my acquaintance, if a day scholar,
+went naturally to Miss Irwin's or to Miss Annabel's in town; if a
+boarder perhaps to Miss Chapman's at Holmesburg or Mrs. Comegys at
+Chestnut Hill; unless her parents were converts or Catholics by birth
+when she went instead to the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Torresdale
+or in Walnut Street. The Philadelphia boy began with the Episcopal
+Academy and finished with the University of Pennsylvania. Friends went
+to the Friends' School in Germantown, and to Swarthmore and Haverford.
+What others did, did not matter. I had heard there were public or free
+schools where children could go for nothing, but nobody to my knowledge
+went to them. With what insolence we each of us, in our own little
+fraction of the world, think everybody outside of it nobody! But up in
+the top story rooms of the school-house at Broad and Locust, where my
+work took me two afternoons in the week, I found myself the centre of a
+vast network of schools! High Schools, Grammar Schools, Primary Schools,
+Scholarships, more divisions and subdivisions than I could count; with
+teachers--for there was a class for teachers--and pupils coming from
+every ward and suburb, every street and alley of the town; a School
+Board keeping a watchful eye upon schools and teachers, not leaving me
+out; and all about me a vast population without one idea or interest
+except the education of Philadelphia. And this implied, like the
+newspaper, a perfect organization of its own to keep the whole thing
+going--an organization that never could have been born in a day. The
+education of Philadelphia had absorbed a vast population since
+Philadelphia was: the first Philadelphia children hardly escaping from
+their cave dwellings before they were hurried into school to have their
+poor little minds trained and disciplined. Really, in my first days of
+work, life was a succession of startling discoveries about Philadelphia.
+
+I could not get paid for my afternoons at the school, which I ought to
+have paid for considering the education they were to me, without making
+another discovery. The pay came monthly from the City in the form of a
+warrant, or so I believe it is called. As I have explained that I had
+never been possessed of money of my own, some allowance will be made for
+my stupidity in thinking it necessary to cash the warrant in person. It
+never occurred to me to open a bank account or to ask my Father to
+exchange the warrant for money. I went myself to the office in the big,
+new, unfinished City Hall--how well I remember, when I was kept waiting
+which was always, my conscientiousness in jotting down elaborate notes
+of windows and doors and upholstery and decoration: Zola in France and
+Howells at home having made Realism the literary fashion, and Realism,
+I gathered, being achieved only by way of jotting down endless notes in
+every situation in which I found myself; especially as J. had brought
+back from Italy exemplary and inspiring tales of Vernon Lee (Violet
+Paget) and Mary Robinson (Mme. Duclaux), with whom he had worked and
+travelled, filling blank books with memoranda collected from the windows
+of every train they took and every hotel in which they stayed.
+
+I am glad I was stupid, such a good thing for me was this going in
+person, such a suggestive lesson in City Government which I learned was
+as little of an automatic arrangement as education and the newspaper,
+and not necessarily something that all decent people should be ashamed
+of being mixed up with, the way my Father and the old-fashioned
+Philadelphian of his type looked upon it and every other variety of
+Government. It was just another huge, busy, striving, toiling
+organization, so huge as to fit with difficulty into the enormous ugly
+new buildings, then recently set down for it in Penn Square with
+complete indifference to Penn's plan for his green country town, or to
+get its work done in the maze of courts and passages and offices by the
+hordes of big and little officials no less preoccupied in City
+Government than journalists in their newspaper, or teachers in their
+school, or--outrageous as it may sound--society in the Assembly and
+Dancing Class and the things which I had been brought up to believe the
+beginning and end of existence on this earth.
+
+[Illustration: BROAD STREET, LOOKING SOUTH FROM ABOVE ARCH STREET]
+
+My new knowledge of Philadelphia was widened in various other directions
+as time went on. My Uncle's experiment, when it took practical shape,
+attracted attention and he was asked to lecture on it in places like the
+Franklin Institute--there was no keeping away very long from Benjamin
+Franklin in Philadelphia once I got to know anything about
+Philadelphia--and to visit institutions like Moyamensing Prison or
+Kirkbride's Insane Asylum that he might consider the advisability of
+introducing his scheme of manual work for the benefit of the insane and
+the criminal. I usually accompanied him on these occasions, and before
+he had got through his rounds I had seen a number of different phases of
+Philadelphia activity and enterprise and power of organization. I had
+been given some idea of the armies of doctors and nurses and scientists
+who had made Kirkbride's a model throughout the land, while Dr. Albert
+Smith had helped me to an additional insight into the hospitals that set
+as excellent an example. I had been given an idea of the armies of
+judges and juries and police and governors and warders and visiting
+inspectors,--of whom my Father was one, with a special tenderness for
+murderers whom he used to take his family to visit--at Moyamensing. And
+from the combination of all my new experiences I had gained further
+knowledge of the energies at work beyond the limits of "Chestnut,
+Walnut, Spruce and Pine" to make Philadelphia what it was.
+
+
+VI
+
+I ought to have needed no guide to the knowledge and appreciation of
+these things, it may be said. I admit it. But the happy mortals who are
+born observant do not picture to themselves the tortures gone through by
+those who must have observation thrust upon them before they begin to
+use their eyes. I had not been born to observe, I had not been trained
+to observe, and to become observant I had to go through the sort of
+practical course Mr. Squeers set to his boys. His method, denounce it as
+you will, has its merits. The students of Dotheboys Hall could never
+have forgotten what a window is or what it means to clean it. I had
+grown up to accept life as a pageant for me to look on at, with no part
+to play in it. After my initiation into work, I could never forget, in
+the quietest, emptiest sections of the town, not even in placid little
+backwaters like Clinton Street and De Lancey Place, the machinery
+forever crashing and grinding and roaring to produce the pageant, to
+weave for Philadelphia the beautiful serenity it wore like a garment. I
+could never forget that, insignificant as my share in the machinery
+might be, all the same I was contributing something to make it go. I
+could never be sure that everybody I met, however calm in appearance,
+might not be as mixed up in the great machine of work as I was beginning
+to be.
+
+[Illustration: CLINTON STREET, WITH THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL AT ITS
+END]
+
+I had to work to learn that Philadelphia had worked, and still worked,
+and worked so well as to be the first to have given America much that
+is best and most vital in the country--the first to show the right way
+with its schools and hospitals and libraries and newspapers and
+galleries and museums, the leader in the fight for liberty of
+conscience, the scene of the first Colonial Congress and the signing of
+the Declaration of Independence and the Centennial Exposition to
+commemorate it, a pioneer in science and industry and manufacture--a
+town upon which all the others in the land could not do better than
+model themselves--while all the time it maintained its fine air of calm
+that perplexes the stranger and misleads the native. But I had found it
+out, found out its greatness, before age had dimmed my perceptions and
+dulled my power of appreciation; and to find Philadelphia out is to love
+it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI: THE ROMANCE OF WORK
+
+
+I
+
+I was still in the stage of wonder and joy at seeing myself in print,
+when work and Philadelphia joined in the most unlooked for manner to
+help me tell my Grandmother that "something" she was so anxiously
+waiting to hear. An article on Philadelphia which an intelligent Editor
+asked me to write was my introduction to J. The town that we both love
+first brought us together, as it now brings us back to it together after
+the many years that have passed since it laid the foundation of our long
+partnership.
+
+[Illustration: THE CHERRY STREET STAIRS NEAR THE RIVER]
+
+I would say nothing about the article at this late date had it not added
+so materially to my life and to my knowledge of Philadelphia. I am not
+proud of it as a piece of literary work. But it seems, as I recall the
+days of my apprenticeship, to mark the turning of the ways, to point to
+the new road I was destined to take. I got it out the other day, the
+first time in over a quarter of a century, proposing to reprint it,
+thinking the contrast between my impressions of Philadelphia thirty
+years ago and my impressions of Philadelphia to-day might be amusing. In
+memory, it had remained a brilliant performance, one any editor would be
+pleased to jump at, and I was astonished to find it youthful and crude,
+inarticulate, inadequate not only to the subject itself but to my
+appreciation of the subject which at the time was unbounded. I do not
+know whether to be more amazed at my failure in it to say what I wanted
+to say, or at the Editor's amiability in publishing it. The article may
+not have lost all its eloquence for me, since between the halting lines
+I can read the story I did not know how to tell, but for others it would
+prove a dull affair and it is best left where it is, forgotten in the
+old files of a popular magazine.
+
+The story I read is one of a series of discoveries with a romance in
+each. The way the article came about was that J. had made etchings of
+Philadelphia, and the Editor, who had wisely arranged to use them,
+thought they could not be published without accompanying text. When he
+asked me, as a young Philadelphian just beginning to write, to supply
+this text, he advised me to consult with J., whom I did not know and
+whose studio address he gave me.
+
+I was thrilled by the prospect, never having been in a studio nor met an
+artist, and when it turned out not half so simple as it looked on paper,
+when the first catching my artist was attended with endless delays and
+difficulties, it did not lessen the thrill or take away from the sense
+of adventure.
+
+J.'s studio, which he shared with Mr. Harry Poore, was at the top of
+what was then the Presbyterian Building on Chestnut Street above
+Thirteenth, quite new and of tremendous height at a time when the
+sky-scraper had not been invented nor the elevator become a necessity
+of Philadelphia life. Day after day, varying the hour with each attempt,
+now in the morning, now at noon, now toward evening, I toiled up those
+long flights of stairs, marvelling at the strange, unaccountable
+disclosures through half-opened studio doors, for it was a building of
+studios; glad of the support of my Uncle who was seeing me through this,
+as he saw me through all my earliest literary enterprises; arriving at
+the top, breathless and panting, only to be informed by a notice,
+written on paper and pinned on the tight-locked door, that J. was out
+and would be back in half an hour. My Uncle and I were inclined to
+interpret this literally, once or twice waiting trustingly on the dark
+landing some little while beyond the appointed time. On one occasion I
+believe the door was opened, when we knocked, by Mr. Poore who was not
+sure of the length of a half hour as J. reckoned it, but had an idea it
+might vary according to circumstances, especially now that J. was out of
+town. I went away not annoyed as I should be to-day, but more stirred
+than ever by the novelty of the adventure.
+
+[Illustration: THE MORRIS HOUSE ON EIGHTH STREET]
+
+At last I tied J. down by an appointment, as I should have done at the
+start, and he, having returned to town, kept it to the minute. I think
+from first to last of this astonishing business I had no greater shock
+of astonishment than when I followed him into his studio. We were in the
+Eighteen-Eighties then, when American magazines and newspapers were
+making sensational copy out of the princely splendour of the London
+studios, above all of Tadema's, Leighton's, Millais': palatial
+interiors, hung with priceless tapestries, carpeted with rare Oriental
+rugs, shining with old brass and pottery and armour, opening upon
+Moorish courts, reached by golden stairs, fragrant with flowers, filled
+with soft couches and luxurious cushions--flamboyant, exotic interiors
+that would not have disgraced Ouida's godlike young Guardsmen but that
+scarcely seemed to belong to men who made their living by the work of
+their hands. Indeed, it was their splendour that misled so many
+incompetent young men and women of the later Victorian age into the
+belief that art was the easiest and most luxurious short cut to wealth.
+But there was nothing splendid or princely about J.'s studio. It was
+frankly a workshop, big and empty, a few unframed drawings and life
+studies stuck up on the bare walls, the floors carpetless, for furniture
+an easel or two and a few odd rickety chairs--a room nobody would have
+dreamed of going into except for work. But then, my first impression of
+J. was of a man who did not want to do anything except work.
+
+My experience had been that people--if I leave out my Uncle--worked, not
+because they wanted to but because they had to and that, sceptical as
+they might be on every other Scriptural point, they were not to be
+shaken out of their belief in work as a curse inherited from Adam. J.,
+evidently, would have found the curse in not being allowed to work. And
+as new to me was the enthusiasm with which, while he showed me his
+prints and drawings, he began to talk about Philadelphia and its beauty.
+It was unusual for Philadelphians to talk about their town at all; if
+they did, it was more unusual for them to talk with enthusiasm; and the
+interest in it forced upon them by the Centennial had been for every
+quality rather than its beauty. Even my Uncle--though later, in his
+_Memoirs_, he wrote charmingly of the charm of Philadelphia--at that
+time affected to admire nothing in it except the unsightly arches of the
+Pennsylvania Railroad, bridging the streets between the Schuylkill and
+the Station, and if he made the exception in their favour, it was
+because they reminded him of London. Thanks to the Centennial and the
+stimulus of hard work, I was not as ignorant of Philadelphia as I had
+been, but I was not rid of the old popular fallacy that the American in
+search of beauty must cross the Atlantic and go to Europe. And here was
+J., in five minutes telling me more about Philadelphia than I had
+learned in a lifetime, revealing to me in his drawings the beauty of
+streets and houses I had not had the wit to find out for myself, firing
+me with sudden enthusiasm in my turn, convincing me that nothing in the
+world counted but Philadelphia, opening my eyes to its unsuspected
+resources, so that after this I could walk nowhere without visions of
+romance where all before had been everyday commonplace, leaving me eager
+and impatient to start on my next journey of discovery which was to be
+in his company.
+
+
+II
+
+To illustrate our article--for _ours_ it had become--J. passed over the
+obvious picturesqueness of Philadelphia--the venerable Pennsylvania
+Hospital, the beautiful State House, Christ Church, the Old Swedes, St.
+Peter's--buildings for which Philadelphia, after years of indifference,
+had at last been exalted by the Centennial into historic monuments, the
+show places of the town, labelled and catalogued--buildings of which J.
+had already made records, having begun his work by drawing them, his
+plate of the State House among the first he ever etched. He now went in
+preference to the obscure by-ways, to the unpretending survivals of the
+past, so merged, so swallowed up in the present, that it needed keen
+eyes to detect them: old buildings stamped with age, but too humble in
+origin for the Centennial to have resurrected; busy docks, grimy river
+banks, crazy old rookeries abandoned to the business and poverty that
+claimed them: to the strange, neglected, never-visited corners of a
+great town where beauty springs from the rich soil of labour and chance,
+neglect and decay.
+
+How little I had known of Philadelphia up till then! One of the very
+first places to which he took me was the old Second Street Market that,
+when I lived within a stone's throw of it, I had never set my eyes
+on--the old market that, south of Pine, forces Second Street to widen
+and make space for it and that turns the gable of the little old Court
+House directly north, breaking the long vista of the street as St.
+Clement's and St. Mary's in London break the vista of the Strand--the
+old market that I believe the city proposes to pull down, very likely
+will have pulled down before these lines are in print, though there is
+not a Philadelphian who would not go into ecstasies over as shabby and
+down-at-the-heel Eighteenth Century building if stumbled upon in an
+English country town. And as close to his old family home and mine J.
+led me into inn yards that might have come straight from the Borough on
+the Surrey side of the Thames, and in and out of dark mysterious courts
+which he declared as "good" as the exploited French and Italian courts
+every etcher has at one time or another made a plate of--curious nooks
+and by-ways I had never stopped to look at during my Third Street days
+and would have seen nothing in if I had.
+
+And I remember going with him along Front Street, where I should have
+thought myself contaminated at a time when it might have varied the dull
+round of my daily walks, so unlike was it to the spick and span streets
+I knew,--glimpses at every crossing of the Delaware, Philadelphia's
+river of commerce that Philadelphians never went near unless to take the
+boat for Torresdale or, in summers of economy, the steamer for
+Liverpool; for several blocks, groups of seafaring men mending sails on
+the side-walk, Mariners' Boarding-Houses, a Mariners' Church, and
+Philadelphia here the seaport town it is and always has been; and then,
+successive odours of the barnyard, fish, spice, coffee, Philadelphia
+smelling as strong of the romance of trade as any Eastern bazaar.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD COACHING-INN YARD]
+
+And I remember J. and I crossing the forbidden line into "up town" to
+find beauty, interest, picturesqueness in "Market, Arch, Race and
+Vine"--old houses everywhere, the old Meeting-House, Betsy Ross' house,
+Provost Smith's, the Christ Church Burial Ground at Fifth and Arch where
+Franklin is buried, narrow rambling alleys, red and black brick, and
+there, up on a house at the corner of Front, where it is to this day, a
+sign going back to the years when Race was still Sassafras Street, and
+so part of the original scheme of Philadelphia, to which, with
+Philadelphia docility, I had all my life believed South of Market alone
+could claim the right.
+
+And I remember our wandering to the Schuylkill, not by the neat and
+well-kept roads and paths of the Park, but where tumbled-down houses
+faced it near Callowhill Street Bridge and works of one kind or another
+rose from its banks near Gray's Ferry, and Philadelphia was a town of
+industry, of machines, of railroads connecting it with all parts of the
+world,--for already to J. "the Wonder of Work" had made its irresistible
+appeal. And I remember our wandering farther, north and south, east and
+west--interest, beauty, picturesqueness never failing us--in the end
+Philadelphia transformed into a vast Wonderland, where in one little
+section people might spend their lives dancing, paying calls at noon,
+eating chicken salad and croquettes from Augustine's, but where in every
+other they were striving, struggling, toiling, to carry on Penn's
+traditions and to give to his town the greatness, power and beauty he
+planned for it.
+
+In these walks I had followed J. into streets and quarters of the town I
+had not known. But I would be leaving out half the story if I did not
+say how much he showed me in the streets and quarters I did know. It is
+with a town, I suppose, as with life out of which, philosophers say, we
+get just as much, or as little, as we bring to it. I had brought no
+curiosity, no interest, no sympathy, to Philadelphia, and Philadelphia
+therefore had given me nothing save a monotony of red brick and green
+shade. But now I came keen with curiosity, full of interest, aflame with
+sympathy, and Philadelphia overwhelmed me with its gifts. Oh, the
+difference when, having eyes, one sees! I was as surprised to learn that
+I had been living in the midst of beauty all my life as M. Jourdain was
+to find he had been talking prose.
+
+Down in lower Spruce and all the neighbouring streets, where I had
+walked in loneliness longing for something to happen, something happened
+at every step--beautiful Colonial houses, stately doorways, decorative
+ironwork, dormer windows, great gables facing each other at street
+corners, harmonious proportions--not merely a bit here and a bit there,
+but the old Colonial town almost intact, preserved by Philadelphia
+through many generations only to be abandoned now to the Russian Jew and
+the squalor and the dirt that the Russian Jew takes with him wherever
+he goes. In not another American town had the old streets then changed
+so little since Colonial days, in not another were they so well worth
+keeping unchanged. I had not to dive into musty archives to unearth the
+self-evident fact that the early Friends, when they left England, packed
+up with their liberty of conscience the love of beauty in architecture
+and, what was more practical, the money to pay for it; that, in a fine
+period of English architecture, they got good English architects,--Wren
+said to have been of the number--to design not merely their public
+buildings, but their private houses; that, their Founder setting the
+example, they carried over in their personal baggage panelling,
+carvings, ironwork, red and black brick, furniture, and the various
+details they were not likely to procure in Philadelphia until
+Philadelphians had moved from their caves and the primeval forest had
+been cut down; that when Philadelphia could contribute its share of the
+work, they modified the design to suit climate, circumstances, and
+material, and bequeathed to us a Philadelphia with so much local
+character that it never could be mistaken for an English town.
+
+This used to strike the intelligent foreigner as long as Philadelphia
+was content to have a character of its own and did not bother to be in
+architectural or any other movements. "Not a distressingly new-looking
+city, for the Queen Anne style in vogue when its prosperity began is in
+the main adhered to with Quaker-like precision; good red brick; numerous
+rather narrow windows with white outside shutters, a block cornice along
+the top of the fa�ades and the added American feature of marble steps
+and entry,"--this, in a letter to William Michael Rossetti, was Mrs.
+Gilchrist's description of Philadelphia in the late Eighteen-Seventies,
+and it is an appreciative description though most authorities would
+probably describe Philadelphia as Georgian rather than Queen Anne.
+Philadelphia did more to let the old character go to rack and ruin
+during the years I was away from it than during the two centuries
+before, and is to-day repenting in miles upon miles of sham Colonial.
+But repentance cannot wipe away the traces of sin--cannot bring back the
+old Philadelphia I knew.
+
+[Illustration: FRANKLIN'S GRAVE]
+
+I do not want to attribute too much to my new and only partially
+developed power of observing. Had the measuring worm not retreated
+before the sparrow, I might perhaps have been less prepared during my
+walks with J. to admit the beauty of the trees lining every street, as
+well as of the houses they shaded. But what is the use of troubling
+about the might-have-been? The important thing is that, with him I did
+for the first time see how beautiful are our green, well-shaded streets.
+With him too I first saw how beautiful is their symmetry as they run in
+their long straight lines and cross each other at right angles. It was a
+symmetry I had confused with monotony, with which most Philadelphians,
+foolishly misled, still confuse it. They would rather, for the sake of
+variety, that Penn had left the building and growth of Philadelphia to
+chance as the founders of other American towns did--they would rather
+boast with New York or Boston of the disorderly picturesqueness of
+streets that follow old cow tracks made before the town was. But Penn
+understood the value of order in architecture as in conduct. It is true
+that Ruskin, the accepted prophet of my young days, did not include
+order among his Seven Lamps, but there was a good deal Ruskin did not
+know about architecture, and a town like Paris in its respect for
+arrangement--for order--for a thought-out plan--will teach more at a
+glance than all his rhapsodies. Philadelphia has not the noble
+perspectives of the French capital nor the splendid buildings to
+complete them, but its despised regularity gives it the repose, the
+serenity, which is an essential of great art, whether the art of the
+painter or the engraver, the sculptor or the architect. And it gives,
+too, a suggestiveness, a mystery we are more apt to seek in
+architectural disorder and caprice. I know nobody who has pointed out
+this beauty in Penn's design except Mrs. Gilchrist in the description
+from which I have already borrowed, and she merely hints at the truth,
+not grasping it. Philadelphia to her was more picturesque and more
+foreign-looking than she expected, and her explanation is in the "long
+straight streets at right angles to each other, long enough and broad
+enough to present that always pleasing effect of vista-converging lines
+that stretch out indefinitely and look as if they must certainly lead
+somewhere very pleasant," the streets that are to the town what "the
+open road" is to the country,--the long, white, straight road beckoning
+who can say where?
+
+
+III
+
+It was without the slightest intention on my part that the
+vista-converging lines of the streets led me direct to William Penn. But
+I defy anybody to do a little thinking while walking through the streets
+of Philadelphia and not be led to him, so for eternity has he stamped
+them with his vivid personality--not William Penn, the shadowy prig of
+the school history, but William Penn, the man with a level head, big
+ideas, and the will to carry them out--three things that make for
+genius. To the weakling of to-day the fight for liberty of conscience
+would loom up so gigantic a task as to fill to overflowing his little
+span here below. But in the fight as Penn fought it, the material
+details could be overlooked as little as the spiritual, the comfort of
+the bodies of his people no more neglected than the freedom of their
+souls. He did not stop to preach about town-planning and garden cities,
+and improved housing for the workman, like the would-be reformer of
+to-day. With no sentimental pose as saviour of the people, no drivel
+about reforming and elevating and sweetening the lives of humanity, no
+aspiration towards "world-betterment," Penn made sure that Philadelphia
+should be the green town he thought it ought to be and that men and
+women, whatever their appointed task, should have decent houses to live
+in. He had the common-sense to understand that his colonists would be
+the sturdier and the better equipped for the work they had to do if they
+lived like men and not like beasts, and that a town as far south as
+Philadelphia called for many gardens and much green shade. The most
+beautiful architecture is that which grows logically out of the needs of
+the people. That is why Penn's city as he designed it was and is a
+beautiful city, to which English and German town reformers should come
+for the hints Philadelphians are so misguided as to seek from them.
+
+I could not meet Penn in his pleasant streets and miss the succession of
+Friends who took over the responsibility of ensuring life and reality to
+his design, not allowing it, like Wren's in London, to lapse into a
+half-forgotten archaeological curiosity. Personally. I knew nothing of
+the Friends and envied J. who did because he was one of them, as I never
+could be, as nobody, not born to it, can. I had seen them, as alas! they
+are seen no longer: quiet, dignified men in broad-brimmed hats,
+sweet-faced women in delicate greys and browns, filling our streets in
+the spring at the time of Yearly Meeting. Once or twice I had seen them
+at home, the women in white caps and fichus, quiet and composed, sitting
+peacefully in their old-time parlours simple and bare but filled with
+priceless Sheraton or Chippendale. They looked, both in the open streets
+and at their own firesides, so placid, so detached from the world's
+cares, it had not occurred to me that they could be the makers of the
+town's beauty and the sinews of its strength. But in my new mood I could
+nowhere get far from them.
+
+Ghosts of the early Friends haunted the old streets and the old houses
+and, mingling with them, were ghosts of the World's People who had lost
+no time in coming to share their town and ungraciously abuse the
+privilege. The air was thick with association. J. and I walked in an
+atmosphere of the past, delightfully conscious of it but never troubling
+to reduce it to dry facts. We could not have been as young as we were
+and not scorn any approach to pedantry, not as lief do without ghosts as
+to grub them up out of the Philadelphia Library or the Historical
+Society. We left it to the antiquary to say just where the first Friends
+landed and the corner-stone of their first building was laid, just in
+which Third Street house Washington once danced, in which Front Street
+house Bishop White once lived. It was for the belated Boswell, not for
+us, to follow step by step the walks abroad of Penn, or Franklin, or any
+of our town's great men. It was no more necessary to be historians in
+order to feel the charm of the past than to be architects in order to
+feel the charm of the houses, and for no amount of exact knowledge would
+we have exchanged the romance which enveloped us.
+
+[Illustration: ARCH STREET MEETING]
+
+Could I have put into words some of the emotion I felt in gathering
+together my material, what an article I would have made! But my words
+came with difficulty, and indeed I have never had the "ready pen" of the
+journalist, always I have been shy in expressing emotion of any kind. No
+reader could have guessed from my article my enthusiasm as I wrote it.
+But at least it did get written and my pleasure in it was not disturbed
+by doubt. I was too enthralled by what I had to say to realize that I
+had not managed to say it at all.
+
+
+IV
+
+With the publication of the article our task was at an end, but not our
+walks together. J. and I had got into the habit of them, it was a
+pleasant habit, we saw no reason to give it up.
+
+Sometimes we walked with new work as an object. There were articles
+about Philadelphia for _Our Continent_. We called it work--learning
+Romany--when we both walked with my Uncle up Broad Street to Oakdale
+Park, and through Camden and beyond to the Reservoir, where the Gypsies
+camped, and made Camden in my eyes, not the refuge of all in doubt,
+debt, or despair as its traditions have described it, but a rival in
+romance of Bagdad or Samarcand. When we walked still further, taking the
+train to help us out, to near country towns for the autumn fairs, never
+missing a side show, we called this the search for local colour, and I
+filled note-books with notes. Sometimes we walked for no more practical
+purpose than pleasure in Philadelphia. And we could walk for days, we
+could walk for miles, and exhaust neither the pleasure nor the town that
+I once fancied I knew by heart if I walked from Market to Pine and from
+the Delaware to the Schuylkill.
+
+I remember as a remarkable incident my discovery of the suburbs. With
+the prejudice borrowed from my Father, I had cultivated for all
+suburbs something of the large sweeping contempt which, in the
+Eighteen-Nineties, Henley and the _National Observer_, carrying on the
+tradition of Thackeray, made it the fashion to profess for the suburbs
+of London. West Philadelphia and Germantown were no less terms of
+opprobrium in my mouth than Clapham and Brixton in Henley's. But Henley,
+though it was a mistake to insist upon Clapham with its beautiful Common
+and old houses and dignified air, was expressing his splendid scorn of
+the second-rate, the provincial, in art and in letters. I was only
+expressing, parrot-like, a pose that did not belong to me, but to my
+Father in whose outlook upon life and things there was a whimsical
+touch, and who carried off' his prejudices with humour.
+
+[Illustration: CLIVEDEN, THE CHEW HOUSE]
+
+I was the more foolish in this because few towns, if any, have lovelier
+suburbs than Philadelphia. Their loveliness is another part of our
+inheritance from William Penn who set no limits to his dream of a green
+country town, and from the old Friends who, in deference to his desire,
+lined not only their streets but their roads with trees. This is only
+as it should be, I thought when, reading the letters of John Adams, I
+came upon his description of the road to Kensington and beyond,
+"straight as the streets of Philadelphia, on each side ... beautiful
+rows of trees, button-woods, oaks, walnuts, cherries, and willows." In
+our time, scarcely a road out of Philadelphia is without the same
+beautiful rows, if not the same variety in the trees, and while much of
+the open country it ran through in John Adams' day has been built up
+with town and suburban houses, the trees still line it on each side.
+Everybody knows the beauty of the leafy roads of the Main Line, quite a
+correct thing to know, the Main Line being the refuge of the
+Philadelphian pushed out of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine" by
+business and the Russian Jew combined. But the Main Line has not the
+monopoly of suburban beauty, though it may of suburban fashion. The Main
+Street in Germantown, with its peaceful old grey stone houses and great
+overshadowing trees, has no rival at home or abroad, and I have seen as
+commonplace a street as Walnut in West Philadelphia, its uninteresting
+houses screened behind the two long lines of trees, become in the golden
+light of a summer afternoon as stately an avenue as any at Versailles or
+St. Germain.
+
+Not only the trees, but the past went with us to Germantown. Has any
+other American suburb so many old houses to boast? Stenton, the Chew
+House, the Johnson House, the Morris House, the Wistar House, Wyck--are
+there any other Colonial houses with nobler interiors, statelier
+furniture, sweeter gardens? I recall the pillared hall of Chew House,
+the finely proportioned entrance and stairway of Stenton, the garden of
+Wyck as I last saw it--rather overgrown, heavy with the perfume of roses
+and syringa, the June sun low behind the tall trees that stand close to
+the wall along Walnut Lane;--I recall the memories clustering about
+those old historic homes, about every lane and road and path, and I
+wonder that Germantown is not one of the show places of the world. But
+the foreigner, to whom Philadelphia is a station between New York and
+Washington or New York and Chicago, has never heard of it, nor has the
+rest of America to whom Philadelphia is the junction for Atlantic City.
+With the exception of Stenton, the old Germantown houses are for use,
+not for show, still lived in by the families who have lived in them from
+the beginning, and I love them too well to want to see them overtaken by
+the fate of sights starred in Baedeker, even while I wonder why they
+have escaped.
+
+At times J. and I walked in the green valley of the Wissahickon, along
+the well-kept road past the old white taverns, with wide galleries and
+suppers of cat-fish and waffles, which had not lost their pleasant
+primitiveness to pass themselves off as rural Rumpelmeyers where ladies
+stop for afternoon tea. Can the spring be fairer anywhere than in and
+around Philadelphia when wistaria blossoms on every wall and the country
+is white with dogwood? Often we wandered in the Wissahickon woods, by
+narrow footpaths up the low hillsides, so often that, wherever I may
+be, certain effects of brilliant sunshine filtering through the pale
+green of early spring foliage will send me straight back to the
+Wissahickon and to the days when I could not walk in Philadelphia or its
+suburbs and not strike gold at every step. And the Wissahickon was but
+one small section of the Park, of which the corrupt government
+Philadelphia loves to rail at made the largest and fairest, at once the
+wildest and most wisely laid-out playground, in America. Will a reform
+Government, with all its boasting, do as much for Philadelphia? I had
+skimmed the surface only on those boating parties up the river and those
+walking parties in the starlit or moonlit shade. Wide undiscovered
+stretches lay off the beaten track, and the mansions of the
+Park--Strawberry, Belmont, Mount Pleasant--were well stocked, not only
+with lemonade and cake and peanuts, with croquettes and chicken salad,
+but with beauty and associations for those who knew how to give the
+order. And, greater marvel, beauty--classic beauty--was to be had even
+in the Fairmount Water Works that, after I left school, I had looked
+down upon as a childish entertainment provided for the holidays, beneath
+the consideration of my maturer years.
+
+
+V
+
+Of all our walks, none was better than the walk to Bartram's on the
+banks of the Schuylkill beyond Gray's Ferry. It seemed very far then,
+before the trolley passed by its gate, and before the rows of little
+two-story houses had begun to extend towards it like the greedy
+tentacles of the great town. The City Government had not taken it over,
+it was not so well looked after. The old grey stone house, with the
+stone tablet on its walls bearing witness that his Lord was adored by
+John Bartram, had not yet been turned into a museum. I am not sure
+whether the trees around it--the trees collected from far and near--were
+learnedly labelled as they are now. The garden had grown wild, the
+thicket below was a wilderness. It is right that the place should be
+cared for. The city could not afford to lose the beauty one of its most
+famous citizens, who was one of the most famous botanists of his day,
+built up, and his family preserved, for it, and when I returned I
+welcomed the sign this new care gave of Philadelphia's interest, so long
+in the awakening. But Bartram's was more beautiful in its neglect, as an
+old church is more beautiful before the restorer pulls down the ivy and
+scrapes and polishes the stone. Many were the Sunday afternoons J. and I
+spent there, and many the hours we sat talking on the little bench at
+the lower end of the wilderness, where we looked out on the river and
+planned new articles.
+
+[Illustration: BARTRAM'S]
+
+When our walks together had become too strong a habit to be broken and
+we decided to make the habit one for life, we went back again and again
+to Bartram's and on that same little bench, looking out upon the river,
+we planned work for the long years we hoped were ahead of us: perhaps
+seeing the future in the more glowing colours for the contrast with the
+past about us, the ashes of the life and beauty from which our phoenix
+was to soar. The work then planned carried and kept us thousands of
+miles away, but it belongs none the less to the old scenes, where it was
+inspired, and I like to think that, though the chances of this work have
+made us exiles for years, the memory of our life as we have lived it is
+inseparable from the memory of Bartram's or, indeed, of Philadelphia
+which, through work, I learned to see and to love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII: PHILADELPHIA AND LITERATURE
+
+
+I
+
+On the principle that nothing interests a man--or a woman--so much as
+shop, I had no sooner begun to write than I saw Philadelphia divided not
+between the people who could and could not go to the Assembly and the
+Dancing Class, but between the people who could and could not write;
+and, after I began to write for illustration, between the people who
+could and could not paint and draw. It had never before occurred to me
+to look for art and literature in Philadelphia.
+
+[Illustration: CARPENTER'S HALL INTERIOR]
+
+At that time, you had, literally, to look for the literature to find it.
+Philadelphia, with its usual reticence and conscientiousness in
+preventing any Philadelphian from becoming a prophet in Philadelphia,
+had hidden its literary, with its innumerable other, lights under a
+bushel, content itself to know they were there, if nobody else did. As
+towns, like men, are apt to be accepted at their own valuation, most
+Americans would then have thought it about as useful to look for snakes
+in Ireland as for literature in Philadelphia. I am not sure that the
+Philadelphian did not agree with them. Recently, I have heard him, in
+his new zeal for Philadelphia, talk as if it were the biggest literary
+thing on earth, the headquarters of letters in the United States, a
+boast which I am told Indianapolis also makes and, as far as I am
+concerned, can keep on making undisputed, for I do not believe in
+measuring literature like so much sheet iron or calico. But no matter
+what we have come to in Philadelphia, in the old days the Philadelphian
+seldom gave his lions a chance to roar at home or paid the least
+attention to them if they tried to. I rather think he would have
+affected to share the Western Congressman's opinion of "them literary
+fellers" when the literary fellers came from his native town.
+
+But the Philadelphian must have done a great deal of reading to judge by
+the number of public libraries in the town,--the Philadelphia Library,
+the Ridgway, the Mercantile, the Free Public Library, the University
+Library, the Bryn Mawr College Library, the Friends' Germantown Library,
+the Library of the Historical Society, and no doubt dozens I know
+nothing about--and there were always collectors from the days of Logan
+and Dr. Rush to those of Mr. Widener, George C. Thomas and Governor
+Pennypacker. But the Philadelphia reading man never talked books and the
+Philadelphia collector never vaunted and advertised his treasures, as he
+does now that collecting is correct. The average man kept his books out
+of sight. I remember few in my Grandfather's house, and not a bookcase
+from top to bottom--few in any other house except my Father's. But I
+know that many people had books and a library set apart to read them in,
+and I have been astonished since to see the large collections in houses
+where of old I had never noticed or suspected their presence. The
+Philadelphian was as reticent about his books and his pleasure in them
+as about everything else, with the result that he got the credit for
+neither, even at home. This had probably something to do with the fact
+that though, as far back as I can remember, I had had a fancy for books
+and for reading, I grew up with the idea that for literature, as for
+beauty, the Atlantic had to be crossed, that it was not in the nature of
+things for Philadelphia to have had a literary past, to claim a literary
+present, or to hope for a literary future. But as I had discovered my
+mistake about the beauty during those walks with J., so in my modest
+stall in the literary shop, I learned how far out I had been about the
+literature. It was the same story over again. I had only to get
+interested, and there was everything in the world to interest me.
+
+
+II
+
+There was the past, for Philadelphia had had a literary past, and not at
+all an empty past, but one full of the romance of effort and pride of
+achievement. Because Philadelphians did not begin to write the minute
+they landed on the banks of the Delaware, some wise people argue that
+Friends were then, as now, unliterary. But what of William Penn, whose
+writings have become classics? What of Thomas Elwood, the friend of
+Milton? What of George Fox who, if unlettered, was a born writer no less
+than Bunyan? Friends did not write and publish books right off in
+Philadelphia for the same excellent reason that other Colonists did not
+in other Colonial towns. Living was an absorbing business that left them
+no time for writing, and printing presses and publishers' offices and
+book stores did not strike them as immediate necessities in the
+wilderness. It was not out of consideration that the early Philadelphia
+Friends bequeathed nothing to the now sadly overladen shelves of the
+British Museum and the Library of Congress.
+
+When leisure came Philadelphians were readier to devote it to science.
+According to Mr. Sydney Fisher, Pennsylvania has done more for science
+than any other State: a subject upon which my profound ignorance bids me
+be silent. But science did not keep them altogether from letters. No
+people ever had a greater itch for writing. Look at the length of their
+correspondence, the minuteness of their diaries. And they broke into
+poetry on the slightest provocation. Authorities say that no real poem
+appeared in America before 1800, but the blame lies not alone with
+Philadelphia. It did what it could. Boston may boast of Anne Bradstreet
+who was rhyming before most New Englanders had time for reading, but so
+could Philadelphia brag of Deborah Logan--if Philadelphia ever bragged
+of anything Philadelphian--and I am willing to believe there is no great
+difference between the two poetesses without labouring through their
+verses to prove myself wrong. And the Philadelphian was as prolific as
+any other Colonial in horrible doggerel to his mistress's hoops and
+bows, to her tears and canary birds. And as far as I know, only a
+Philadelphian among Colonial poets is immortalized in the Dunciad,
+though possibly Ralph, Franklin's friend to whom the honour fell, would
+rather have been forgotten than remembered solely because his howls to
+Cynthia made night hideous for Pope. And where else did the young men so
+soon form themselves into little groups to discourse seriously upon
+literature and kindred matters, as they walked sedately in the woods
+along the Schuylkill? Where else was there so soon a society--a
+junto--devoted to learning?
+
+In innumerable ways I could see, once I could see anything, how
+Philadelphia was preparing itself all along for literary pursuits and
+accomplishment. Let me brag a little, if Philadelphia won't. Wasn't it
+in Germantown that the first paper mill of the Colonies was set up?
+Wasn't it there that the New Testament was printed in German--and went
+into seven editions--before any other Colony had the enterprise to print
+it in English, so that Saur's Testament is now a treasure for the
+collector? Isn't it maintained by some authorities, if others dispute
+it, that the first Bible in English was published in Philadelphia by
+Robert Aitken, at "Pope's Head above the Coffee House, in Market
+Street"? And Philadelphia issued the first American daily paper, the
+most important of the first American reviews, the most memorable Almanac
+of Colonial days--can any other compete with Poor Richard's? And
+Philadelphia opened the first Circulating Library--the Philadelphia
+Library is no benevolent upstart of to-day. And Philadelphia publishers
+were for years the most go-ahead and responsible--who did not know the
+names of Cary, Lea, Blanchard, Griggs, Lippincott, knew nothing of the
+publishing trade. And Philadelphia book stores, with Lippincott's
+leading, were the best patronized. And Philadelphia had the monopoly of
+the English book trade, with Thomas Wardle to direct it. And
+Philadelphia held its own views on copyright and stuck to them in the
+face of opposition for years--whether right or wrong does not matter,
+the thing is that it cared enough to have views. There is a record for
+you! Why the literary man had only to appear, and Philadelphia was all
+swept and garnished for his comfort and convenience.
+
+[Illustration: MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN]
+
+And the literary man did appear, with amazing promptness under the
+circumstances. When the demand was for political writers, Philadelphia
+supplied Franklin, Dickinson, and a whole host of others, until it is
+all the Historical Society of Pennsylvania can do to cope with their
+pamphlets. When the demand was for native fiction, Philadelphia produced
+the first American novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, and if
+Philadelphians do not read him in our day, Shelley did in his, which
+ought to be as much fame as any pioneer could ask for. When the need was
+for an American Cookery Book, Philadelphia presented Miss Leslie to the
+public who received her with such appreciation that, in the First
+Edition, she is harder to find than Mrs. Glasse. When, with the years,
+the past rose in value, Philadelphia gave to America an antiquary, and
+John Watson, with his Annals, set a fashion in Philadelphia that had to
+wait a good half century for followers. And when the writer was
+multiplied all over the country and the reader with him, Philadelphia
+provided the periodical, the annual, the parlour-table book, that the
+one wrote for and the other subscribed to--an endless succession of
+them: _The Casket_, _The Gift_, _The Souvenir_, which I have no desire
+to disturb on their obscure shelves; the _Philadelphia Saturday Museum_,
+and _Burton's Gentleman's Magazine_, to me the emptiest of empty names;
+_Sartain's Union Magazine_, which I might as well be honest and say I
+have never seen; _Graham's_, in its prime, unrivalled, unapproached;
+_Godey's Lady's Book_, offering its pages alike to the newest verse and
+the latest mode, the popular magazine that every American saw at his
+dentist's or his doctor's, edited by Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, for a
+woman, then as always, could get where she chose, if she had the mind
+to, without the help of arson and suicide; _Peterson's_, which I recall
+only in its title; _Lippincott's_, in my time the literary test or
+standard in Philadelphia and scrupulously taken in by the Philadelphia
+householder. I can see it still, lying soberly on the centre table in
+the back parlour of the Eleventh and Spruce Street house, never defaced
+or thumbed, I fancy seldom opened, but like everything in the house,
+like my Grandfather himself, a type, a symbol of Philadelphia
+respectability. It was as much an obligation for the respectable
+Philadelphia citizen to subscribe to _Lippincott's_ as to belong to the
+Historical Society, to be a member of the Philadelphia Library, to buy
+books for Christmas presents at Lippincott's or Porter and Coates'. The
+Philadelphian, who had no particular use for a book as a book or, if he
+had, kept the fact to himself, was content to parade it as an ornament,
+and no parlour was without its assortment of pretty and expensive
+parlour-table books, received as Christmas presents, and as purely
+ornamental as the pictures on the wall and the vases on the mantelpiece.
+I know one Philadelphian who carried this decorative use of books still
+further and nailed them to the ceiling to explain that the room they
+decorated was a library, which nobody would have suspected for a moment,
+as they were the only volumes in it.
+
+For the man who had a living to make out of literature, Philadelphia was
+a good place, not to come away from, but to go to, and a number of
+American men of letters did go, though I need hardly add Philadelphia
+made as little of the fact as possible. In Philadelphia Washington
+Irving, sometimes called America's first literary man, published his
+books, but truth compels me to admit that he fared better when he handed
+them over to Putnam in New York; though of late years, the Lippincotts
+have done much to atone for the old failure by their successful issues
+of _The Alhambra_ and _The Traveller_. To Philadelphia magazines, N. P.
+Willis, and there was no more popular American writer, pledged himself
+for months ahead. To Philadelphia, Lowell came from Boston to get work.
+Poe deserted Richmond and the South for Philadelphia, where he
+contributed to Philadelphia magazines, edited them, planned new ones,
+while Philadelphia waited until he was well out of the world to know
+that he ever had lived there. Altogether, when I came upon the scene,
+Philadelphia had had a highly creditable literary past, and was having a
+highly creditable literary present, and, in pursuance of its invariable
+policy, was making no fuss about it.
+
+
+III
+
+As I look back, the three most conspicuous figures of this literary
+present were Charles Godfrey Leland, George Boker and Walt Whitman. All
+three were past middle age, they had done most of their important work,
+they had gained an international reputation. But that of course made no
+difference to Philadelphia. I doubt if it had heard of George Boker as a
+man of letters, though it knew him politically and also socially, as he
+had not lost his interest in society and the Philadelphia Club. My
+Uncle, having no use for society in Philadelphia and saying so with his
+accustomed vigour, and not having busied himself with politics for many
+years, was ignored unreservedly. Walt Whitman, who probably would not
+have been considered eligible for the Assembly and the Dancing Class
+had he condescended to know of their existence, did not exist socially,
+and it is a question if he would have collected round him his ardent
+worshippers from Philadelphia had he not had the advantage of having
+been born somewhere else. If I am not mistaken, this worship had not
+begun in my time, when he was more apt to receive a visitor from London
+or Boston than from Philadelphia.
+
+[Illustration: ARCH STREET MEETING--INTERIOR]
+
+The fact that it was my good fortune to know these three men contributed
+considerably to my new and pleasant feeling of self-importance. When I
+wrote the life of my Uncle a few years ago, I had much to say of him and
+my relations with him at this period, and I do not want to repeat
+myself. But I can no more leave him out of my recollections of literary
+Philadelphia than out of my personal reminiscences. When he entered so
+intimately into my life he was nearer sixty than fifty, but he had lost
+nothing of his vigour nor of his physical beauty--tall, large,
+long-bearded, a fine profile, the eyes of the seer. He was fastidious in
+dress, with a leaning to light greys and browns, and a weakness for
+canes which he preferred thin and elegant. I remember his favourite was
+black and had an altogether unfashionable silver, ruby-eyed dragon for
+handle. On occasions to which it was appropriate, he wore a silk hat; on
+others, more informal, he exchanged it for a large soft felt--a modified
+cowboy hat--which suited him better, though he would not have forgiven
+me had I had the courage to say so to his face, his respect for the
+conventions, always great, having been intensified during his long
+residence in England. It seems superfluous to add that he could not pass
+unnoticed in Philadelphia streets, which did not run to cowboy hats or
+dragon-handled canes or any deviations from the approved Philadelphia
+dress. Nor did his fancy for peering into shop windows make him less
+conspicuous, and as his daily walk was hardly complete if it did not
+lead to his buying something in the shop, were it only a five-cent bit
+of modern blue-and-white Japanese china, this meant that before his
+purchase was handed over to me, as it usually was, his pleasure being
+not in the possession but in the buying, he had parcels to carry, a
+shocking breach of good manners in Philadelphia. In his company
+therefore I became a conspicuous figure myself, and I was often his
+companion in the streets; but to this I had no objection, having been
+inconspicuous far too long for my taste.
+
+[Illustration: FRONT AND CALLOWHILL]
+
+He had written his _Breitmann Ballads_ years before when the verse of no
+other American of note--unless it was Longfellow's and Whittier's and
+Lowell's in the _Biglow Papers_--had had so wide a circulation. He had
+also published one or two of his Gypsy books, never surpassed except by
+Borrow. And he was engaged in endless new tasks--more Gypsy papers, Art
+in the Schools, Indian Legends, Comic Ballads, Essays on Education, and
+I did not mind what since my excitement was in being admitted for the
+first time into the companionship of a man who devoted himself to
+writing, to whom writing was business, who sat down at his desk after
+breakfast and wrote as my Father after breakfast went down to his office
+and bought and sold stocks, who never stopped except for his daily walk,
+who got back to work if there was a free hour before dinner and who,
+after dinner, read until he went to bed. Moreover, he had brought with
+him the aroma, as it were, of the literary life in London. He had met
+many of the people who, because they had written books, were my heroes.
+Here would have been literature enough to transfigure Philadelphia had I
+known no other writers.
+
+
+IV
+
+But, through him, I did know others. First of all, George Boker with
+whom, however, I could not pretend to friendship or more than the barest
+acquaintance. In the streets he was as noticeable a figure as my Uncle,
+though given neither to cowboy hats and dragon-handled canes nor to
+peering into shop windows and carrying parcels. Like my Uncle, he was
+taller than the average man, and handsomer, his white hair and white
+military moustache giving him a more distinguished air, I fancy, in his
+old age than was his in his youth. His smile was of the kindliest, the
+characteristic I remember best. He had returned from his appointments as
+Minister to Russia and Turkey and had given up active political and
+diplomatic life. He had written most of his poems, if not all,
+including the _Francesca da Rimini_ which Lawrence Barrett was shortly
+afterwards to put on the stage, and he impressed me as a man who had had
+his fill of life and work and adventure and was content to settle down
+to the comforts of Philadelphia. He and my Uncle, who had been friends
+from boyhood or babyhood, spent every Sunday afternoon together. My
+Uncle had large spacious rooms on the ground floor of a house in South
+Broad Street where the Philadelphia Art Club now is, and there George
+Boker came Sunday after Sunday and there, if I dropped in, I saw him. I
+had the discretion never to stay long, for I realized that their
+intimate free talk was valued too much by both for them to care to have
+it interrupted. I can remember nothing he ever said--I have an idea he
+was a man who did not talk a great deal, while my Uncle did; my memory
+is of his kindly smile and my sense that here was one of the literary
+friendships I had read of in books. So, I thought, might Dr. Johnson and
+Goldsmith have met and talked, or Lamb and Coleridge, and Broad Street
+seemed tinged with the romance that I took for granted coloured the
+Temple in London and Gough Square.
+
+
+V
+
+Through my Uncle I also met Walt Whitman, and he impressed me still more
+with the romance of literature. He was so unexpected in Philadelphia,
+for which I claim him in his last years, Camden being little more than a
+suburb, whatever Camden itself may think. I could almost have imagined
+that it was for the humour of the thing he came to settle where his very
+appearance was an offence to the proprieties. George Boker was
+scrupulously correct. My Uncle's hat and dragon-handled cane only seemed
+to emphasize his inborn Philadelphia shrinking from eccentricity. But
+Walt Whitman, from top to toe, proclaimed the man who did not bother to
+think of the conventions, much less respect them. You saw it in his long
+white hair and long white beard, in his loose light grey clothes, in the
+soft white shirt unlaundered and open at the neck, in the tall, formless
+grey hat like no hat ever worn in Philadelphia. To have been stopped by
+him on Chestnut Street--a street he loved--would have filled me with
+confusion and shame in the days before literature had become my shop.
+But once literature blocked my horizon, to be stopped by him lifted me
+up to the seventh heaven. If people turned to look, and Philadelphians
+never grew quite accustomed to his presence, my pleasure was the
+greater. I took it for a visible sign that I was known, recognized, and
+accepted in the literary world. And what a triumph in streets where, of
+old, life had appalled me by its emptiness of incident!
+
+In one way or another I saw a good deal of Walt Whitman, but most
+frequently by the chance which increased the picturesqueness of the
+meeting. I called on him in the Camden house described many times by
+many people: in my memory, a little house, the room where I was received
+simple and bare, the one ornament as unexpected there as Walt Whitman
+himself in Philadelphia, for it was an old portrait, dark and dingy, of
+an ancestor; and I wondered if an ancestor so ancient as to grow dark
+and dingy in a frame did not make it easier to play the democrat and
+call every man comrade--or _Camerado_, I should say, as Walt Whitman
+said, with his curious fondness for foreign words and sounds. But though
+I saw him at home, he is more associated in my memory with the
+ferry-boat for Camden when my Uncle and I were on our way to the Gypsy's
+camping place near the reservoir; and with the corner of Front and
+Market and the bootblack's big chair by the Italian's candy and fruit
+stand where he loved to sit, and where I loved to see him, though,
+Philadelphian at heart, I trembled for his audacity; and with the Market
+Street horse-car, where he was already settled in his corner before it
+started and where the driver and the conductor, passing through, nodded
+to him and called him "Walt," and where he was as happy as the modern
+poet in his sixty-horse-power car. He was happiest when sitting out in
+front with the driver, and I have rarely been as proud as the afternoon
+he gave up that privileged seat to stay with my Uncle and myself inside.
+His greeting was always charming. He would take a hand of each of us,
+hold the two in his for a minute or so beaming upon us, never saying
+very much. I remember his leading us once, with our hands still in his,
+from the fruit-stand to the tobacconist's opposite to point out to my
+Uncle the wooden figure of an Indian at the door, for which he professed
+a great admiration as an example of the art of the people before they
+were trained in the Minor Arts.
+
+[Illustration: THE ELEVATED AT MARKET STREET WHARF]
+
+These chance meetings were always the best, and he told us that he
+thought them so, that he loved his accidental meetings with
+friends--there were many he prized among his most valued reminiscences.
+And I remember his story of Longfellow having gone over to Camden
+purposely to call on him, and not finding him at home, and their running
+into each other on the ferry-boat to Market Street, and Longfellow
+saying that he had come from the house deeply disappointed, regretting
+the long quiet talk he had hoped for, but deciding that perhaps the
+strange chance of the meeting on the water was better. My Uncle, had he
+been hurrying to catch a train, would still have managed to talk
+philosophy and art education. But I remember Walt Whitman also saying
+that the ferry and the corner of Market Street and the Market Street car
+were hardly places for abstract discussion, though the few things said
+there were the less easily forgotten for being snatched joyfully by the
+way.
+
+It was one day in the Market Street car that he and my Uncle had the
+talk which left with me the profoundest impression. As a rule I was too
+engrossed in thinking what a great person I was, when in such company,
+to shine as a reporter. But on this occasion the subject was the School
+of Industrial Arts in which I was giving my Uncle the benefit of my
+incompetent assistance. He asked Walt Whitman to come and see it,
+telling him a little of its aims and methods. Whitman refused, amiably
+but positively. I cannot recall his exact words, but I gathered from
+them that he had no sympathy with schemes savouring of benevolence or
+reform, that he believed in leaving people to work out their own
+salvation, and this, coming as it did after I had seen for myself the
+terms he was on with the driver and conductor, expressed more eloquently
+than his verse his definition of democracy. I may be mistaken, but I
+thought then and have ever since that his belief in the people carried
+him to the point of thinking they knew better than the philanthropist
+what they needed and did not need. My Uncle was not of accord with him
+and I, who am neither democrat nor philanthropist, would not pretend to
+decide between them. My Uncle did not like Walt Whitman's attitude and
+refusal, convinced as he was of the good to the people that was to come
+of the reform he was initiating, though he was constitutionally
+incapable of meeting the people he was reforming on equal terms. The
+twinkle in Walt Whitman's eye when he refused gave me the clue to the
+large redeeming humour with which he looked upon a foolish world, seeing
+each individual in the place appointed, right in it, fitting into it,
+unfit for any other he did not make for himself of his own desire and
+courage--the humour without which the human tragedy would not be
+bearable.
+
+I wish I could have had more talk with Whitman, I wish I had been older
+or more experienced, that I might have got nearer to him--or so I felt
+in those old days. I have now an idea that his silence was more
+effective than his speech, that if he had said more to any of his
+devoted following he might have been less of a prophet. But his tranquil
+presence was in itself sufficient to open a new outlook, and it
+reconciled me to the scheme of the universe for good or for ill. His
+personality impressed me far more than his poems. It seemed to me to
+explain them, to interpret them, as nothing else could--his few words of
+greeting worth pages of the critic's eloquent analysis.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII: PHILADELPHIA AND LITERATURE--CONTINUED
+
+
+I
+
+I had glimpses into other literary vistas, but mostly from a respectful
+and highly appreciative distance. How I wish I could recapture even as
+much as the shadow of the old rapturous awe with which any man or woman
+who had ever made a book inspired me!
+
+[Illustration: DR. FURNESS'S HOUSE, WEST WASHINGTON SQUARE, JUST BEFORE
+IT WAS PULLED DOWN]
+
+There was reason for awe when the man was Dr. Horace Howard Furness, the
+editor of Shakespeare, and if Philadelphia knew its duty better than to
+draw attention to so scholarly a performance by a Philadelphian,
+scholars out of Philadelphia, who were not hampered by Philadelphia
+conventions, hailed it as the best edition of Shakespeare there could
+be. I must always regret that in his case I succeeded in having no more
+than the glimpse. Most of my literary introductions came through my
+Uncle who, though he knew Dr. Furness, saw less and less of him as time
+went on, partly I think because of one of those small misunderstandings
+that are more unpardonable than the big offences--certainly they were to
+my Uncle. Dr. Furness' father, old Dr. Furness the Unitarian Minister,
+meeting him in the street one day, asked him gaily, but I have no doubt
+with genuine interest, how his fad, the school, was getting on. My
+Uncle, who could not stand having an enterprise so serious to him
+treated lightly by others, retorted by asking Dr. Furness how his fad
+the pulpit was getting on. The result was coolness. The chances are that
+Dr. Furness never realized the enormity of which he had been guilty, but
+my Uncle could neither forget his jest nor forgive him and his family
+for it. And his heart was not softened until many years afterwards, when
+in far Florence he heard that Dr. Furness wished for his return to
+Philadelphia that he might vindicate his claim, in danger of being
+overlooked, as the first to have introduced the study of the Minor Arts
+into the Public Schools.
+
+Mrs. Wister was another Philadelphia literary celebrity whose work had
+made her known to all America by name, the only way she was known to me.
+It was my loss, for they say she was more charming than her work. But to
+Philadelphia no charm of personality, no popularity of work, could shed
+lustre upon her name, which was her chief glory: literature was honoured
+when a Wister stooped to its practice. On her translations of German
+novels, Philadelphians of my generation were brought up. After _Faith
+Gartney's Girlhood_ and _Queechy_ and _The Wide, Wide World_, no tales
+were considered so innocuous for the young, not yet provided with the
+mild and exemplary adventures of the tedious Elsie. Would the _Old
+Mam'selle's Secret_ survive re-reading, I wonder? The favourites of
+yesterday have a way of turning into the bores of to-day. Not long ago I
+tried re-reading Scott whom in my youth I adored, but his once
+magnificent heroes had dwindled into puppets, their brilliant exploits
+into the empty bombast of Drury Lane and Wardour Street. If Scott cannot
+stand the test, what hope for the other old loves? I risk no more lost
+illusions.
+
+From no less a distance I looked to Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis who, with
+Mrs. Wister, helped to supply the country with fiction, in her case
+original, while her son, Richard Harding Davis, was on the sensational
+brink of his career. And again from a distance I looked to Frank
+Stockton, with no idea that he was a Philadelphia celebrity--very likely
+every other Philadelphian was as ignorant, but that is no excuse for me.
+I had not found him out as my fellow citizen when I saw much of him some
+years later in London, nor did I find it out until recently when,
+distrustful of my Philadelphia tendency to look the other way if
+Philadelphians are distinguishing themselves, I consulted the
+authorities to make sure how great or how small was my knowledge of
+Philadelphia literature. From all this it will be seen that in those
+remote days I was very much on the literary outside in Philadelphia, but
+with the luck there to run up against some of the giants.
+
+Into the vista of the poets chance gave me one brief but more intimate
+glimpse. In a Germantown house--I am puzzled at this day to say whose--I
+was introduced one evening to Mrs. Florence Earle Coates and Dr. Francis
+Howard Williams, both already laurel-crowned, at a small gathering over
+which Walt Whitman presided. In his grey coat and soft shirt I remember
+he struck me as more dressed than the guests in their evening clothes,
+but I remember he also struck me as less at home in the worshipping
+parlour than in the bootblack's corner. The eloquence of his presence
+stands out in my memory vividly, though I have forgotten the name of the
+host or hostess to whom I am indebted for enjoying it, and I think it
+must have been then that I began to suspect there was more of a literary
+life in Philadelphia than I had imagined. I had no opportunity to get
+further than my suspicion, for it was very shortly after that J. and I
+undertook to carry out the plans we had been making on the old bench by
+the river in Bartram's Garden. Walt Whitman I never saw again, and of
+the group assembled about him nothing for many years.
+
+[Illustration: THE GERMANTOWN ACADEMY]
+
+I came into closer contact with writers to whom literature and
+journalism were not merely a method of expression, but a means of
+livelihood. Philadelphia, with its magazines, as with so much else, had
+shown the way and other towns had lost no time in following and getting
+ahead. New York was in the magazine ascendant. _The Century_ and
+_Harper's_ had replaced _Graham's_ and _Godey's Lady's Book_ and
+_Peterson's_. But _Lippincott's_ remained, and though the Editor, after
+his cruel letter of refusal, never deigned to notice me, it was some
+satisfaction to have been in actual correspondence with an author as
+distinguished as John Foster Kirk, the historian of Charles the Bold.
+When _Our Continent_ was labouring to revive the old tradition of
+Philadelphia as a centre of publishers and periodicals, I got as far as
+the editorial office--very far indeed in my opinion--and there once or
+twice I saw Judge Tourgee, who had abandoned his reconstructive mission
+and judicial duties for an editorial post in Philadelphia, and who at
+the moment was more talked about than any American author, his _Fool's
+Errand_ having given him the sort of fame that _Looking Backward_
+brought to Bellamy: ephemeral, but colossal while it lasted. Curiously,
+I recall nothing of the man himself--not his appearance, his manner, his
+talk. I think it must have been because, for me, he was overshadowed by
+his Art Editor, Miss Emily Sartain; my interest in him eclipsed by my
+admiration for her and my envy of a woman, so young and so handsome, who
+had attained to such an influential and responsible post. I thought if I
+ever should reach half way up so stupendous a height, I could die
+content. Louise Stockton, Frank Stockton's sister, and Helen Campbell
+were on the staff, in my eyes amazing women with regular weekly tasks
+and regular weekly salaries. I might argue for my comfort that there was
+greater liberty in being a free lance, but how wonderful to do work that
+an editor wanted every week, was willing to pay for every
+week!--wonderful to me, anyway, who had just had my first taste of
+earning an income, but not of earning it regularly and without fail. My
+Uncle wrote more than once for Tourgee; J. and I contributed those
+articles which were further excuses for our walks together: Judge
+Tourgee, to his own loss, thinking it a recommendation for a contributor
+to be a Philadelphian as he would not have thought had he known his
+Philadelphia better. _Our Continent_ was too Philadelphian to be
+approved in Philadelphia or to be in demand out of it. One symbol of
+literary respectability the town had in _Lippincott's_, and one was as
+much as it could then support. _Our Continent_ came to an end either
+just before or just after J. and I set out on our travels. There were
+other women in journalism who excited my envy. Mrs. Lucy Hooper's
+letters to the _Evening Telegraph_ struck me as the last and finest word
+in foreign correspondence. I never, even upon closer acquaintance, lost
+my awe of Mrs. Sarah Hallowell who was intimately associated with the
+_Ledger_, or of Miss Julia Ewing, though her association with the same
+paper had nothing to do with its literary side.
+
+
+II
+
+Now and then I was stirred to the depths by my glimpse of writers from
+other parts of the world. It was only when a prophet was a home product
+that Philadelphia kept its eyes tight shut; when the prophet came from
+another town it opened them wide, and its arms wider than its eyes, and
+showed him what a strenuous business it was to be the victim of
+Philadelphia hospitality. It was rather pleased if the prophet happened
+to be a lord, or had a handle of some kind to his name, but an author
+would answer for want of something better, especially if he came from
+abroad. No Englishman on a lecture tour was allowed to pass by
+Philadelphia.
+
+Immediately on his arrival, the distinguished visitor was appropriated
+by George W. Childs, who had undertaken to play in Philadelphia the part
+of the Lord Mayor in the City of London and do the town's official
+entertaining, and who was known far and wide for it--"he has entertained
+all the English who come over here," Matthew Arnold wrote home of him,
+and visitors of every other nationality could have written the same of
+their own people passing through Philadelphia. You would meet him in the
+late afternoon, fresh from the _Ledger_ office, strolling up Chestnut
+Street of which he was another of the conspicuous figures--not because
+of any personal beauty, but because he did not believe in the
+Philadelphia practice of hiding one's light under a bushel, and had
+managed to make himself known by sight to every other man and woman in
+the street; just as old Richard Vaux was; or old "Aunt Ad" Thompson,
+everybody's aunt, in her brilliant finery, growing ever more brilliant
+with years; or that distinguished lawyer, Ben Brewster, "Burnt-faced
+Brewster," whose genius for the law made every one forget the terrible
+marks a fire in his childhood had left upon his face. Philadelphia would
+not have been Philadelphia without these familiar figures. Childs seldom
+appeared on Chestnut Street without Tony Drexel, straight from some big
+operation on the Stock Exchange, the two representing all that was most
+successful in the newspaper and banking world of Philadelphia: their
+friendship now commemorated in that new combination of names as
+familiar to the new and changing generation as Cadwallader-Biddle was to
+the old and changeless. Between them it was the exception when there was
+not an emperor, or a prince, or an author, or an actor, or some other
+variety of a distinguished visitor being put through his paces and shown
+life in Philadelphia, on the way to the house of one or the other and to
+the feast prepared in his honour. At the feast, if there was speaking to
+be done, it was invariably Wayne MacVeagh who did it. As I was not
+greatly in demand at public functions, I heard him but once--a memorable
+occasion which did not, however, impress me with the brilliance of his
+oratory.
+
+Matthew Arnold, the latest distinguished visitor, was to lecture, and I
+had been looking forward to the evening with an ardour for which alas! I
+have lost the faculty. Literary celebrities were still novelties--more
+than that, divinities--in my eyes. Among them, Matthew Arnold held
+particularly high rank, one of the chief heroes of my worship, and many
+of my contemporaries worshipped with me. Youth was then, as always,
+acutely conscious of the burden of life, and we made our luxury of his
+pessimism. I could spout whole passages of his poems, whole poems when
+they were short, though now I could not probably get further than their
+titles. There had been a dinner first--there always was a dinner first
+in Philadelphia--and a Philadelphia dinner being no light matter, he
+arrived late. The delay would have done no harm had not Wayne MacVeagh,
+who presided, introduced him in a speech to which, once it was started,
+there seemed no end. It went on and on, the audience growing restless,
+with Matthew Arnold himself an object of pity, so obvious was his
+embarrassment. Few lecturers could have saved the situation, and Matthew
+Arnold would have been a dull one under the most favourable
+circumstances. I went away disillusioned, reconciled to meeting my
+heroes in their books. And I could understand when, years later, I read
+the letters he wrote home, why the tulip trees seemed to have as much to
+do as the people in making Philadelphia the most attractive city he had
+seen in America.
+
+[Illustration: THE STATE HOUSE FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE]
+
+Another distinguished visitor who lectured about this period came off
+more gaily:--Oscar Wilde, to whose lecture I had looked forward with no
+particular excitement, for I was young enough to feel only impatience
+with his pose. After listening to him, I had to admit that he was
+amusing. His affected dress, his deliberate posturings, his flamboyant
+phrases and slow lingering over them as if loth to let them go, made him
+an exhilarating contrast to Matthew Arnold, shocked as I was by a writer
+to whom literature was not always in dead earnest, nor to teach its
+goal, even though it was part of his pose to ape the teacher, the voice
+in the wilderness. And he was so refreshingly enthusiastic when off the
+platform, as I saw him afterwards in my Uncle's rooms. He let himself go
+without reserve as he recalled the impressions of his visit to Walt
+Whitman in Camden and his meeting with the cowboy in the West. To him,
+the cowboy was the most picturesque product of America from whom he
+borrowed hat and cloak and appeared in them, an amazing spectacle. And I
+find in some prim, priggish, distressingly useless little notes I made
+at the time, that it was a perfect, a supreme moment when he talked to
+Walt Whitman who had been to him the master, at whose feet he had sat
+since he was a young lad, and who was as pure and earnest and noble and
+grand as he had hoped. That to Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde seemed "a great
+big splendid boy" is now matter of history.
+
+I know that Philadelphia entertained Wilde, and so I fancy him staying
+with George W. Childs, dining with Tony Drexel, and being talked to
+after dinner by Wayne MacVeagh, though I cannot be sure, as
+Philadelphia, with singular lack of appreciation, included me in none of
+the entertaining. I saw him only in Horticultural Hall, where he
+lectured, and at my Uncle's. This was seeing him often enough to be
+confirmed in my conviction that literature might be a stimulating and
+emotional adventure.
+
+Many interesting people of many varieties were to be met in my Uncle's
+rooms. I remember the George Lathrops who, like Lowell and Poe of old,
+had come to Philadelphia for work: Lathrop rather embittered and
+disappointed, I thought; Mrs. Lathrop--Rose Hawthorne--a marvellous
+woman in my estimation, not because of her beautiful gold-red hair, nor
+her work, which I do not believe was of special importance, but as the
+daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne and therefore a link between me in my
+insignificance and the great of Brook Farm and Concord. I remember
+editors from New York, impressive creatures; and Members of Parliament,
+hangers-on of the literary world of London; and actresses, its lions,
+when in England:--Janauschek, heavily tragic off as on the stage, for
+whom my Uncle's admiration was less limited than mine; and Miss
+Genevieve Ward, playing in _Forget-Me-Not_, her one big success, for she
+failed in the popularity to repeat it that comes so easily to many less
+accomplished. How timidly I sat and listened, marvelling to find myself
+there, feeling like the humble who shall be exalted in the Bible,
+looking upon my Uncle's rooms as the literary threshold from which I was
+graciously permitted to watch the glorious company within.
+
+
+III
+
+I had gone no further than this first, tremulous ardent stage in my
+career when my Uncle deserted his memorable rooms never to return, and
+J. and I started on the journey that we thought might last a year--as
+long as the money held out, we had said, to the discomfort of the family
+who no doubt saw me promptly on their hands again--and that did not
+bring me back to Philadelphia for over a quarter of a century. Of
+literary events during my absence, somebody else must make the record.
+
+[Illustration: "THE LITTLE STREET OF CLUBS," CAMAC STREET ABOVE SPRUCE
+STREET]
+
+When I did go back after all those years, I was conscious that there
+must have been events for a record to be made of, or I could not have
+accounted for the change. Literature was now in the air. Local prophets
+were acknowledged, if not by all Philadelphia, by little groups of
+satellites revolving round them. Literary lights had come from under the
+bushel and were shining in high places. Societies had been industriously
+multiplying for the encouragement of literature. All such encouragement
+in my time had devolved upon the Penn Club that patronized literature,
+among its other interests, and wrote about books in its monthly journal
+and invited their authors to its meetings. During my absence, not only
+had the Penn Club continued to flourish--to such good purpose that J.
+and I were honoured by one of these invitations and felt that never
+again could Fame and Fate bring us such a triumphant moment, except when
+the Academy of Fine Arts paid us the same honour and so upset our old
+belief that no Philadelphian could ever be a prophet in
+Philadelphia!--but Philadelphia had broken out into a multitude of Clubs
+and Societies, beginning with the Franklin Inn, for Franklin is not to
+be got away from even in Clubland, and his Inn, I am assured, is the
+most comprehensive literary centre to which every author, every artist,
+every editor, every publisher who thinks himself something belongs to
+the number of one hundred--that there should be the chance of one
+hundred with the right to think themselves something in Philadelphia is
+the wonder!--and in the house in Camac Street, which one Philadelphian I
+know calls "The Little Street of Clubs," the members meet for light
+lunch and much talk and, it may be, other rites of which I could speak
+only from hearsay, my sex disqualifying me from getting my knowledge of
+them at first hand. And there is a Business and Professional Club and a
+Poor Richard, bringing one back to Franklin again, in the same Little
+Street. And there are Browning Societies, and Shakespeare Societies, and
+Drama-Reforming Societies, and Pegasus Societies, and Societies for
+members to read their own works to each other; and more Societies than
+the parent Society discoursing in the woods along the Schuylkill could
+have dreamed of: with the Contemporary Club to assemble their variously
+divided ends and objects under one head, and to entertain literature as
+George W. Childs had entertained it, and, going further, to pay
+literature for being entertained, if literature expresses itself in the
+form of readings and lectures by those who practise it professionally.
+The change disconcerted me more than ever when I, Philadelphia born, was
+assured of a profitable welcome if I would speak to the Club on
+anything. The invitation was tentative and unofficial, but the
+Contemporary Club need be in no fear. It may make the invitation
+official if it will, and never a penny the poorer will it be for my
+presence: I am that now rare creature, a shy woman subject to stage
+fright. And I cannot help thinking that, despite the amiability to the
+native, the stranger, simply because he is a stranger, continues to have
+the preference, so many are the Englishmen and Englishwomen invited to
+deliver themselves before the Club who never could gather an audience at
+home.
+
+[Illustration: DOWN SANSOM STREET FROM EIGHTH STREET. THE LOW HOUSES AT
+SEVENTH STREET HAVE SINCE BEEN TORN DOWN AND THE WESTERN END OF THE
+CURTIS BUILDING NOW OCCUPIES THEIR PLACE]
+
+And Philadelphia has recaptured the lead in the periodical publication
+that pays, and I found the Curtis Building the biggest sky-scraper in
+Philadelphia, towering above the quiet of Independence Square, a brick
+and marble and pseudo-classical monument to the _Ladies' Home Journal_
+and the _Saturday Evening Post_, and if in the race literature lags
+behind, what matter when merit is vouched for in solid dollars and
+cents? What matter, when the winds of heaven conspire with bricks and
+mortar to make the passer-by respect it? I am told that on a windy day
+no man can pass the building without a fight for it, and no woman
+without the help of stalwart policemen. In her own organ of fashion and
+feminine sentiment, she has raised up a power against which, even with
+the vote to back her, she could not prevail.
+
+And Philadelphia is not content to have produced the first daily
+newspaper but is bent on making it as big as it can be made anywhere. If
+I preserved my morning paper for two or three days in my hotel bedroom,
+I fairly waded in newspapers. On Sundays if I carried upstairs only the
+_Ledger_ and the _North American_, I was deep in a flood of Comic
+Supplements, and Photograph Supplements, and Sport Supplements, and
+every possible sort of Supplement that any other American newspaper in
+any other American town can boast of--all the sad stuff that nobody has
+time to look at but is what the newspaper editor is under the delusion
+that the public wants--in Philadelphia, one genuine Philadelphia touch
+added in the letters and gossip of "Peggy Shippen" and "Sally Wister,"
+names with the double recommendation to Philadelphia of venerable age
+and unquestionable Philadelphia respectability.
+
+And I found that the Philadelphia writer has increased in numbers and in
+popularity, whether for better or worse I will not say. I have not the
+courage for the r�le of critic on my own hearth, knowing the penalty for
+too much honesty at home. Nor is there any reason why I should hesitate
+and bungle and make myself unpleasant enemies in doing indifferently
+what Philadelphia, in its new incarnation, does with so much grace. I
+have now but to name the Philadelphian's book in Philadelphia to be
+informed that it is monumental--but to mention the Philadelphia writer
+of verse to hear that he is a marvel--but to enquire for the
+Philadelphia writer of prose to be assured that he is a genius. There is
+not the weeest, most modest little Philadelphia goose that does not sail
+along valiantly in the Philadelphia procession of swans. The new pose is
+prettier than the old if scarcely more successful in preserving a sense
+of proportion, and it saves me from committing myself. I can state the
+facts that strike me, without prejudice, as the lawyers say.
+
+
+IV
+
+One is that the last quarter of a century has interested the
+Philadelphia writer in Philadelphia as he had not been since the days of
+John Watson. Most Philadelphians owned a copy of Watson's _Annals_. I
+have one on my desk before me that belonged to J.'s Father, one must
+have been in my Grandfather's highly correct Philadelphia house, though
+I cannot recall it there, for a Philadelphian's duty was to buy Watson
+just as it was to take in _Lippincott's_, and Philadelphians never
+shirked their obligations. They probably would not have been able to say
+what was in Watson, or, if they could, would have shrugged their
+shoulders and dismissed him for a crank. But they would have owned the
+_Annals_, all the same. Then the Centennial shook them up and insisted
+on the value of Philadelphia's history, and Philadelphians were no
+longer in fashion if they did not feel, or affect, an interest in
+Philadelphia and its past. After the Centennial the few who began to
+write about it could rely upon the many to read about it.
+
+[Illustration: THE DOUBLE STAIRWAY IN THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL]
+
+Once, the Philadelphian who was not ashamed to write stories made them
+out of the fashionable life of Philadelphia. Dr. Weir Mitchell
+inaugurated the new era, or the revolt, or the secession, or whatever
+name may be given it with the first historical novel of Philadelphia. It
+is fortunate, when I come to _Hugh Wynne_, that I have renounced
+criticism and all its pretences. As a Friend by marriage, if such a
+thing is possible, I cannot underestimate the danger. Only a Friend born
+a Friend is qualified to write the true Quaker novel, and I am told
+by this kind of Friend that _Hugh Wynne_ is not free from
+misrepresentations, misconceptions and misunderstandings. This may be
+true--I breathe more freely for not being able to affirm or to deny
+it--but, as Henley used to say, there it is--the first romantic gold out
+of the mine Philadelphia history is for all who work it. Since these
+lines were written the news has reached me that never again will Dr.
+Mitchell work this or any other mine. I cannot imagine Philadelphia
+without him. When I last saw him, it seemed to me that no Philadelphian
+was more alive, more in love with life, better equipped to enjoy life in
+the way Philadelphia has fashioned it--the Philadelphia life in which
+his passing away must leave no less a gap than the disappearance of the
+State House or the Pennsylvania Hospital would leave in the Philadelphia
+streets. If Dr. Mitchell's digging brought up the romance of
+Philadelphia, Mr. Sydney George Fisher's has unearthed the facts, for
+Philadelphia was the root of the great growth of Pennsylvania which is
+the avowed subject of his history. And the men who helped to make this
+history have now their biographers at home, though hitherto the task of
+their biography had been left chiefly to anybody anywhere else who would
+accept the responsibility, and my Brother, Edward Robins, Secretary of
+the University of Pennsylvania, has written the life of Benjamin
+Franklin, without whom the University would not have been, at least
+would not have been what it is. And in so many different directions has
+the interest spread that my friend since _Our Convent Days_, Miss Agnes
+Repplier, has taken time from her studies in literature and from
+building a monument to her beloved Agrippina to write its story. When
+she sent me her book, I opened it with grave apprehensions. In the
+volumes she had published, humour was the chief charm, and how would
+humour help her to see Philadelphia? I need not have been uneasy. There
+is no true humour without tenderness. If she had her smile for the town
+we all love, as we all have, it was a tender smile, and I think no
+reader can close her book without wanting to know still more of
+Philadelphia than it was her special business in that place to tell
+them. And that no vein of the Philadelphia mine might be left unworked.
+Miss Anne Hollingsworth Wharton has busied herself to gather up old
+traditions and old reminiscences, dipping into old letters and diaries,
+opening wide Colonial doorways, resurrecting Colonial Dames, reshaping
+the old social and domestic life disdained by historians. The numerous
+editions into which her books have gone explain that she has not worked
+for her own edification alone, that Philadelphia, once it was willing to
+hear any talk about itself, could not hear too much. And after Miss
+Wharton have come Mr. Mather Lippincott and Mr. Eberlein to collect the
+old Colonial houses and their memories, followed by Mr. Herbert C. Wise
+and Mr. Beidleman to study their architecture: just in time if
+Philadelphia perseveres in its crime of moving out of the houses for the
+benefit of the Russian Jew and of mixing their memories with squalor. Of
+all the ways in which Philadelphia has changed, none is to me more
+remarkable than in this rekindling of interest out of which has sprung
+the new group of writers in its praise.
+
+Nor were the Philadelphia poets idle during my absence. Dr. Mitchell had
+not before sung so freely in public, nor had he ranked, as I am told he
+did at the end, his verse higher than his medicine. Mrs. Coates' voice
+had not carried so far. Dr. Francis Howard Williams had not rhymed for
+Pageants in praise of Philadelphia. Mr. Harrison Morris had not joined
+the Philadelphia choir. Mr. Harvey M. Watts had not been heard in the
+land. I have it on good authority that yearly the Philadelphia poets
+meet and read their verses to each other, a custom of which I cannot
+speak from personal knowledge as I have no passport into the magic
+circle, and perhaps it is just as well for my peace of mind that I have
+not. Rumour declares that, on certain summer evenings, a suburban porch
+here or there is made as sweet with their singing as with the perfume of
+the roses and syringa in the garden, and I am content with the rumour
+for there is always the chance the music might not be so sweet if I
+heard it. I like to remember that the poets on their porch, whether
+their voices be sweet or harsh, descend in a direct line from the young
+men who wandered, discoursing of literature, along the Schuylkill. And
+Philadelphia's love of poetry is to be assured not only by its own
+singers but by its care, now as in the past, for the song of others.
+Horace Howard Furness, Jr., has taken over his father's task and, in so
+doing, will see that Philadelphia continues to be famous for the most
+complete edition of Shakespeare.
+
+There had been equal activity during my absence among the story-tellers.
+Since Brockden Brown, not one had written so ambitious a tale as _Hugh
+Wynne_, not one had ever laughed so good-humouredly at Philadelphia as
+Thomas A. Janvier in his short stories of the Hutchinson Ports and
+Rittenhouse Smiths--what gaiety has gone out with his death! Not one had
+ever seen character with such truth as Owen Wister,--if only he could
+understand that as good material awaits him in Philadelphia as in
+Virginia and Wyoming. And John Luther Long is another of the
+story-tellers Philadelphia can claim though, like Mr. Wister, he shows a
+greater fancy for far-away lands or to wander among strange people at
+home.
+
+There is no branch of literature that Philadelphia has not taken under
+its active protection. Who has contributed more learnedly to the records
+of the Inquisition than Henry Charles Lea, or to the chronicles of the
+law in the United States than Mr. Hampton L. Carson and Mr. Charles
+Burr, duly conscious as Philadelphia lawyers should be of the
+Philadelphian's legal responsibility? Who can compete in knowledge of
+the evolution of the playing card with Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer or
+rival her collection? Who ever thought of writing the history of
+autobiography before Mrs. Anna Robeson Burr? The time had but to come
+for an admirer to play the Boswell to Walt Whitman, and Mr. Traubel
+appeared. When Columbia wanted a Professor of Journalism, Philadelphia
+sent it Dr. Talcott Williams. When England seemed a comfortable shelter
+for research there was no need to be in a hurry about, Mr. Logan
+Pearsall Smith showed what could be done with an exhaustive study of Dr.
+Donne, though why he was not showing instead what could be done with the
+Loganian Library, where the chance to show it was his for the claiming,
+he alone can say. When such recondite subjects as Egyptian and Assyrian
+called for interpreters, Philadelphia was again on the spot with Mrs.
+Cornelius Stevenson and Dr. Morris Jastrow. And for authorities on the
+drama and history, it gives us Mr. Felix Schelling and Dr.
+McMaster,--but perhaps for me to attempt to complete the list would only
+be to make it incomplete. Here, too, I tread on dangerous ground. It may
+be cowardly, but it is safe to give the tribute of my recognition to all
+that is being accomplished by the University of Pennsylvania and its
+scholars--by Bryn Mawr College and its students--by the Historical
+Society of Pennsylvania--by other Colleges and learned bodies--by
+innumerable individuals--and not invite exposure by venturing into
+detail and upon comment. It is in these emergencies that the sense of my
+limitations comes to my help.
+
+[Illustration: CARPENTER'S HALL, BUILT 1771]
+
+At least I am not afraid to say that, on my return, I fancied I found
+this side of Philadelphia life less a side apart, less isolated, more
+identified with the social side, and the social side, for its part,
+accepting the identification. The University and Bryn Mawr could not
+have played the same social part in the Philadelphia I remember. Perhaps
+I shall express what I mean more exactly if I say that, returning with
+fresh eyes, I saw Philadelphia ready and pleased, as I had not
+remembered it, to acknowledge openly talents and activities it once made
+believe to ignore or despise--to go further really and, having for the
+first time squarely faced its accomplishments, for the first time to
+blow its own trumpet. The new spirit is one I approve. I would not call
+all the work that comes out of Philadelphia monumental, as some
+Philadelphians do, or Philadelphia itself a modern Athens, or the hub of
+the literary universe, or any other absurd name. But I do think that in
+literature and learning it is now contributing, as it always has
+contributed, its fair share to the country, and that if Philadelphia
+does not say so, the rest of the country will not, for the rest of the
+country is still under the delusion that Philadelphia knows how to do
+nothing but sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV: PHILADELPHIA AND ART
+
+
+I
+
+Ignorance of art and all relating to it could not have been greater than
+mine when I paid that first eventful visit to J.'s studio on Chestnut
+Street.
+
+I lay the blame only partly on my natural capacity for ignorance. It was
+a good deal the fault of the sort of education I received and the
+influences among which I lived--the fault of the place and the period in
+which I grew up. Nominally, art was not neglected at the Convent. A
+drawing-class was conducted by an old bear of a German, who also gave
+music lessons, and who prospered so on his monopoly of the arts with us
+that he was able to live in a delightful cottage down near the river.
+Drawing was an "extra" of which I was never thought worthy, but I used
+to see the class at the tables set out for the purpose in the long low
+hall leading to the Chapel, the master grumbling and growling and
+scolding, the pupils laboriously copying with crayon or chalk little
+cubes and geometrical figures or, at a more advanced stage, the
+old-fashioned copy-book landscape and building, rubbing in and rubbing
+out, wrestling with the composition as if it were a problem in algebra.
+The Convent could take neither credit, nor discredit, for the system; it
+was the one then in vogue in every school, fashionable or otherwise,
+and not so far removed, after all, from systems followed to this day in
+certain Academies of Art.
+
+[Illustration: INDEPENDENCE HALL--LENGTHWISE VIEW]
+
+Another class was devoted to an art then considered very beautiful,
+called Grecian Painting. It was not my privilege to study this either,
+but I gathered from friends who did that it was of the simplest: on the
+back of an engraving, preferably of a religious subject and prepared by
+an ingenious process that made it transparent, the artist dabbed his
+colours according to written instructions. The result, glazed and
+framed, was supposed to resemble, beyond the detection of any save an
+expert, a real oil painting and was held in high esteem.
+
+A third class was in the elegant art of making wax flowers and, goodness
+knows why, my Father squandered an appreciable sum of his declining
+fortunes on having me taught it. I am the more puzzled by his desire to
+bestow upon me this accomplishment because none of the other girls'
+fathers shared his ambition for their daughters and I was the only
+member of the class. Alone, in a room at the top of the house--chosen no
+doubt for the light, as if the deeds there done ought not to have been
+shrouded in darkness--I worked many hours under the tuition of Mother
+Alicia, cutting up little sheets of wax into leaves and petals,
+colouring them, sticking them together, and producing in the end two
+horrible masterpieces--one a water-lily placed on a mirror under a glass
+shade, the other a basket of carnations and roses and camelias--both of
+which masterpieces my poor family, to avoid hurting my feelings, had to
+place in the parlour and keep there I blush to remember how long. It
+must be admitted that this was scarcely an achievement to encourage an
+interest in art. For the appreciation of art, as for its practice, it is
+important to have nothing to unlearn from the beginning; mine was the
+sort of training to reduce me to the necessity of unlearning everything;
+and most of my contemporaries, on leaving school, were in the same
+plight.
+
+My eyes were no better trained than my hands. Works of art at the
+Convent consisted of the usual holy statues designed for our spiritual,
+not �sthetic edification; the Stations of the Cross whose merit was no
+less spiritual; two copies of Murillo and Rafael which my Father, in the
+fervour of conversion, presented to the Mother Superior; and a picture
+of St. Elizabeth of Hungary that adorned the Convent parlour, where we
+all felt it belonged, such a marvel to us was its combination of
+brilliantly-coloured needle-and-brush work.
+
+Illustrated books there must have been in the ill-assorted hodge-podge
+of a collection in the Library from which we obtained our reading for
+Thursday afternoons and Sundays. But though I doubt if there was a book
+I had not sampled, even if I had not been able to read it straight
+through, I can recall no illustrations except the designs by Rossetti,
+Millais, and Holman Hunt, made for Moxon's Tennyson and reproduced by
+the Harpers for a cheap American edition of the Poems, a copy of which
+was given to me one year as a prize. Little barbarian as I was, I
+disliked the drawings of the Pre-Raphaelites because they mystified
+me--the Lady of Shalott, entangled in her wide floating web, the finest
+drawing Holman Hunt ever made; the company of weeping queens in the Vale
+of Avalon, in Rossetti's harmoniously crowded design--when I flattered
+myself I understood everything that was to be understood, more
+especially Tennyson's Poems, many of which I could recite glibly from
+beginning to end--and did recite diligently to myself at hours when I
+ought to have been busy with the facts and figures in the class books
+before me. Most people, young or old, dislike anything which shows them
+how much less they understand than they think they do.
+
+Of the history of art I was left in ignorance as abject, the next to
+nothing I knew gleaned from a _Lives of the Artists_ adapted to
+children, a favourite book in the Library, one providing me with the
+theme for my sole serious effort in drama--a three-act play, Michael
+Angelo its hero, which, with a success many dramatists might envy. I
+wrote, produced, acted in, and found an audience of good-natured nuns
+for, all at the ripe age of eleven.
+
+
+II
+
+When I left the Convent for the holidays and eventually "for good,"
+little in my new surroundings was calculated to increase my knowledge of
+art or to teach me the first important fact, as a step to knowledge,
+that I knew absolutely nothing on the subject. In my Grandfather's
+house, art was represented by the family portraits, the engraving after
+Gilbert Stuart's Washington, the illustrated lamp shade, and the Rogers
+Group. My Father, re-established in a house of his own, displayed an
+unaccountably liberal taste, straying from the Philadelphia standard to
+the extent of decorating his parlour walls with engravings of Napoleon
+he had picked up in Paris--to one, printed in colour, attaching a value
+which I doubt if the facts would justify, though, as I have never come
+across it in any collection, Museum, or Gallery, it may be rarer and,
+therefore, more valuable, than I think. Other fruits of his old journeys
+to Paris were two engravings, perhaps after Guys, of two famous ladies
+of that town, whose presence in our prim and proper and highly domestic
+dining-room seems to me the most incongruous accident in an otherwise
+correctly-appointed Philadelphia household. When I think of Napoleon
+replacing Washington on our walls, I suspect my Father of having broken
+loose from the Philadelphia traces in his youth, though by the time I
+knew him the prints were the only signs of a momentary dash for freedom
+on the part of so scrupulous a Philadelphian.
+
+It is curious that illustrations should have as small a place in my
+memory of home life as of the Convent. The men of the Golden Age of the
+Sixties had published their best work long before I had got through
+school, and in my childhood books gave me my chief amusement. But I
+remember nothing of their fine designs. The earlier Cruikshank drawings
+for Dickens I knew well in the American edition which my Father owned,
+and never so long as I live can I see the Dickens world except as it is
+shown in the much over-rated Cruikshank interpretations. Other memories
+are of the highly-finished, sentimental steel-engravings of Scott's
+heroines, including Meg Merrilies, whom I still so absurdly associate
+with Crazy Norah. Another series of portraits, steel-engravings, as
+highly-finished and but slightly less insipid, illustrated my Father's
+edition of Thiers' _French Revolution_ through which, one conscientious
+winter, I considered it my duty to wade. And I recall also the large
+volumes of photographs after Rafael and other masters that, in the
+Eighteen-Seventies, came into fashion for Christmas presents and
+parlour-table books, and that I think must have heralded the new
+departure the Centennial is supposed to have inaugurated.
+
+If I try to picture to myself the interior of the houses where I used to
+visit, art in them too seems best represented by family portraits no
+more remarkable than my Grandfather's, by the engraving of Stuart's
+Washington, or of Penn signing the Treaty with the Indians, or of the
+American Army crossing the Delaware, all three part of the traditional
+decoration of the Philadelphia hall and dining-room, and by a Rogers
+Group and an illustrated lamp shade. The library in which a friend first
+showed me a volume of Hogarth's engravings I remember as exceptional.
+But I have an idea that had I possessed greater powers of appreciation
+then, I should have a keener memory now of other houses full of
+interesting pictures and prints and illustrated books, which I did not
+see simply because my eyes had not been trained to see them.
+
+Certainly, there were Philadelphia collections of these things then, as
+there always have been--only they were not heard of and talked about as
+they are now, or, if they were, it was to dismiss their collecting as an
+amiable fad. Mr. John S. Phillips had got together the engravings which
+the Pennsylvania Academy is to-day happy to possess. People who were
+interested did not have to be told that Mr. Claghorn's collection was
+perhaps the finest in the country; J. was one of the wise minority, and
+often on Sundays took advantage of Mr. Claghorn's generosity in letting
+anybody with the intelligence to realize the privilege come to look at
+his prints and study them; but I, who had not learned to be interested,
+knew nothing of the collection until I knew J. Gebbie and Barrie's store
+flourished in Walnut Street as it hardly could had there not been people
+in Philadelphia, as Gebbie once wrote to Frederick Keppel, who collected
+"these smoky, poky old prints." Gebbie and Barrie have gone, but Barrie
+remains, a publisher of art books, and there are other dealers no less
+important and perhaps more enterprising, who prosper, as one of them has
+recently assured me they could not, if they depended for their chief
+support upon Philadelphia. But Philadelphia gives, as it gave, solid
+foundations of support, with the difference that to-day it takes good
+care the world should know it.
+
+[Illustration: GIRARD COLLEGE]
+
+A few Philadelphians collected pictures. One of the show places, more
+select and exclusive than the Mint and Girard College, for the rare
+visitor to the town with a soul above dancing and dining, was Mr.
+Gibson's gallery in Walnut Street, open on stated days to anybody
+properly introduced, or it may be that only a visiting card with a
+proper address was necessary for admission. The less I say about the
+Gallery the better, for I never went to Mr. Gibson's myself, though I
+knew the house as I passed it for one apart in Philadelphia--one where
+so un-Philadelphia-like a possession as a picture gallery was allowed to
+disturb the Philadelphian's first-story arrangement of front and back
+parlours. The collection can now be visited, without any preliminary
+formalities, at the Academy of Fine Arts. Mrs. Bloomfield Moore was
+still living in Philadelphia and she must have begun collecting though,
+well as I knew the inside of her house in my young days, I hesitate to
+assert it as a fact--which shows my unpardonable blindness to most
+things in life worth while. I never, as far as I remember, went anywhere
+for the express purpose of looking at paintings. I had not even the
+curiosity which is the next best thing to knowledge and understanding. I
+have said how meagre are my impressions of the old Academy on Chestnut
+Street. It is a question to me whether I had ever seen more than the
+outside of the new Academy at Broad and Cherry Streets before I met J.
+To go to the exhibitions there had not as yet come within the list of
+things Philadelphians who were not artists made a point of doing.
+Altogether, judging from my own recollections, Philadelphians did not
+bother about art, and did not stop to ask whether there was any to
+bother about in Philadelphia, or not.
+
+
+III
+
+Their indifference was their loss. The art, with a highly respectable
+pedigree, was there for Philadelphia to enjoy and be proud of, if
+Philadelphia had not been as reticent about it as about all its other
+accomplishments and possessions. I have a decided suspicion that I have
+come to a subject about which I might do well to observe the same
+reticence, not only as a Philadelphian, but as the wife of an artist.
+For if, as the wife of a Friend, I have learned that only Friends are
+qualified to write of themselves, as the wife of an artist I have reason
+to believe it more discreet to leave all talk of art to artists, though
+discretion in this regard has not been one of the virtues of my working
+life. But just now, I am talking not so much of art as of my attitude
+towards art which must have been the attitude of the outsider in
+Philadelphia, or else it would not have been mine. As for the genealogy
+of Philadelphia art, it is, like the genealogy of Philadelphia families,
+in the records of the town for all who will to read.
+
+In the very beginning of things Philadelphia may have had no more
+pressing need for the artist's studio than for the writer's study. But
+it was surprising how soon its needs expanded in this direction. English
+and other European critics deplore the absence of an original--or
+aboriginal--school of art in America, as if they thought the American
+artist should unconsciously have lost, on his way across the Atlantic,
+that inheritance from centuries of civilization and tradition which the
+modern artist who calls himself Post-Impressionist is deliberately
+endeavoring to get rid of, and on his arrival have started all over
+again like a child with a clean slate. Only an American art based on the
+hieroglyphics and war paint of the Indians would satisfy the critic with
+this preconceived idea. But the first American artists were not savages,
+they were not primitives. They did not paint pictures like Indians any
+more than the first American architects built wigwams like Indians, or
+the first American Colonials dressed themselves in beads and feathers
+like Indians. Colonials had come from countries where art was highly
+developed, and they could no more forget the masters at home than they
+could forget the literature upon which they and their fathers had been
+nourished. If years passed before a Philadelphian began to paint
+pictures, it was because Philadelphians had not time to paint as they
+had not time to write. The wonder really is that they began so
+soon--that so soon the artist got to work, and so soon there was a
+public to care enough for his work to enable him to do it.
+
+In a thousand ways the interest of Philadelphians in art expressed
+itself. It is written large in the beauty of their houses and in their
+readiness to introduce ornament where ornament belonged. The vine and
+cluster of grapes carved on William Penn's front door; the panelling and
+woodwork in Colonial houses; the decoration of a public building like
+the State House; the furniture, the silver, the china, we pay small
+fortunes for when we can find them and have not inherited them; the
+single finely-proportioned mirror or decorative silhouette on a white
+wall; the Colonial rooms that have come down to us untouched, perfect in
+their simplicity, not an ornament too many;--all show which way the wind
+of art blew.
+
+There was hardly one of the great men from any American town, makers of
+first the Revolution and then the Union, who did not appreciate the
+meaning and importance of art and did not leave a written record, if
+only in a letter, of his appreciation. Few things have struck me more in
+reading the Correspondence and Memoirs and Diaries of the day. But these
+men were not only patriots, they were men of intelligence, and they knew
+the folly of expecting to find in Philadelphia or New York or Boston the
+same beautiful things that in Paris or London or Italy filled them with
+delight and admiration, or of seeing in this fact a reason to lower
+their standard. The critics who are shocked because we have no
+aboriginal school might do worse than read some of these old documents.
+I recommend in particular a passage in a letter John Adams wrote to his
+wife from Paris. It impressed me so when I came upon it, it seemed to me
+such an admirable explanation of a situation perplexing to critics, that
+I copied it in my notebook, and I cannot resist quoting it now.
+
+[Illustration: UPSALA, GERMANTOWN]
+
+"It is not indeed the fine arts which our country requires," he writes,
+"the useful, the mechanic arts are those which we have occasion for in a
+young country as yet simple and not far advanced in luxury, although
+much too far for her age and character.... The science of government it
+is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of
+legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take place of,
+indeed to exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics
+and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and
+philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy,
+geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce
+and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study
+painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and
+porcelain."
+
+John Adams and his contemporaries may not have had American grandfathers
+with the leisure to earn for them the right to study art, but they did
+not ignore it. All the time they felt its appeal and responded to the
+appeal as well as busy men, absorbed in the development of a new
+country, could. They got themselves painted whenever they happened to
+combine the leisure to sit and a painter to sit to. When a statesman
+like Jefferson, who confessed himself "an enthusiast on the subject of
+the arts," was sent abroad, he devoted his scant leisure to securing the
+best possible sculptor for the statue of Washington, or the best
+possible models for public buildings at home. Much that we now prize in
+architecture and design we owe to the men who supposed themselves too
+occupied with politics and war to encourage art and artists. They were
+not too busy to provide the beauty without which liberty would have been
+a poor affair--not too busy to welcome the first Americans who saw to it
+that all the beauty should not be imported from Europe. "After the first
+cares for the necessaries of life are over, we shall come to think of
+the embellishments," Franklin wrote to his London landlady's daughter.
+"Already some of our young geniuses begin to lisp attempts at painting,
+poetry and music. We have a young painter now studying at Rome."
+
+[Illustration: THE HALL AT CLIVEDEN, THE CHEW HOUSE]
+
+In this care for the embellishments of life, of so much more real
+importance than the necessaries, Philadelphia was the first town to take
+the lead, though Philadelphians have since gone out of their way to
+forget it. The old Quaker lady in her beautiful dress, preserving her
+beautiful repose, in her beautiful old and historic rooms, shows the
+Friends' instinctive love of beauty even if they never intentionally, or
+deliberately, undertook to create it. For the most beautiful of what we
+now call Colonial furniture produced in the Colonies, Philadelphia is
+given the credit by authorities on the subject. Franklin's letters
+could also be quoted to show Philadelphians' keenness to have their
+portraits done in "conversation" or "family" pieces, or alone in
+miniatures, whichever were most in vogue. Even Friends, before Franklin,
+when they visited England sought out a fashionable portrait-painter like
+Kneller because he was supposed the best. Artists from England came to
+Philadelphia for commissions, artists from other Colonies drifted there,
+Peale, Stuart, Copley. Philadelphia, in return, spared its artists to
+England, and the Royal Academy was forced to rely upon Philadelphia for
+its second President--Benjamin West. The artist's studio in Philadelphia
+had become a place of such distinction by the Revolution that members of
+the first Congress felt honoured themselves when allowed to honour it
+with their presence--in the intervals between legislating and dining.
+The Philadelphian to-day, goaded by the moss-grown jest over
+Philadelphia slowness and want of enterprise into giving the list of
+Philadelphia "firsts," or the things Philadelphia has been the first to
+do in the country, can include among them the picture exhibition which
+Philadelphia was the first to hold, and the Pennsylvania Academy which
+was the first Academy of the Fine Arts instituted in America.
+Philadelphia was the richest American town and long the Capital; the
+marvel would be if it had not taken the lead in art as in politics.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV: PHILADELPHIA AND ART--CONTINUED
+
+
+I
+
+By the time I grew up years had passed since Philadelphia had ceased to
+be the Capital, and during these years its atmosphere had not been
+especially congenial to art. But the general conditions had not been
+more stimulating anywhere in America. The Hudson River School is about
+all that came of a period which, for that matter, owed its chief good to
+revolt in countries where more was to be expected of it: in France, to
+first the Romanticists and then the Impressionists who had revolted
+against the Academic; in England to the Pre-Raphaelites who, with noisy
+advertisement, broke away from Victorian convention. Art in America had
+not got to the point of development when there was anything to revolt
+against or to break away from. What it needed was a revival of the old
+interest, a reaction from the prevailing indifference to all there was
+of art in the country.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD WATER-WORKS, FAIRMOUNT PARK]
+
+Some say this came in Philadelphia with the Centennial. The Centennial's
+stirring up, however, would not have done much good had not artists
+already begun to stir themselves up. How a number of Americans who had
+been studying in Paris and Munich returned to America full of youth and
+enthusiasm in the early Eighteen-Seventies, there to lead a new
+movement in American art, has long since passed into history--also the
+fact that one of the most remarkable outcomes of this new movement was
+the new school of illustration that quickly made American illustrated
+books and magazines famous throughout the world. But what concerns me as
+a Philadelphian is that, once more at this critical moment, Philadelphia
+took the lead. The publishers of the illustrated books and magazines may
+have been chiefly in New York, the illustrations were chiefly from
+Philadelphia, and there is no reason why Philadelphia should not admit
+it with decent pride. Abbey and Frost were actually, Howard Pyle and
+Smedley virtually, Philadelphians. Blum and Brennan passed through the
+Academy Schools. J., when I met him, was at the threshold of his career.
+And the illustrators were but a younger offshoot of the new Philadelphia
+group. Miss Mary Cassatt had already started to work in Paris, where
+Jules Stewart and Ridgway Knight represented the older Philadelphia
+school; Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt was already in London; J. McLure Hamilton
+had finished his studies at Antwerp; Alexander and Birge Harrison had
+been heard of in Paris where Sargent--who belongs to Philadelphia if to
+any American town--had carried off his first honours. At home Richards
+was painting his marines; Poore had begun his study of animals; Dana, I
+think, was beginning his water-colours; William Sartain had long been
+known as an engraver; Miss Emily Sartain was an art editor and soon to
+be the head of an art school; the Moran family, with the second
+generation, had become almost a Philadelphia institution; from Stephen
+Ferris J. could learn the technic of etching as from the Claghorn
+collection he could trace its development through the ages; and of the
+younger men and women, his contemporaries, he did not leave me long in
+ignorance.
+
+My own work had led me to the discovery of so many worlds of work in
+Philadelphia, I could not have believed there was room for another. But
+there was, and the artists' world was so industrious, so full of energy,
+so sufficient unto itself, so absorbed in itself, that, with the first
+glimpse into it, the difficulty was to believe space and reason could be
+left for any outside of it. This new experience was as extraordinary a
+revelation as my initiation into the newspaper world. I had been living,
+without suspecting it, next door to people who thought of nothing,
+talked of nothing, occupied themselves with nothing, but art: people for
+whom a whole army of men and women were busily employed,
+managing schools, running factories, keeping stores, putting up
+buildings--delightful people with whom I could not be two minutes
+without reproaching myself for not having known from the cradle that
+nothing in life save art ever did count, or ever could. And at this
+point I can afford to get rid of Philadelphia reticence without scruple
+since through this, to me, new world of work I had the benefit of J.'s
+guidance.
+
+It was a moment when it had got to be the fashion for artists in all the
+studios in the same building to give receptions on the same day, and I
+learned that J.'s, so strange to me at first, was only one of an endless
+number. For part of my new experience was the round of the studios on
+the appointed day, when I was too oppressed by my ignorance and my
+desire not to expose it and my uncertainty as to what was the right
+thing to say in front of a picture, that I do not remember much besides,
+except the miniatures of Miss Van Tromp and the marines of Prosper
+Senat, and why they should now stand out from the confused jumble of my
+memories I am sure I cannot see.
+
+Then J. took me to the Academy of Fine Arts and it was revealed to me as
+a place not to pass by but to go inside of: artists from all over the
+country struggling to get in for its annual exhibition of paintings
+which already had a reputation as one of the finest given in the
+country; artists from all over the world drawn in for its international
+exhibitions of etchings--Whistler, Seymour Haden, Appian, Lalanne, a
+catalogue-full of etchers introduced for the first time to my uneducated
+eyes; everybody who could crowding in on Thursday afternoons to sit on
+the stairs and listen to the music, while I upbraided myself for not
+having known ages ago what delightful things there were to do, instead
+of letting my time hang heavy on my hands, in Philadelphia.
+
+J. had me invited to more private evenings and reunions of societies of
+artists, and I remember--if they do not--meeting many who were at the
+very heart of the machinery that made the wheels of the new movement go
+round:--Mr. Leslie Miller, the director of the School of Industrial Art
+from which promising students were emerging or had emerged; Stephen
+Parrish and Blanche Dillaye and Gabrielle Clements, whose etchings were
+with the Whistlers and the Seymour Hadens in the international
+exhibitions; Alice Barber full of commissions from magazines; Margaret
+Leslie and Mary Trotter in their fervent apprenticeship; Boyle and
+Stephens the sculptors; Colin Cooper and Stephens the painters. What a
+rank outsider I felt in their company! And how grateful I was for my
+talent as a listener that helped to save me from exposure!
+
+
+II
+
+I saw another side of the revival at my Uncle's Industrial Art School in
+the eagerness of teachers and pupils both to know and to learn and to
+practise--an eagerness that had, I fear, an eye to ultimate profit. That
+was the worst feature of the booming of art in the Eighteen-Eighties.
+Gain was the incentive that drove too many students to the art schools
+of Philadelphia as to those of Paris, or London, and set countless
+amateurs in their own homes to hammering brass and carving wood and
+stamping leather. Art was to them an investment, a speculation, a
+gentlemanly--or ladylike--way of making a fortune. An English painter I
+know told me a few years since that he had put quite six thousand pounds
+into art, what with studying and travelling for subjects, and he thought
+he had a right to look for a decent return on his money. That expresses
+the attitude of a vast number of Philadelphians in their new active
+enthusiasm. However trumpery the amount of labour they invested, they
+counted on it to bring them in a big dividend in dollars and cents.
+
+[Illustration: THE STAIRWAY, STATE HOUSE]
+
+I am afraid my Uncle, without meaning to, encouraged this spirit, when
+he started not only the Industrial Art School, but the Decorative Art
+Club in Pine Street. He was an optimist and saw only the beautiful side
+of anything he was interested in. To please him I was made the Treasurer
+of the Club. The Committee sympathised with my Uncle and worked for the
+ultimate good he thought the Club was to accomplish in Philadelphia.
+Mrs. Harrison, Mrs. Mifflin, Mrs. Pepper, Miss Julia Biddle with whom I
+served, agreed with him that women who had some training in art would
+understand better the meaning of art and the pleasure of the stimulus
+this understanding could give. My Uncle, however, always ready to do
+anybody a good turn, went further and was anxious that provision should
+also be made to sell the work done in the Club, which in this way would
+be open to many who could not otherwise afford it. I fancy that this
+provision, if not the success of the Club, was one of its chief
+attractions. The amateur is apt to believe she can romp in gaily and
+snatch whatever prizes are going by playing with the art which is the
+life's work, mastered by toil and travail, of the artist.
+
+I criticise now, but in my new ardour I saw nothing to criticise. On the
+contrary, I saw perfection: artists and students encouraged,
+occupations and interests lavished upon amateurs whose lives had been as
+empty as mine; and I worked myself up into a fine enthusiasm of belief
+in art as a new force, or one that if it had always existed had been
+waiting for its prophet,--just as electricity had waited for Franklin to
+capture and apply it to human needs. I went so far in my exaltation as
+to write an inspired--or so it seemed to me--article on Art as the New
+Religion, proving that the old religions having perished and the old
+gods fallen, art had re-arisen in its splendour and glory to provide a
+new gospel, a new god, to take their place, and I filled my essay with
+ingenious arguments, and liberal quotations from William Morris and
+Ruskin, and rhetorical flights of prophecy. I had not given the last
+finishing and convincing touches to my exposition of the new gospel
+when, with my marriage, came other work more urgent, and I was spared
+the humiliation of seeing my Palace of Art collapse, like the house
+built on sand, while I still believed in it. In the years that followed
+I got to know most of the galleries and exhibitions of Europe; despite
+my scruples I made a profession of writing about art; and the education
+this meant taught me, among other things, the simple truth that art is
+art, and not religion. But I cannot laugh at the old folly of my
+ignorance. The enthusiasm, the mood, out of which the article grew, was
+better, healthier, than the apathy that had saved me from being
+ridiculous because it risked nothing.
+
+
+III
+
+These years away from home were spent largely in the company of artists
+and were filled with the talk of art; what had been marvels to me in
+Philadelphia became the commonplaces of every day. But I was all the
+time in Italy, or France, or England, and could not realize the extent
+to which, for Philadelphians who had not wandered, artists and art were
+also becoming more and more a part of everyday life. I did not see
+Philadelphia in the changing, not until it had changed, and possibly I
+feel the change more than those who lived through it. It is not so much
+in the things done, in actual accomplishment, that I am conscious of it,
+as in the new concern for art, the new attentions heaped upon it, the
+new deference to it. Art is in the air--"on the town," a subject of
+polite conversation, a topic for the drawing-room.
+
+When I first came out, art had never supplied small talk in society,
+never filled up a gap at a dull dinner or reception. We should have been
+disgracefully behind the times if we could not chatter about Christine
+Nilsson and Campanini and the last opera, or Irving and Ellen Terry and
+their interpretation of Shakespeare; if we had not kept up with Trollope
+and George Eliot, and read the latest Howells and Henry James, and raved
+over the Rubaiyat. But we might have had the brand-newest biographical
+dictionary of artists at our fingers' ends--as we had not--and there
+would have been no occasion to use our information. Nobody sparkled by
+sprinkling his talk with the names of artists and sculptors, nobody
+asked what was in the last Academy or who had won the gold medal in
+Paris, nobody discussed the psychology or the meaning of the picture of
+the year. I remember thinking I was doing something rather pretentious
+and pedantic when I began to read Ruskin. I remember how a friend who
+was a tireless student of K�gler and Crowe and Cavalcaselle, as a
+preparation to the journey to Europe that might never come off, was
+looked upon as a sort of prodigy--a Philadelphia phenomenon. But to-day
+I am sure there is not the name of an artist, from Cimabue and Giotto to
+Matisse and Picasso, that does not go easily round the table at any
+Philadelphia dinner; not a writer on art, from Lionardo to Nordau, who
+cannot fill up awkward pauses at an afternoon crush; not one of the
+learned women of Philadelphia who could not tell you where every
+masterpiece in the world hangs and just what her emotions before it
+should be, who could not play the game of attributions as gracefully as
+the game of bridge, who could not dispose of the most abstruse points in
+art as serenely as she settles the simplest squabble in the nursery.
+
+The Academy is no longer abandoned in the wilderness of Broad and Cherry
+Streets; its receptions and private views are social functions, its
+exhibitions are events of importance, the best given in Philadelphia and
+throughout the land, its collections are the pride of the wealthy
+Philadelphians who contribute to them, its schools are stifled with
+scholarships.
+
+[Illustration: UPPER ROOM, STENTON]
+
+The other Art Schools have multiplied, not faster, however, than the
+students whose legions account for, if they do not warrant, the
+existence not of the Academy Schools alone, but of the School of
+Industrial Art, the Drexel Institute, the Woman's School of Design, the
+Uncle's old little experiment enlarged into a large Public Industrial
+Art School where, I am told, the Founder is comfortably forgotten--of
+more institutes, schools, classes than I probably have heard of.
+
+The Art Galleries have multiplied: there is some reason for Memorial
+Hall now that the Wilstach Collection is housed there, and the _Yellow
+Buskin_, one of the finest Whistlers, hangs on its walls, now that the
+collections of decorative art are being added to by Mrs. John Harrison
+and other Philadelphians who are ambitious for their town and its
+supremacy in all things. Nor does this Philadelphia ambition soar to
+loftier heights than in the project for the new Parkway from the City
+Hall with a new Art Gallery--the centre of a sort of University of Art
+if I can rely upon the plans--to crown the Park end of this splendid
+(partially still on paper) avenue, as the Arc de Triomphe crowns the
+western end of the Avenue of the Champs-Elys�es.
+
+The collectors multiply, their aims, purse, field of research, all
+expanding; their shyness on the subject surmounted; Old Masters for whom
+Europe now weeps making their triumphant entry into Philadelphia; the
+highest price, that test of the modern patron, paid for a Rembrandt in
+Philadelphia; the collections of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Widener and Mr.
+Elkins and Mr. Thomas in Philadelphia as well known by the authorities
+as the Borghesi collection in Rome or the Duke of Westminster's in
+London.
+
+The social life of art grows and can afford the large luxurious Club in
+South Broad Street, artists and their friends amply supporting it. And
+the old Sketch Club, once glad of the shelter of a room or so, has
+blossomed forth in a house of its own in the flourishing "Little Street
+of Clubs," with the Woman's Plastic Club close by.
+
+The artists only, as far as I can see, have not multiplied and grown in
+proportion. But the artist somehow appears to be the last consideration
+of those who think they are encouraging art. Still there are new names
+for my old list: Henry Thouron, Violet Oakley, Maxfield Parrish, now
+ranked with the decorative painters--and, I might just point out in
+passing, it is to Philadelphia that Boston, Harrisburg, and at times New
+York must send for their decorators, whose work I have not seen in place
+to express an opinion on it one way or the other. Cecilia Beaux and
+Adolphe Borie now figure with the portrait painters; Waugh and Fromuth
+with the marine painters, who include also Stokes, the chronicler of
+Arctic splendors of sea and sky, and Edward Stratton Holloway, the
+making of beautiful books claiming his interest no less than the sea;
+Glackens, Thornton Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Jessie Wilcox Smith
+with the illustrators; McCarter, Redfield with the group gathered about
+the Academy; Grafly with the sculptors; Clifford Addams, Daniel Garber
+with the winners of scholarships. Architects have not lagged behind in
+the race--after the Furness period, a Cope and Stewardson period, a
+Wilson Eyre period, to-day a Zantzinger, Borie, Medary, Day, Page,
+Trumbauer, and a dozen more periods each progressing in the right
+direction; with young men from the Beaux-Arts and young men from the
+University School, eager to tackle the ever-increasing architectural
+commissions in a town growing and re-fashioning itself faster than any
+mushroom upstart of the West, to inaugurate a period of their own.
+
+
+IV
+
+I am not a fighter by nature, I set a higher value on peace as I grow
+older, and I look to ending my days in Philadelphia. Therefore I
+chronicle the change; I do not criticise it. But a few comments I may
+permit myself and yet hope that Philadelphia will not bear me in return
+the malice I could so ill endure. I think the gain to Philadelphia from
+this new interest has, in many ways, been great. If art is the one thing
+that lives through the ages--art whether expressed in words, or paint,
+or bricks and mortar, or the rhythm of sound,--it follows that the
+pleasure it gives--when genuine--is the most enduring. This is a
+distinct, if perhaps at the moment negative, gain. A more visible gain I
+think comes from the new desire, the new determination to care for the
+right thing: a fashion due perhaps to the insatiable American craving
+for "culture," and at times guilty of unintelligent excesses, but
+pleasanter in results than the old crazes that filled Philadelphia
+drawing-rooms with spinning wheels and cat's tails and Morris
+medi�valism,--if they brought _Art Nouveau_ in their train, thank
+fortune it has left no traces of its passing; a fashion more dignified
+in results than the old standards that filled Philadelphia streets with
+flights of originality, and green stone monsters, and the deplorable
+Philadelphia brand of Gothic and Renaissance, Romanesque and Venetian,
+Tudor and everything except the architecture that belongs by right and
+tradition in Penn's beautiful town.
+
+[Illustration: WYCK--The doorway from within]
+
+But interest in art does not create art, and when Philadelphia believes
+in this interest as a creator, Philadelphia falls into a mistake that it
+has not even the merit of having originated. I have watched for many
+years the attempts to make art grow, to force it like a hot-house plant.
+The same thing is going on everywhere. In England, South Kensington for
+more than half a century has had its schools in all parts of the
+kingdom, the County Council has added to them, the City Corporation and
+the City Guilds have followed suit, artists open private classes,
+exhibitions have increased in number until they are a drug on the
+market, art critics flourish, the papers devote columns to their
+platitudes. And what has England to show as the outcome of all this
+care? Go look at the decorations in the Royal Exchange and the pictures
+in the Royal Academy, examine the official records and learn how great
+is the yearly output of art teachers in excess of schools for them to
+teach in, and you will have a good idea of the return made on the money
+and time and red tape lavished upon the teaching of art. It is no better
+in Paris. Schools and students were never so many, foreigners arrive in
+such numbers that they are pushing the Frenchman out of his own Latin
+Quarter, American students swagger, play the prince on scholarships, are
+presented with clubs and homes where they can give afternoon teas and
+keep on living in a little America of their own. And what comes of it?
+Were the two Salons, with the Salon des Ind�pendants and the Salon
+d'Automne thrown in, ever before such a weariness to the flesh?--was
+mediocrity ever before such an invitation to the pos�ur and the crank to
+pass off manufactured eccentricity as genius?
+
+It would not be reasonable to expect more of Philadelphia than of London
+and Paris. I cannot see that finer artists have been bred there on the
+luxury of scholarships and schools than on their own efforts when they
+toiled all day to be able to study at night, when success was theirs
+only after a hard fight. The Old Masters got their training as
+apprentices, not as pampered youths luxuriating in fine schools and
+exhibitions and incomes and every luxury; they were patronized and more
+splendidly than any artists to-day, but not until they had shown reason
+for it, not until it was an honour to patronize them. The new system is
+more comfortable, I admit, but great work does not spring from comfort.
+Philadelphia is wise to set up a high standard, but not wise when it
+makes the way too easy. For art is a stern master. It cares not if the
+weak fall by the roadside, so long as the strong, unhampered, succeed in
+getting into their own. The best thing that has been done at the Academy
+for many a day is the reducing of the scholarships from a two, or three,
+years' interval free of responsibility, to a summer's holiday among the
+masterpieces of Europe, which, I am told, is all they are now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI: PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE
+
+
+I
+
+If interest in the art of eating called for justification, I could show
+that I come by mine legitimately. My family took care of that when the
+sensible ancestor who made me an American settled in Accomac, where most
+things worth eating were to be had for the fishing or the shooting or
+the digging, so that Accomac feasted while the rest of Virginia still
+starved, and when my Grandfather, in his day, moved to Philadelphia
+which is as well provided as Accomac and more conscientious in
+cultivating its possibilities. It would be sheer disloyalty to the
+family inheritance if I did not like to eat well, just as it would be
+rank hypocrisy to see in my loyalty a virtue.
+
+Accomac's reputation for good eating has barely got beyond the local
+history book, Accomac, I find, being a place you must have belonged to
+at one time or another, to know anything about. But Philadelphia made a
+reputation for its high living as soon as the Philadelphian emerged from
+his original cave, or sooner--read Watson and every other authority and
+you will find that before he was out of it, even the family cat occupied
+itself in hunting delicacies for the family feast. And right off the
+Philadelphian understood the truth the scientist has been centuries in
+groping after: that if people's food is to do them good, they must take
+pleasure in it. The material was his the minute he landed on the spot,
+not the least recommendations of which were its fish and game and its
+convenience as a port where all the country did not produce could be
+brought from countries that did--a spot that, half-way between the North
+and the South, assured to Philadelphia one of the best-stocked markets
+in the world, ever the wonder and admiration of every visitor to the
+town. Pleasure in the material, if history can be trusted, dates as far
+back. A wise man once suggested the agreeable journeys that could be
+planned on a gastronomical map of France--from the Tripe of Caen to the
+Bouillabaisse of Marseilles, from the Ch�teau Margaux of Bordeaux to the
+Champagne of Rheims, from the Ducks of Rouen to the Truffles of
+P�rigord, and so, from one end to the other of that Land of Plenty. I
+would suggest that an agreeable record of Philadelphia might be based
+upon the dinners it has eaten, from the historic dinner foraged for by
+the cat over a couple of centuries ago, to the banquet of yesterday in
+Spruce Street or Walnut, at the Bellevue or the Ritz.
+
+[Illustration: THE PHILADELPHIA DISPENSARY FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE]
+
+I should like some day to write this history myself, when I have more
+space and time at my disposal. I have always been blessed with a healthy
+appetite, a decent sense of discrimination in satisfying it, and also a
+deep interest in the Philosophy of Food ever since I began to collect
+cookery books. The more profoundly I go into the subject, the readier I
+am to believe with Brillat-Savarin that what a man is depends a good
+deal on what he eats. This is why I think that if the Philadelphian is
+to be understood, the study of him must not stop with his politics and
+his literature and his art, but must include his marketing and his bill
+of fare. He has had the wit never to doubt the importance of both, and
+the pride never to make light of his genius for living well.
+
+The early Friends in Philadelphia knew better than to pull a long face,
+burrowing for the snares of the flesh and the devil in every necessity
+of life, like the unfortunate Puritans up in New England. It was not to
+lead a hermit's existence William Penn invited them to settle on the
+banks of the Delaware, and he and they realized that pioneer's work
+could not be done on hermit's fare. They entertained no fanatical
+disdain for the pleasures of the table, no ascetic abhorrence to good
+food, daintily prepared. Brawn and chocolate and venison were Penn's
+tender offering as lover to Hannah Callowhill, olives and wine his
+loving gift as friend to Isaac Norris. For equally "acceptable presents"
+that admirable citizen had to thank many besides Penn. James Logan knew
+that the best way to manage your official is to dine him, and in his
+day, and after it, straight on, no public commissioner, and indeed no
+private traveller, could visit Philadelphia and not be fed with its
+banquets and comforted with its Madeira and Punch, while few could
+refrain from saying so with an eloquence and gratitude that did them
+honour. Benjamin Franklin, keeping up the tradition, was known to feast
+more excellently than a philosopher ought, and his philosophy of food is
+explained by his admission in a letter that he would rather discover a
+_recipe_ for making Parmesan cheese in an Italian town than any ancient
+inscription. The American Philosophical Society could not conduct its
+investigations without the aid of dinners and breakfasts, nor could any
+other Philadelphia Society or Club study, or read, or hunt, or fish, or
+legislate, or pursue its appointed ends, without fine cooking and hard
+drinking--though I hope they were not the inspiration of Thomas
+Jefferson's severe criticism of his fellow Americans who, he said, were
+unable to terminate the most sociable meals without transforming
+themselves into brutes. It was impossible for young ladies and grave
+elders to keep descriptions of public banquets and family feasts and
+friendly tea-drinkings out of their letters and diaries: one reason of
+the fascination their letters and diaries have for Philadelphians who
+read them to-day. And altogether, by the Revolution, to judge from John
+Adams' account of his "sinful feasts" in Philadelphia, and General
+Greene's description of the luxury of Boston as "an infant babe" to the
+luxury of Philadelphia, and the rest of America's opinion of
+Philadelphia as a place of "crucifying expenses," and many more signs of
+the times, the dinners of Philadelphia had become so inseparable from
+any meeting, function, or business, that I am tempted to question
+whether, had they not been eaten, the Declaration of Independence could
+have been signed. But it was signed and who can say, in face of the
+fact, that Philadelphia was any the worse for its feasting? And what if
+it proved a dead weight to John Adams, did Boston, did any other town do
+more in the cause of patriotism and independence?
+
+[Illustration: MORRIS HOUSE, GERMANTOWN]
+
+One inevitable feature of the "sinful feasts" was the Madeira John Adams
+drank at a great rate, but suffered no inconvenience from. I could not
+dispense with it in these old records, such a sober place does it hold
+in my own memories of Philadelphia. The decanter of Madeira on my
+Grandfather's dinner table marked the state occasion, and I would not
+have recognized Philadelphia on my return had the same decanter not been
+produced in welcome. It was an assurance that Philadelphia was still
+Philadelphia, though sky-scrapers might break the once pleasant monotony
+of low, red brick houses and motor horns resound through the once
+peaceful streets.
+
+From the beginning Madeira was one of the things no good Philadelphia
+household could be without--just the sound, dignified, old-fashioned
+wine the Philadelphian would be expected to patronize, respectable and
+upright as himself. Orders for it lighten those interminably long
+letters in the Penn-Logan correspondence, so long that all the time I
+was reading them, I kept wondering which of the three I ought to pity
+the most: Penn for what he had to endure from his people; Logan for
+having to keep him posted in his intolerable wrongs; or myself for
+wading through all they both had to say on the subject. As time went
+on, I do not believe there was an official function at which Madeira did
+not figure. There I always find it--the wine of ceremony, the
+sacrificial wine, without which no compact could be sealed, no event
+solemnized, no pleasure enjoyed. It seems to punctuate every step in the
+career of Philadelphians and of Philadelphia, and I thought nothing
+could be more characteristic, when I read the _Autobiography_ of
+Franklin, than that it should have been over the Philadelphia Madeira
+one Governor of Pennsylvania planned a future for him, and another
+Governor of Pennsylvania later on discoursed provincial affairs with
+him, "most profuse of his solicitations and promises" under its pleasant
+influence. Throughout the old annals I am conscious of that decanter of
+Madeira always at hand, the Philadelphian "as free of it as an Apple
+Tree of its Fruit on a Windy Day in the month of July," one old visitor
+to the town records with a pretty fancy for which, as like as not, it
+was responsible.
+
+And throughout the more modern records, there it is again. Even in the
+old-fashioned Philadelphia boarding-house less than a century ago, the
+men after dinner sat over their Madeira. New generations of visitors,
+like the old, drank it and approved, the Madeira that supported John
+Adams at Philadelphia's sinful feasts helping to steer Thackeray and an
+endless succession of strangers at the gate through Philadelphia's
+course of suppers and dinners. It amuses me to recall, as an instance of
+all it represented to Philadelphia, that for a couple of years at the
+Convent, though a healthier child than I never lived, I was made by the
+orders of my Father, obeyed by no means unwillingly on my part, to drink
+a glass of Madeira, with a biscuit, every morning at eleven. And so
+deep-rooted was its use in the best traditions of Philadelphia
+respectability, that the irreproachable Philadelphia ladies who wrote
+cookery books never omitted the glass of Madeira from the Terrapin, and
+went so far as to quote Scripture and to recommend a little of it for
+the stomach's sake.
+
+
+II
+
+One of these Philadelphia ladies wrote the most famous cookery book to
+this day published in America; a fact which pleases me, partly because,
+with Edward Fitzgerald, I cannot help liking a cookery book, and still
+more because it flatters my pride as a Philadelphian that so famous a
+book should come from Philadelphia. It seems superfluous to add that I
+mean Miss Leslie's _Complete Cookery_. What else could I mean?
+
+There had been cookery books in America before Miss Leslie's. America,
+with Philadelphia to set the standard, could not get on very far without
+them. If in the hurry and flurry of Colonial life, the American did not
+have the leisure to write them, he borrowed them, the speediest way to
+manufacture any kind of literature. There is an American edition of Mrs.
+Glasse, with Mrs. Glasse left out--the American pirate was nothing if
+not thorough. There is an American edition of Richard Briggs who was
+not deprived of the credit of his book, though robbed of his title.
+There are American editions I have no doubt of many besides which I have
+only to haunt the old bookstalls and second-hand book stores of
+Philadelphia assiduously enough to find. But of American cookery books,
+either borrowed or original, before the time of Miss Leslie, I own but
+the stolen Mrs. Glasse and an insignificant little manual issued in New
+York in 1813, an American adaptation probably of an English model to
+which I have not yet succeeded in tracing it.
+
+Nor do I know of any I do not own, and I know as much of American
+cookery books as any of the authorities, and I do not mind saying so, as
+I can without the shadow of conceit. Vicaire includes only two or three
+in his _Bibliographie_; Hazlitt, to save trouble, confined himself to
+English books; Dr. Oxford's interest is frankly in the publications of
+his own country, though, in his first bibliography, he mentions a few
+foreign volumes, and in his second he refers to one American piracy, and
+these are the three chief bibliographers of the Kitchen in Europe.
+American authorities do not exist, when I except myself. It is true that
+G. H. Ellwanger made a list of cookery books, but he threw them together
+anyhow, with no attempt at classification, and his list scarcely merits
+the name of bibliography. The history of the American cookery book is a
+virgin field, and as such I present it to the innumerable American
+students who are turned out from the Universities, year after year, for
+the research work that is frequently of as little use to themselves as
+to anybody else.
+
+[Illustration: THE STATE HOUSE COLONNADE]
+
+But many as may be the discoveries in the future, Miss Leslie cannot be
+dethroned nor deprived of her distinction as the Mrs. Glasse of America.
+Other writers, if there were any, were allowed to disappear; should they
+be dragged out of their obscurity now, it would be as bibliographical
+curiosities, bibliographical specimens. Miss Leslie was never forgotten,
+she survives to-day, her name honoured, her book cherished. She leapt
+into fame on its publication, and with such ardour was the First Edition
+bought up, with such ardour either reverently preserved or diligently
+consulted that I, the proud possessor of Mrs. Glasse in her First
+Edition "pot folio," of Apicius Coelius, Gervase Markham, Scappi, Grimod
+de la Reyni�re, and no end of others in their first Editions, cannot as
+yet boast a First Edition of Miss Leslie. I have tried, my friends have
+tried; the most important book-sellers in the country have tried; and in
+vain, until I begin to think I might as well hope for the Elzevir
+_Patissier Fran�ais_ as the 1837 _Complete Cookery_. It may be hidden on
+some unexplored Philadelphia book shelf, for it was as indispensable in
+the Philadelphia household as the decanter of Madeira. I ask myself if
+its appreciation in the kitchen, for which it was written, is the reason
+why I have no recollection of it in the Eleventh and Spruce Street
+house, well as I remember _Lippincott's_ on the back parlour table, nor
+in my Father's library, well as I recall his editions of Scott and
+Dickens, Voltaire and Rousseau, a combination expressive of a liberal
+taste in literature. But never anywhere have I seen that elusive First
+Edition, never anywhere succeeded in obtaining an earlier edition than
+the Fifty-Eighth. The date is 1858--think of it! fifty-eight editions in
+twenty-one years! Can our "Best Sellers" surpass that as a record? Or
+can any American writer on cookery after Miss Leslie, from Mrs. Sarah
+Joseph Hale and Jenny June to Marion Harland and the Philadelphia Mrs.
+Rorer, rank with her as a rival to Mrs. Glasse, as the author of a
+cookery book that has become the rare prize of the collector?
+
+
+III
+
+It is so proud an eminence for a quiet Philadelphia maiden lady in the
+Eighteen-Thirties and Forties to have reached that I cannot but wish I
+knew more of Miss Leslie personally. From her contemporaries I have
+learned nothing save that she went to tea parties like any ordinary
+Philadelphian, that she was interested in the legends and traditions of
+her town, which wasn't like any ordinary Philadelphian, and that she
+condescended to journalism, editing _The Casket_. There is a portrait of
+her at the Academy, Philadelphia decorum so stamped upon her face and
+dress that it makes me more curious than ever to know why she was not
+the mother of children instead of a writer of books. These books explain
+that she had a literary conscience. In her preface to her _Domestic
+Economy_, which is not an unworthy companion to her _Complete Cookery_,
+she reveals an unfeminine respect for style. "In this as in her Cookery
+Book," she writes, a dignity expressed in her use of the third person,
+"she has not scrupled when necessary, to sacrifice the sound to the
+sense; repeating the same words when no others could be found to express
+the purport so clearly, and being always more anxious to convey the
+meaning in such terms as could not be mistaken than to risk obscuring it
+by attempts at refined phraseology or well-rounded periods." Now and
+then the temptation was too strong and she fell into alliteration,
+writing of "ponderous puddings and curdled custards." But this is
+exceptional. As a rule, in her dry, business-like sentences, it would be
+impossible to suspect her of philandering with sound, or concerning
+herself with the pleasure of her readers.
+
+Her subject is one, happily, that can survive the sacrifice. The book is
+a monument to Philadelphia cookery. She was not so emancipated as to
+neglect all other kitchens. _Recipes_ for Soup _� la Julienne_ and
+Mulligatawny, for Bath Buns and Gooseberry Fools, for Pilaus and
+Curries, are concessions to foreign conventions. _Recipes_ for Oysters
+and Shad, for Gumbo and Buckwheat Cakes, for Mint Juleps and Sweet
+Potatoes, for Pumpkins and Mush, show her deference to ideals cultivated
+by Americans from one State or another. But concessions and deference do
+not prevent her book--her two books--from being unmistakably
+Philadelphian:--an undefinable something in the quality and quantity, a
+definable something in the dishes and ingredients. I know that in my
+exile, thousands of miles from home, when I open her _Complete Cookery_,
+certain passages transport me straight back to Philadelphia, to my
+childhood and my youth, to the second-story back-building dining-room
+and the kitchen with the lilacs at the back-yard door. I read of Dried
+Beef, chipped or frizzled in butter and eggs, and, as of old in the
+Eleventh and Spruce Street house, a delicious fragrance, characteristic
+of Philadelphia as the sickly smell of the ailanthus, fills my nostrils
+and my appetite is keen again for the eight o'clock tea, long since
+given way to the eight o'clock dinner. I turn the pages and come to Reed
+Birds, roasted or baked, and at once I feel the cool of the radiant fall
+evening, and I am at Belmont or Strawberry Mansion after the long walk
+through the park, one of the gay party for whom the cloth is laid. Or
+the mere mention of Chicken Salad sets back the clock of the years and
+drops me into the chattering midst of the Philadelphia five o'clock
+reception, in time for the spread that, for sentiment's sake, is dear to
+me in memory, but that, for digestion's sake, I hope never to see
+revived. Or a thrill is in the dressing for the salad alone, in the mere
+dash of mustard that Philadelphia has the independence to give to its
+Mayonnaise. I am conservative in matters of art. I would not often
+recommend a deviation from French precedent which is the most reliable
+and the finest. But Philadelphia may be trusted to deviate, when it
+permits itself the liberty, with discretion and distinction.
+
+[Illustration: THE SMITH MEMORIAL, WEST FAIRMOUNT PARK]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII: PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE--CONTINUED
+
+
+I
+
+So much of Philadelphia is in Miss Leslie that her silence on one or two
+matters essentially Philadelphian is the greater disappointment.
+
+I have said that when I was young it was the business of the man of the
+house to market and to make the Mayonnaise for the dinner's salad, and I
+have searched for the reason in vain. His appropriation of the marketing
+seems to be comparatively modern. If the chronicles are to be trusted,
+it was the woman's business as late as Mrs. Washington's day. But by
+mine, the man's going to market had settled solidly into one of those
+Philadelphia customs taken for granted by Philadelphians simply because
+they were Philadelphia customs. Never in print have I seen any reference
+to this division of family labour except in the Philadelphia stories of
+Thomas A. Janvier who, as a Philadelphian, knew that it became well
+brought up Philadelphia men to attend to the marketing and that duties
+becoming to them were above explanation. Janvier knew also that only in
+Philadelphia, probably, could it occur to the "master of a feast" to
+dress the salad, and that this was the reason "why a better salad is
+served at certain dinner tables in Philadelphia than at any other
+dinner tables in the whole world." Miss Leslie is not without honour in
+her own town and was there reverenced by no one as truly as by Janvier,
+but his reverence for the Art of Cookery was more profound and he shared
+the belief of the initiated that in it man surpasses as hitherto, I
+regret to say, he has surpassed in all the arts.
+
+Janvier himself was the last "master of the feast" it was my good
+fortune to watch preparing the Mayonnaise. It was a solemn rite in his
+hands, and the result not unworthy--his salads were delicious, perfect,
+original, their originality, however, never pushed to open defiance of
+the Philadelphia precedents he respected. One of my pleasantest memories
+of him is of his salad-making at his own dinner table in his London
+rooms, one or two friends informally gathered about him, and the summer
+evening so warm that he appeared all in white--a splendid presence, for
+he was an unusually handsome man, of the rich, flamboyant type that has
+gone out of fashion almost everywhere except in the South of France. The
+white added, somehow, to the effect of ceremony, and he lingered over
+every stage of the preparation and the mixing,--the Philadelphia touch
+of mustard not omitted,--with due gravity and care. How different the
+salad created with this ceremony from the usual makeshift mixed nobody
+knows how or where!
+
+[Illustration: THE BASIN, OLD WATER-WORKS]
+
+That the Philadelphia man should have accepted this responsibility,
+explains better than I could how high is the Philadelphia standard. I
+could not understand Miss Leslie's silence on the subject, did I not
+suspect her of a disapproval as complete as her Cookery. She had no
+new-fangled notions on the position of woman, no desire to dispute man's
+long-established superiority. If she was willing to teach women how to
+become accomplished housewives, it was that they might administer to the
+comfort and satisfy the appetite of their fathers and brothers and
+husbands and sons. The end of woman, according to her creed, is to make
+the home agreeable for man, and it would save us many of to-day's
+troubles if we agreed with her. No man, since it is to his advantage,
+will blame her for being more orthodox as a woman than as a
+Philadelphian, nor is it at very great cost that I forgive her. I prize
+her book too much from the collector's standpoint, if from no other, to
+resent its sentiment. And my joy in my copy--in my Fifty-eighth
+Edition--is none the less because it was presented to me by Janvier who,
+in a few short stories, gave the spirit of the Philadelphia feast as
+Miss Leslie, in two substantial volumes, collected and classified its
+materials.
+
+Another thing I do not find in Miss Leslie is the Oyster Croquette,
+which she could not have ignored had she once eaten it. Therefore I am
+led to see in it the product of a generation nearer my own. In my
+memories of childhood it is inseparable from my Grandmother's eight
+o'clock tea on evenings when the family were invited in state--in my
+memories of youth inseparable from every afternoon or evening party at
+which I feasted fearlessly and well--and it figured at many a Sunday
+high-tea, that exquisite feast which, by its very name, refuses to let
+itself be confounded with its coarser counterpart known to the English
+as a meat-tea. From these facts I conclude, though I have no other data
+to rely upon, that the Oyster Croquette must have been not simply the
+masterpiece, but the creation of Augustine, for the Oyster Croquette
+which the well-brought-up Philadelphian then ate at moments of rejoicing
+was always of his cooking.
+
+
+II
+
+Augustine--the explanation is superfluous for Philadelphians of my
+age--was a coloured man with the genius of his race for cookery and
+probably a drop or more of the white blood that developed in him also
+the genius for organization, so that he was a leader among caterers, as
+well as a master among cooks. It is worth noting that the demand for
+cooks in Philadelphia being great, the greatest cooks in America never
+failed to supply it: worth noting also that the Philadelphia housewife,
+being thus well supplied, had not begun when I was young to amuse
+herself with the chafing-dish as she does now. For many years,
+Augustine's name and creations were the chief distinction of every
+Philadelphia feast. To have entertained without his assistance would
+have been as serious a crime as to have omitted Terrapin--in season--and
+Ice-cream from the Philadelphia menu; as daring as to have gone for
+chocolates anywhere save to P�nas' or for smilax anywhere save to
+Pennock's, and this sort of daring in Philadelphia would have been
+deplored not as harmless originality, but as eccentricity in the worst
+possible taste. Thanks to Augustine, Philadelphia became celebrated in
+America for its Oyster Croquettes and Terrapin and Broiled Oysters--what
+a work of genius this, with the sauce of his invention!--as Bresse is in
+France for its Chickens, or York in England for its Hams.
+
+So much I know about him, and no more--but his name should go down in
+history with those of Vatel and Car�me and Gouff�: an artist if ever
+there was one! Because he did not commit suicide like Vatel--his oysters
+were never late--because he did not write encyclopedias of cookery like
+Car�me and Gouff�, his name and fame are in danger of perishing unless
+every Philadelphian among my contemporaries hastens to lay a laurel leaf
+upon his grave. I fear nothing as yet has been done to preserve his
+memory. His name survives on the simple front of a South Fifteenth
+Street house, where I saw it and rejoiced when I was last at home and,
+in compliment to him, went inside and ate my lunch in the demure light
+of a highly respectable dining-room in the society of a dozen or more
+highly respectable Philadelphians seated at little tables. I could not
+quarrel with my lunch--it was admirably cooked and served--but it was an
+everyday lunch, not the occasional feast--the Augustine of old did not
+cook the ordinary meal and the Fifteenth Street house is too modest to
+be accepted as the one and only monument to his memory.
+
+[Illustration: GIRARD STREET]
+
+The Oyster Croquette could not have sprung up in a day and triumphed
+were Philadelphia as hide-bound with convention as it is supposed to be.
+Philadelphia is conservative in matters of cookery when conservatism
+means clinging to its great traditions; it is liberal when liberality
+means adapting to its own delightful ends the new idea or the new
+masterpiece. It never ceased to be sure of its materials nor of their
+variety, the Philadelphia market half way between North and South
+continuing to provide what is best in both: the meats of the finest--the
+fattest mutton he ever saw, Cobbett, though an Englishman, found in
+Philadelphia--its fruits and vegetables of the most various, its butter,
+good Darlington butter, famed from one end of the land to the other. And
+in the preparation of its materials, for the sake of eating better,
+Philadelphians never have hesitated to take their good where they have
+found it. Dishes we prize as the most essentially Philadelphian have
+sometimes the shortest pedigree. Why, the Ice-cream that is now one of
+Philadelphia's most respected institutions, came so recently that people
+we, of my generation, knew could remember its coming. On my return to
+Philadelphia, with the advantage the perspective absence gives, I could
+appreciate more clearly than if I had stayed at home how well
+Philadelphia eats and how nobly it has maintained its old ideals, how
+nobly accepted new ones. It has not wavered in the practice of eating
+well and taking pleasure in the eating--the reputation of giving good
+dinners is, as in my youth, the most highly prized. To quote Janvier:
+"The person who achieves celebrity of this sort in Philadelphia is not
+unlike the seraph who attains eminence in the heavenly choir." But I am
+conscious of a latitude that would not have been allowed before in the
+choice of a place to eat them in, and amazed at the number of new
+dishes.
+
+
+III
+
+The back-building dining-room was the one scene I knew for the feast. If
+I were a man I could tell a different tale. As a woman I used to
+hear--all Philadelphia women used to hear--of colossal masculine
+banquets at the Philadelphia Club and the Union League, of revels at the
+Clover Club, of fastidious feasts at more esoteric clubs--the State in
+Schuylkill, the Fish-House Club, and what were the others?--clubs
+carrying on the great Colonial traditions, perpetuating the old Colonial
+Punch as zealously as the Vestal Virgins watched their sacred fire,
+observing mystic practices in the Kitchen, the Philadelphia man himself,
+it was said, putting on the cook's apron, presiding over grills and
+saucepans, and serving up dishes of such exquisite quality as it has not
+entered into the mind of mere woman to conceive or to execute: with the
+true delicacy of the gourmet choosing rather to consecrate his talents
+to the one perfect dish than to squander them upon many, shrinking as an
+artist must from the plebeian "groaning-board" of the gluttonous
+display. To stories of these marvels I listened again and again, but my
+only knowledge of them is based on hearsay. I would as soon have
+expected to be admitted to Mount Athos or to the old Chartreuse as to
+banquets and feasts and revels so purely masculine; to ask for the vote
+would have seemed less ambitious than to pray for admission. What folly
+then it would be for me to pretend to describe them! What presumption to
+affect a personal acquaintance I have not and could not have! Into what
+pitfalls of ignorance would I stumble! It is for the Philadelphia man
+some day to write this particular chapter in the history of Philadelphia
+at Table.
+
+As to the Philadelphia woman at the period of which I speak, she had no
+Clubs. It was not supposed to be good form for her to feast outside of
+the back-building dining-room. She might relieve her hunger with Oysters
+in Jones's dingy little shop, or a plate of Ice-cream in Sautter's
+sombre saloon; or, with a boating party in spring or summer, she might
+go for dinner or supper to one of the restaurants in the Park. But for
+more serious entertaining, home, or her friends' home, was the place.
+Not that she was, as the fragile, fainting Angelina type once admired,
+too ethereal to think of food and drink. She could order and eat a
+luncheon, or a dinner, with the best, though she did not do the
+marketing or make the Mayonnaise. But she would rather have gone without
+food than defy the unwritten Philadelphia law.
+
+[Illustration: THE UNION LEAGUE, FROM BROAD AND CHESTNUT STREETS]
+
+Now Philadelphia has changed all that. The wise remain faithful to the
+back-building dining-room and, within its grave and tranquil walls, on
+its substantial leather-covered chairs, Stuart's Washington looking down
+from his place above the mantelpiece, they continue to feast with a
+luxury Lucullus might have envied. Fashion, however, drives the less
+wise to more frivolous scenes. I never thought to see the day when I
+should, in Philadelphia, lunch at a large, well-appointed, luxurious
+woman's club, when I should be invited to feast at the Union League--my
+lunch there was one of the most extraordinary of all my extraordinary
+experiences on my return to Philadelphia--when the cloth for my dinner
+would be laid in a big, gay, noisy, crowded Country Club--and yet the
+miracle had been worked in my absence and I saw not the day, but the
+many days when these things happened. Not only this. In Clubs and
+Country Clubs a degree of privacy is still assured. But it is a degree
+too much, to judge from the way Philadelphia rushes to lunch, and dine,
+and drink the tea it does not want at five o'clock, in hotels and
+restaurants: our little secluded oyster saloons exchanged for dazzling
+lunch counters, the Spruce and Pine and Walnut Street house that could
+not be except in Philadelphia deserted for the Ritz and the Bellevue
+that might be in New York or Chicago, Paris or London, Vienna or Rome.
+The old fashion was to celebrate the feast in cloistered seclusion, to
+let none intrude who was not bidden to share it. Now the fashion is to
+cry out and summon the mob and the multitude to gaze upon Philadelphia
+feasting. I know that this is in a measure the result of a change that
+is not peculiar to Philadelphia alone. All the world to-day, wherever
+you go, dines in public--the modern Dives must always dine where his
+Lazarus cannot possibly mistake the gate. But I could not have believed
+that Philadelphia would come to it--that Philadelphia would step out
+from the sanctuary into the market-place and proclaim to the passer-by
+the luxury he had once so scrupulously kept to himself.
+
+
+IV
+
+Nor is the feast quite what it was, though this is not because it has
+lost, but rather because it has gained. I trembled on my return lest the
+old gods be fallen. My first visit after long years away was one of a
+few hours only. I ran over from New York to lunch with old friends.
+There was a horrid moment of bewilderment when I stepped from the
+Pennsylvania Station into a street where I ought to have been at home
+and was not, and this made me dread that at the luncheon the change
+would be more overwhelming. Certain things belong to, are a part of,
+certain places that can never be the same without them. I met a
+Frenchman the other day in London, who had not been there for ten years,
+and who was in despair because at no hotel or restaurant could he find a
+gooseberry or an apple tart. They were not dishes of which he was warmly
+enamoured; no Frenchman could be; but a London shorn of gooseberry and
+apple tarts was not the London he had known. The dread of the same
+disillusionment was in my heart as I drew near my luncheon, more serious
+in my case because the things I did not want to lose were too good to
+lose. But my dread was wasted. Broad Street might have changed, but not
+the Chicken Salad with the Philadelphia dash of mustard in the
+Mayonnaise, not the Croquettes though Augustine had gone, not the
+Ice-cream rising before me in the splendid pyramid of my childhood with
+the solid base of the Coffee Ice-cream I had never gone to Sautter's
+without ordering. And I knew that hope need not be abandoned when I was
+assured that, though Sautter's have opened a big new place on Chestnut
+Street, where a long _menu_ disputes the honours with their one old
+masterpiece, it is to the gloomy store in the retirement of Broad and
+Locust that the Philadelphia woman, who gives a dinner, sends for her
+Ice-cream.
+
+These things were unaltered--they are unalterable. All the old friends
+reappeared at the breakfasts, luncheons and dinners that followed in the
+course of the longer visit when, not the Fatted Calf, but the Fatted
+Shad, Soft-Shell Crab, Fried Oyster, Squab--how the name mystified my
+friend, George Steevens, though he had but to open an old English
+cookery book in my collection to know that in England, before he was
+born, a Squab was a young Pigeon--Broiled Chicken, Cinnamon Bun, little
+round Cakes with white icing on top, were prepared for the prodigal. But
+there were other dishes, other combinations new to me: Grape Fruit had
+come in during my absence, though long enough ago to have reached
+England in the meanwhile; also the fashion of serving Shad and
+Asparagus together, the _dernier cri_ of the Philadelphia epicure,
+though--may I admit it now as I have not dared to before?--a combination
+in which I thought two delicate flavours were sacrificed, one to the
+other. And there were amazing combinations in the Salads, daring,
+strange, unPhiladelphian, calling for the French Dressing for which my
+Philadelphia had small use. I so little liked the new sign of the new
+Sundae at the new popular lunch-counter and druggist's that, with true
+Philadelphia prejudice, I never sampled it. And there were other
+innovations I would need to write a cookery book to exhaust--sometimes
+successful, sometimes not, but with no violation of the canons of the
+art in which Philadelphia has ever excelled. In every experiment, every
+novelty, the motive, if not the result, was sound.
+
+For this reason I have no fear for the future of Philadelphia cookery,
+if only it has the courage not to succumb unreservedly to cold storage.
+The changes may be many, but Philadelphia knows how to sift them,
+retaining only those that should be retained, for beneath them all is
+the changelessness that is the foundation of art.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII: PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY
+
+
+I
+
+I confess to a good deal of emotion as the train slowed up in the
+Pennsylvania Station, and I think I had a right to it. It is not every
+day one comes home after a quarter of a century's absence, and at the
+first glance everything was so bewilderingly home-like. Not that I had
+not had my misgivings as the train neared Philadelphia. From the car
+windows I had seen my old Convent at Torresdale transformed beyond
+recognition, many new stations with new names by the way, rows and rows
+of houses where I remembered fields, Philadelphia grown almost as big as
+London to get into, a new, strange, unbelievable sky-line to the town,
+the bridges multiplied across the Schuylkill--change after change where
+I should have liked to find everything, every house, field, tree, blade
+of grass even, just as I had left it. But what change there might be in
+the station kept itself, for the moment anyway, discreetly out of sight.
+For all the difference I saw, I might have been starting on the journey
+that had lasted over a quarter of a century instead of returning from
+it.
+
+This made the shock the greater when, just outside in Market Street, I
+was met by a company of mounted policemen. It is true they were there
+to welcome not me, but the President of the United States who was due by
+the next train, and were supported by the City Troop, as indispensable a
+part of my Philadelphia as the sky over my head and the bricks under my
+feet; true also that, well-uniformed, well-mounted, well-groomed as they
+were, I felt they would be a credit to any town. But the shock was to
+find them there at all. Philadelphia in my day could not have run, or
+would not have wanted to run, to anything so officially imposing; that
+it could and did now was a warning there was no mistaking. Whatever
+Philadelphia might have developed, or deteriorated, into, it was not any
+longer the Philadelphia I had known and loved.
+
+It was the same sort of warning all the way after that. Wherever I went,
+wherever I turned, I stumbled upon an equally impossible jumble of the
+familiar and the unfamiliar. At times, I positively ached with the joy
+of finding places so exactly as I remembered them that I caught myself
+saying, just here "this" happened, or "that," as I and my Youth met
+ourselves; at others I could have cried for the absurdity, the tragedy,
+of finding everything so different that never in a foreign land had I
+seemed more hopelessly a foreigner.
+
+[Illustration: BROAD STREET STATION]
+
+I did not have to go farther than my hotel for a reminder that
+Philadelphia, to oblige me, had not stood altogether still during my
+quarter of a century's absence, but had been, and was, busy refashioning
+itself into something preposterously new. From one of my high windows I
+might look down to the Philadelphia Library and the Episcopal
+Academy,--those two bulwarks of Philadelphia respectability--and beyond,
+stretching peacefully away to the peaceful curves of the Delaware, to a
+wide plain of flat red roofs and chimneys, broken by the green lines of
+the trees that follow the straight course of Philadelphia's streets and
+by the small green spaces of the trees that shade Philadelphia's
+back-yards: level and lines and spaces I knew as well as a lesson learnt
+by heart. But, from the midst of this red plain of roofs, huge high
+buildings, like towers, that I did not know, sprang up into the blue
+air, increasing in number as my eye wandered northward until, from the
+other window, I saw them gathered into one great, amazing, splendid
+group with William Penn, in full-skirted coat and broad-brimmed hat,
+springing still higher above them.
+
+When I went down into the streets, I might walk for a minute or two
+between rows of the beloved old-fashioned red brick houses, with their
+white marble steps and their white shutters below and green above, and
+then, just as exultantly I began to believe them changeless as the
+Pyramids and the Sphinx, I would come with a jar upon a Gothic gable, an
+absurd turret, a Renaissance doorway, a fa�ade disfigured by a hideous
+array of fire escapes, a sham Colonial house, or some other upstart that
+dated merely from yesterday or the day before. And here and there a
+sky-scraper of an apartment house swaggered in the midst of the little
+"homes" that were Philadelphia's pride--the last new one, to my dismay,
+rearing its countless stories above the once inviolate enclosure of
+Rittenhouse Square.
+
+When I went shopping in Chestnut Street my heart might rejoice at the
+sight of some of the well remembered names--Dreka, Darlington, Bailey,
+Caldwell, as indispensable in my memory as that of Penn himself--but it
+sank as quickly in the vain search for the many more that have
+disappeared, or indeed, for the whole topsy-turvy order of things that
+could open the big new department stores into Market Street and make it
+the rival of Chestnut as a shopping centre, or that could send other
+stores up to where stores had never ventured in my day: stores in Walnut
+Street as high as Eighteenth, a milliner's in Locust Street almost under
+the shadow of St. Mark's, a stock-broker at the corner of Fifteenth and
+Walnut, Hughes and M�ller--I need tell no Philadelphian who Hughes and
+M�ller are even if they have unkindly made two firms of the old
+one--within a stone's throw of Dr. Weir Mitchell's house; when I saw
+that I felt that sacrilege could go no further.
+
+[Illustration: WANAMAKER'S]
+
+For sentiment's sake, I might eat my plate of ice-cream at the old
+little marble-topped table in the old Locust Street gloom at Sautter's,
+or buy cake at Dexter's at the old corner in Spruce Street, but Mrs.
+Burns with her ice-cream, Jones with his fried oysters, had vanished,
+gone away in the _Ewigkeit_ as irrevocably as Hans Breitmann's Barty or
+the snows of yester-year. And Wyeth's and Hubbell's masqueraded under
+other names, and Shinn, from whom we used to buy our medicines, was
+dead, and the new firm sold cigars with their ice-cream sodas, and my
+Philadelphia was stuffed with saw-dust.
+
+Not a theatre was as I had left it, new ones I had never heard of
+drawing the people who used to crowd the Chestnut, which has rung down
+its curtain on the last act of its last play even as I write; the Arch,
+given over now, alas! to the "Movies" and the "Movies" threaten the end
+of the drama not only at the Arch but at all theatres forever;
+well-patronized houses flourishing in North Broad Street; the staid
+Academy of Music thrown into the shadow by its giddy prosperous upstart
+of a rival up-town.
+
+Vanished were old landmarks for which I confidently looked--the United
+States Mint from Chestnut Street; from Broad and Walnut the old yellow
+Dundas House with the garden and the magnolia for whose blossoming I had
+once eagerly watched with the coming of spring; from Thirteenth and
+Locust the old Paterson House, turned into the new, imposing, very much
+criticised building of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; from
+Eleventh and Spruce, that other garden overlooked by the windows of the
+house my Grandfather built and lived in, as my Father did after him,
+and, to me more cruel, the house itself passed into other hands, grown
+shabby with time, and the sign "For Sale" hanging on its neglected
+walls. Change, change, change--that was what I had come home for!
+
+
+II
+
+I am not sure, however, that I had not the worst shock of all when I
+wandered from the old home, further down Spruce Street, below the
+beautiful Eighteenth Century Hospital, dishonoured now and shut in on
+the Spruce Street side by I hardly know what in the way of new wings and
+wards. As I had left it, this lower part of Spruce and Pine and the
+neighbouring streets, had changed less perhaps than any other part of
+the town--has changed less to-day in mere bricks and mortar. It had
+preserved the appropriate background for its inheritance of history and
+traditions. Numerous Colonial houses remained and upon them those of
+later date were modelled. It had kept also the serenity and repose of
+the Quaker City's early days, the character, dignity, charm. Many old
+Philadelphia families had never moved away. It was clean as a little
+Dutch town with nothing to interrupt the quiet but the gentle jingling
+of the occasional leisurely horse-car.
+
+[Illustration: ST. PETER'S CHURCHYARD]
+
+And what did I find it?--A slum, captured by the Russian Jew, the old
+houses dirty, down-at-the-heel; the once spotless marble steps unwashed,
+the white shutters hanging loose; the decorative old iron hinges and
+catches and insurance plaques or badges rusting, and nobody can say how
+much of the old woodwork inside burned for kindling; Yiddish signs in
+the windows, with here a Jewish Maternity Home, and there a Jewish
+newspaper office; at every door, almost every window, and in groups in
+the street, men, women and children with Oriental faces, here and there
+a man actually in his caftan, bearded, with the little curls in front of
+his ears, and a woman with a handkerchief over her head, and all
+chattering in Yiddish and slatternly and dirty as I remembered them in
+South-Eastern Europe, from Carlsbad and Prague to those remote villages
+of Transylvania where dirt was the sign by which I always knew when the
+Jewish quarter was reached. A few patriotic Philadelphians have recently
+returned hoping to stem the current, and their houses shine with
+cleanliness. In Fourth Street the dignified Randolph House, which the
+family never deserted, seems to protest against the wholesale surrender
+to the foreign invasion. In Pine Street, St. Peter's, with its green
+graveyard, has survived untarnished the surrounding desecration. But I
+could only wonder how long the church and these few houses will be able
+to withstand the triumphing alien, and I abandoned hope when, at the
+very gate of St. Peter's, a woman with a handkerchief tied over her head
+stopped me to ask the way to "_Zweit und Pine_."
+
+
+III
+
+I know that the same thing is going on in almost all the older parts of
+the United States, and the new parts too--I know that some small New
+England towns can support their two and three Polish newspapers, that
+New York swarms with people who talk any and every language under the
+sun except English, and can boast, if it is a thing to boast of, more
+Italians than Rome, more Jews than Jerusalem; that San Francisco has its
+Chinatown, that the Middle West abounds in German and Swedish
+settlements--in a word, I know that everywhere throughout the country,
+the native American is retreating before this invasion of the alien. But
+it is with a certain difference in Philadelphia. Have I not said that
+one of the absurdities of my native town--I can afford to call them
+absurdities because I love them--is that for the Philadelphian who looks
+upon himself as the real Philadelphian, Philadelphia lies between the
+Delaware and the Schuylkill, and is bounded on the north by Market
+Street, on the south by Lombard; that in the ancient rhyming list of its
+streets he recognizes only the line:
+
+    "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine"?
+
+Now, when I left home this narrow section was threatening to grow too
+narrow and it was with some difficulty the Philadelphian kept within it.
+Up till then, however, it was in no danger except from his own
+increasing numbers. The tragedy is that the Russian Jew should have
+descended upon just this section, should now, not so much dispute it
+with him, as oust him from it--the Russian Jew, a Jew by religion but
+not by race, who has been found impossible in every country on the
+Continent of Europe into which he has drifted, so impossible when that
+country is Holland that the Jews who have been there for centuries
+collect among themselves the money to send him post haste on to England
+and poor America, for even the Dutch Jew cannot stand the Russian
+Jew--and, from what I have heard, neither can the decent Pennsylvania
+Jew who has been with us almost from the beginning. Other aliens have
+been more modest and set up their slums where they interfere less with
+Philadelphia tradition. I cannot understand, and nobody has been able to
+explain to me, why the Russian Jew was allowed to push his way in. But
+the indolent never see the thin end of the wedge, and there are
+philanthropists whose philanthropy for the people they do not know
+increases in direct proportion to the harm it does to those they do
+know. I was told more than once to consider what Philadelphia was doing
+for the Russian Jew, to remember that he has paid America the compliment
+of accepting it as the Promised Land, that his race in America has
+produced Mary Antin, and to see for myself what good Americans were
+being made of his children. But though Philadelphia may one day blossom
+like the rose with Mary Antins, though there might have been an
+incipient patriot in every one of the small Russian Jews I met being
+taken in batches across Independence Square to Independence Hall to
+imbibe patriotism at the fount, I could not help considering rather what
+the Russian Jew is just now doing for Philadelphia. For it is as plain
+as a pipe stem to anybody with eyes to see that the Philadelphians to
+whom Philadelphia originally belonged are being pushed by the Russian
+Jew out of the only part of it they care to live in.
+
+[Illustration: CITY HALL FROM THE SCHUYLKILL]
+
+I wondered at first why so many people had fled to the country, why so
+many signs "For Sale" or "For Rent" were to be seen about Spruce and
+Pine and Walnut Streets. Various reasons were given me:--with the Law
+Courts now in the centre of the town and the new Stock Exchange at Broad
+and Walnut, and stores everywhere, nobody could live in town; the noise
+of the trolleys is unbearable; the dirt of the city is unhealthy; soft
+coal has made Philadelphia grimier than London; the motor has destroyed
+distance;--excellent reasons, all of them. But it was not until I
+discovered the Russian Jew that I understood the most important. It is
+the Russian Jew who, with an army of aliens at his back--thousands upon
+thousands of Italians, Slavs, Lithuanians, a fresh emigration of negroes
+from the South, and statistics alone can say how many other
+varieties--is pushing and pushing Philadelphians out of the town--first
+up Spruce Street, nearer and nearer to the Schuylkill, then across the
+Schuylkill into the suburbs, eventually to be swept from the suburbs
+into the country, until who can say where there will be any room for
+them at all? With the Russian Jew's genius for adapting himself to
+American institutions, I could fancy him taking possession of, and
+adding indefinitely to, the little two-story houses that already stretch
+in well-nigh endless rows to the West and the North, Germantown and West
+Philadelphia built over beyond recognition. I remember when, one day in
+a trolley, I had gone for miles and miles between these rows--each
+little house with the same front yard, the same porch, the same awning,
+the same rocking-chairs--I had a horrible waking nightmare in which I
+saw them multiplying--as the alien himself multiplied beyond the most
+ardent dreams of Mr. Roosevelt,--and creeping out further and further,
+across the city limits, across the State, across the Middle West, across
+the prairies, across the Rockies, across the Sierras, until at last they
+joined East to West in one unbroken line--one great, unbroken, unlovely
+monument to the enterprise of the new American, and the philanthropy of
+the old: while only the Russian Jew at the door of the State House, like
+Macaulay's New Zealander under the shadow of St. Paul's, remained to
+muse and moralize on the havoc he had wrought.
+
+[Illustration: CHESTNUT STREET BRIDGE]
+
+This may seem a trifle fantastic, but I should find it hard to give an
+idea of how impossibly fantastic the prevailing presence of the alien in
+Philadelphia appeared to me. To be sure, we had our aliens a quarter of
+a century ago. But they were mostly Irish, Germans, Swedes. The Italian
+at his fruit-stall was as yet rather the picturesque exception, and I
+can remember how, not very long before I left home, the whole town went
+to stare at the first importation of Russian Jews, dumped down under I
+have forgotten what shelter, as if they were curiosities or freaks from
+Barnum's. But now the aliens are mostly Latins, Slavs, Orientals who do
+not fit so unobtrusively into our American scheme of things, and who
+come from the lowest classes in their own countries, so ignorant and
+degraded most of them that, what with their increasing numbers and our
+new negro population from the South, there are people in Pennsylvania
+who are trying to introduce an educational test at the polls--America
+having learned the evil of universal suffrage just as England is
+coquetting with it.
+
+
+IV
+
+The rest of Philadelphia--the rest of America, for that matter--may be
+accustomed to this new emigration to my town as well as to all parts of
+the country. But I had not seen the latter-day alien coming in by every
+steamer, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, establishing himself. The
+advantage, or disadvantage, of staying away from home so long is that,
+on returning, one gets the net result of the change the days and the
+years bring with them. Those who stay at home are broken in to the
+change in its initial stages and can accept the result as a matter of
+course. I could not. To be honest, I did not like it. I did not like to
+find Philadelphia a foreign town.
+
+I did not like to find Streets where the name on almost every store is
+Italian. I did not like to find the new types of negro, like savages
+straight from the heart of Africa some of them looked, who are disputing
+South Street and Lombard Street and that disgraceful bit of Locust
+Street with the decent, old-fashioned, self-respecting Philadelphia
+darkies. I did not like to find the people with foreign manners--for
+instance, to have my hand kissed for a tip in the hotel by a Lithuanian
+chambermaid, though I should add that in a month she had grown American
+enough to accept the same tip stoically with a bare "Thank You." I did
+not like to find the foreigner forcing his way not only into the
+Philadelphian's houses, the Philadelphian's schools, the Philadelphian's
+professions--professions that have been looked upon as the sacred right
+of certain Philadelphia families for almost a couple of centuries. I
+have heard all about his virtues, nobody need remind me of them; I know
+that he is carrying off everything at the University so that rich Jews
+begin to think they should in return make it a gift or bequest, as no
+rich Jew has yet, I believe. I know that the young Philadelphian must
+give up his sports and his gaieties if he can hope to compete with the
+young Russian Jew who never allows himself any recreation on the road to
+success--and perhaps this won't do the young Philadelphian any harm. I
+know that if the Russian Jew keeps on studying law, the Philadelphia
+lawyer will be before long as extinct as the dodo--a probability that if
+it wakes up the Philadelphia lawyer may have its uses. All this, and
+much besides, I know--also, incidentally, I might add the fact that the
+Russian Jew, who is not unintelligent, has mastered in a very short time
+the possibilities of arson and bankruptcy as investments. But if there
+were no other side to his virtues--and of course there is that other
+side too--I should not like to think of the new Philadelphian that is to
+come out of this incredible mixture of Russian Jews and countless other
+aliens as little like us in character and tradition.
+
+The new Philadelphian may be a finer creature far than in my hopes for
+him, finer far than the old Philadelphian I have known--but then he will
+not be that old Philadelphian whom I do not want to lose and whom it
+would be a pity to lose in a country for which, ever since Penn pointed
+the way to the constitution of the United States, he has probably
+accomplished more than any other citizen.
+
+Personally, I might as well say that I do not believe he will be a finer
+creature. It seems to me that he is doing away with the old American
+idea of levelling up and is bent on the levelling down process that is
+going on all over Europe. And so foreign is he making us, that I would
+not think J. very far wrong in declaring himself the only real American
+left, if only he would include me with him.
+
+[Illustration: THE NARROW STREET]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX: PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY--CONTINUED
+
+
+I
+
+It was not only the change that oppressed me those first days of my
+return. As bewildering, as discouraging, were the signs everywhere of
+the horrible haste with which it has been brought about: a haste foreign
+to the Philadelphia habit. But the aliens pouring into Philadelphia have
+increased its population at such a prodigious rate that it has been
+obliged to grow too prodigiously fast to meet or to adapt itself to the
+new conditions without the speed that does not belong to it.
+
+I had left it a big, prosperous, industrial town--Baldwin's, Cramp's,
+Kensington and Germantown mills all in full swing--but it carried off
+its bigness, prosperity, and industry with its old demure and restful
+airs of a country town. The old-fashioned, hard-working, Philadelphia
+business man could still dine at four o'clock and spend the rest of the
+afternoon looking out of the window for the people who rarely passed and
+the things that never happened--nobody would be free to dine at four
+now-a-days, nobody would have the leisure to sit at any hour looking out
+of the window, except perhaps the Philadelphia clubman who clings to
+that amiable pastime, as he does, so far successfully, to his Club
+house, threatened on every side as it is by the advance of the
+sky-scraper. The old-fashioned busy Philadelphia crowds, as I remember
+them, could still take their time in the streets, so that I remember,
+too, my friend, George Steevens' astonishment because a passer-by he
+thanked for information could linger to say "You are very welcome." The
+old-fashioned Philadelphia business, going on at a pace that only New
+York and Chicago could beat, was still accomplished with so little fuss
+that the rest of America laughed at Philadelphia for its slowness and
+sleepiness, and told those old time-worn stories that have passed into
+folk-lore. It was just this that gave Philadelphia such a distinct
+character of its own--that it could be laughed at for slowness and
+sleepiness by the other towns, and all the while be sleepy and slow to
+such good purpose as to make itself into one of the most prosperous and
+influential in the country: to be able to work at the American pace and
+yet preserve its dignity and sedateness.
+
+But the old stories have lost what little point they had. Philadelphia
+does not look slow and sleepy any longer. Things have changed, indeed,
+when a modern traveller like Mr. Arnold Bennett can speak of "spacious
+gaiety" in connection with Philadelphia--with its spacious dulness the
+earlier traveller was more apt to be impressed. At last, however, it has
+given up its country-town airs for the airs of the big town it is--given
+up the calmness that was its chief characteristic for the hurry-flurry
+of the ordinary American town. And there is scarcely a Philadelphian
+who regrets it, that is the saddest part of it--scarcely a Philadelphian
+who does not rejoice that Philadelphia is getting to be like New York.
+
+[Illustration: THE MARKET STREET ELEVATED AT THE DELAWARE END]
+
+I think, of all the innovations, this was the one that distressed me
+most, though I could understand the difficulty of calm in the face of
+the multitude of new housing and traffic problems it has had to tackle,
+at a rate and with a speed that the Philadelphian, left to himself,
+would never have imposed upon it. Somehow, it has had to keep on putting
+up those rows of little two-story houses in sufficient numbers to
+shelter the too rapidly increasing population if it is to maintain its
+reputation as the City of Homes; somehow, it has had to provide subways,
+and elevateds, and new suburban lines with no level crossings, and new
+central Stations and Terminals, and big trolley cars out of all
+proportion to Philadelphia's narrow streets, and taxis too dear for any
+but the millionaire to drive in, if the too-rapidly increasing crowds
+are to be got to work and back again; somehow, new bridges have had to
+cross the Schuylkill, new streets have had to be laid out, so many new
+things have had to be begun and done in the too-rapidly growing town,
+that there is small chance and less time for it to take them calmly or,
+alas! to keep itself clean and tidy.
+
+
+II
+
+In my memory Philadelphia was a model of cleanliness under a clean sky,
+free of the smoke that the use of soft coal has brought with it. Every
+Saturday every servant girl--"maid," Philadelphia calls her now--turned
+out with mops and buckets and hose, for such a washing up of the front
+for a week that, until the next Saturday, Philadelphia could not look
+dirty if it tried. But I do not believe that a legion of servant girls,
+with all the mops, buckets, and hose in the world, could ever wash
+Philadelphia clean again, to such depths of dirt has it fallen. It could
+not have been more of a disgrace to its citizens when Franklin deplored
+the shocking condition of its streets, especially in wet weather, or
+when Washington had to wade through mud to get to the theatre where he
+found his recreation. It has become actually the Filthydelphia somebody
+once called it in jest. Not even in the little Spanish and Italian towns
+whose dirt the American deplores, have I seen such streets--all rivers
+and pools and lakes when it rains, ankle-deep in dust when it is dry,
+papers flying loose, corners choked with dirt, tins of ashes and garbage
+standing at the gutter side all day long--even London, that I used to
+think the dirtiest of dirty towns, knows how to order its garbage better
+than that. We Americans are supposed to be long-suffering, to endure
+almost anything until the crisis comes. But I thought that crisis had
+long since come in the Philadelphia streets. Everybody agreed with me,
+and I was assured that a corrupt government having been got out and a
+reform government got in, already there was tremendous talk of schemes
+for garbage--bags to be hauled off full of garbage, dust-tight on the
+way, and hauled back empty, old paper to be bought up by the city so
+that no thrifty citizen would throw a scrap of paper into the
+street--and as tremendous talk of experiments in garbage, ten patriotic
+citizens promising to contribute one thousand dollars each to make them.
+I was assured also that the reform Mayor has done his best and struggled
+valiantly against the evil, but unfortunately it is not he alone who can
+vote the money for a wholesale spring-cleaning. It occurred to me that,
+in the meanwhile, we might be better off if we returned with much less
+expense, to the hogs that were "the best of scavengers" when William
+Cobbett visited Philadelphia. Or, at no more than the cost of a ticket
+to New York, the reformers might at least learn how to keep garbage tins
+off the front steps of inoffensive, tax-paying citizens at five o'clock
+in the afternoon when they ask their friends to drink tea in that
+English fashion which is as novel in my Philadelphia as the difficulty
+with the garbage.
+
+[Illustration: THE RAILROAD BRIDGES AT FALLS OF SCHUYLKILL]
+
+My own opinion was that Philadelphia had lost its head over the
+magnitude of the task before it. In no other way could I account for the
+recklessness with which old streets were torn up for blocks and repaired
+by inches; new streets built and horrible stagnant pools left on their
+outskirts--the suburbs quite as bad in this respect, so bad that I
+understand associations of citizens are formed to do what the
+authorities don't seem able to; boulevards planned and held up when half
+finished, a monumental entrance designed to the most beautiful Park in
+the world and, on its either side, silly little wooden pergolas set up
+to try the effect, by the dethroned government I believe, and, though
+nobody, from one end of the town to the other, approves, neither the
+time nor the money is found to pull them down again--neither the time
+nor the money found for anything but dirt and untidiness.
+
+
+III
+
+The people, their manners, their life,--everything seemed to me to have
+been caught in this mad whirlwind of change and haste. The crowds in the
+street were not the same, had forgotten the meaning of repose and
+leisureliness; had at last given in to the American habit of leaving
+everything until the last moment and then rushing when there was no
+occasion for rush, and pretending to hustle so that not one man or woman
+I met could have spared a second to say "You are welcome" for anybody's
+"Thank you," or, for that matter, to provide the information for
+anybody's thanks;--indeed, these crowds seemed to me to have mastered
+their new r�le with such thoroughness that to-day the visitor from
+abroad will carry away the same idea of Philadelphia as Arnold Bennett,
+who, during his sojourn there, never ceased to marvel at its liveliness.
+
+[Illustration: THE PARKWAY PERGOLAS]
+
+And the crowds have migrated from the old haunts--every sign of life now
+gone from Third Street and round about the Stock Exchange, where nobody
+now is ever in a hurry--carts and cars going at snail's pace, the whole
+place looking as if time did not count--the old town business quarter
+deserted for Market Street and Broad Street round the City Hall.
+
+And the crowds do not get about in the same way--no slow, leisurely ride
+in the horse-car to a _Depot_ in the wilds of Frankford, or at Ninth and
+Green, on the way to the suburbs, but a leap on a trolley, or a rush
+through thronged streets to the _Terminal_ at Twelfth and Market, to the
+_Station_ at Broad and Market. And it was another sign of how
+Philadelphia had "moved" since the old days when, in place of the old
+horse-car, which I could rely upon to go in a straight line from one end
+of the long street to the other, I took the new trolley and it twisted
+and turned with me until the exception was to arrive just where I
+expected to, or, if I only stayed in it long enough, not to be landed in
+some remote country town where I had no intention of going. I have been
+told the story of the stay-at-home Philadelphian as puzzled as I, who
+was promised by a motorman, as uncertain as she where he was going, that
+at least he could give her a "nice ride through a handsome part of the
+town." Worse still, the trolley did not stop at the corners where the
+car used to stop so that I, a native Philadelphian, had to be told where
+to wait for it by an interloper with a foreign accent. Nor was it
+crowded at the same hours as the car used to be, so that going out to
+dinner in a Walnut Street trolley I could sit comfortably and not be
+obliged to hang on to a strap, with everybody who got in or out helping
+to rub the freshness from my best evening gown, which would have been my
+fate in the old days.
+
+And the crowds were not managed in the old way--the ordinary policeman
+used to do his best to keep out of sight, and here was the mounted
+policeman prancing about everywhere, and, at congested corners, adding
+to the confusion by filling up what little space the overgrown trolleys
+left in the narrow streets. I am not sure that it was not this mounted
+policeman--unless it was the coloured policemen and the coloured
+postmen--I had most difficulty in getting accustomed to. I came upon him
+every day, or almost every hour, with something of a new shock. Can this
+be really I, I would say to myself when I saw him in his splendour, can
+this be really Philadelphia?
+
+
+IV
+
+The difference I deplored was not confined to the crowds I did not know;
+it was no less marked in the people I did know, in their standards and
+outlook, in the way they lived. It is hard to say what struck me most,
+though nothing more obviously the first few days than that flight to the
+suburbs which had left such visible proofs as those signs "For Rent" and
+"For Sale" everywhere in the streets where I was most at home--a flight
+necessitated perhaps by the inroads of the alien, but only made possible
+by the annihilation of space due to the motor-car.
+
+[Illustration: MARKET STREET WEST OF THE SCHUYLKILL]
+
+Once, when a Philadelphian set up a carriage, it was the announcement
+to Philadelphia that he had earned the fifty thousand dollars which
+fulfilled his ideal of a fortune. In my day Fairman Rogers' four-in-hand
+was the limit, and but few Philadelphians had the money and the
+recklessness to rival him. Now the Philadelphian does not have to earn
+anything at all before he sets up his motor-car, and it is the
+announcement of nothing except that he is bound to keep in the swim. Our
+children begin where we leave off, as one of my contemporaries said to
+me. Everybody has a motor-car. Everybody who can has one in London, I
+know, and there also the signs "To Let" and "For Sale" in such regions
+as Kensington and Bayswater have for some time back explained to me the
+way it has turned London life upside down. But in Philadelphia not
+merely everybody who can, but everybody who can't has one, and the
+Philadelphian would not do without it, if he had to mortgage his house
+as its price. I remember how incredulous I was, one of my first Sunday
+evenings at home, when I was dining with friends in the
+crowded-to-suffocation dining-room at the Bala Country Club and was
+given as an excuse for being rushed from my untasted coffee to catch an
+inconsiderately early last train, that ours was probably the only dinner
+party in the room without a car to take us back to town. But from that
+evening on I had no chance for incredulity, my own movements beginning
+to revolve round the motor-car. If I was asked to dinner and lunch at a
+distance to which nobody would have thought of dragging me by train in
+the old days, a motor was sent to whirl me out in no time at all. If I
+went into a far suburb for an afternoon visit, instead of coming soberly
+back to town on my return ticket, I would take a short cut by flying
+over half the near country, often in the car of people I had never seen
+before, as the most convenient route to the hotel. All Philadelphia life
+is regulated by the motor-car. It makes a ball or a tea or a dinner ten
+miles away as near as one just round the corner was in my time, and so
+half the gaiety is transferred to the suburbs and the suburban country,
+and, to my surprise, I found girls still going to dances at midsummer.
+
+And the motor has made club life for women indispensable. The woman who
+comes up to town in her car must have a Club, and there is the Acorn
+Club in Walnut Street, The New Century, and the College and Civic Clubs,
+jointly housed at Thirteenth and Spruce, and more clubs in other
+streets, probably, which it was not my privilege to be invited to; all,
+to judge by the Acorn, with luxurious drawing-and dining-and smoking-and
+dressing-and bed-rooms, and women coming and going as if they had lived
+in clubs all their lives, when a short quarter of a century before there
+had not been one for them to see the inside of. And for men and women
+both, the car has brought within their reach those amazing Country Clubs
+that have sprung up in my absence. I had read of Country Clubs in
+American novels and short stories, I had seen them on the stage in
+American plays, but I had never paused to think of them as realities in
+Philadelphia until I was actually taken to the Bala and Huntington
+Valley Clubs, and until I ate their admirable dinners--at Bala, with the
+crowds and in the light and to the music that would have made me feel I
+was in a London restaurant, had it not been for the inevitable
+cocktail--and until I saw with my own eyes the luxurious houses so
+comfortably and correctly appointed--even to brass bedroom candlesticks
+on a table in the second-story hall, just as in an old-fashioned English
+inn, though as far as I could make out there was excellent electric
+light everywhere--until I also saw with my own eyes the trim lawns, and
+gardens, and the wide view over the delicate American landscape, and
+women in the tennis courts, and the men bringing out their ponies for
+polo, and the players dotted over the golf course.
+
+And whether the Country Clubs have created the sport or the sport has
+created the Country Clubs, I cannot say, but in the increased attention
+to sport I was confronted with another difference as startling.
+Philadelphia, I know, has always been given to sport. It hunted and
+raced and fished before time and conscience allowed most of the other
+Colonists in the North the chance to amuse themselves out-of-doors, or
+indoors either, poor things! And the old sports, barring the least
+civilized like bull-baiting and cock-fighting, were kept up, and are
+kept up, and had their Clubhouses, which, in some cases, have survived.
+But, in my time, these sports had been limited to the few who had
+country houses in the right districts or the leisure for the
+gentlemanly pursuit of foxes and fishes, and their clubs were primitive
+compared to the palatial Country Clubs, whose luxury women now share
+with men. If you were in the hunting or fishing set, you heard all about
+it; but if you were not, you heard little enough. But you did not have
+to be in any set to keep up with the great Philadelphia game of cricket,
+which was popular, exclusive as the players in their team might be--all
+Philadelphia that did not play scrupulously going on the proper
+occasions to the Germantown Cricket Ground to watch all Philadelphia
+that did. The one alternative as popular was the pastime of rowing, the
+exclusiveness here in the rowing men's choice among the Clubs with the
+little boating clubhouses on the Schuylkill where boats could be stowed.
+And now? The cricket goes on, as gentlemanly and correct a pastime as
+ever. And the boating goes on, but with a delightful exclusive old
+Colonial house, for one Club at least, hidden in thickets of the Park
+where the stranger might pass within a stone's throw and never discover
+it, but where the boating party can dine with a privacy and a
+sumptuousness undreamed of at Belmont, where boating parties dined in my
+young days. And, in addition, time has been prodigal with golf and
+tennis and polo; women, who had begun tennis in my time, now beginning
+golf, games which, I might as well admit, I have no use for and can
+therefore say little about. And I am told that the University foot-ball
+matches are among the most important and lavishly patronized social
+functions of the year. And in town is the big Racquets Club, in a fine
+new building, big enough to shelter any number of sports besides. And
+the Natatorium, in moving from the unpretentious premises in South Broad
+Street, where it has left its old building and name, to the marble
+palace that was once George W. Childs's. Oh, the sacrilege! the house
+where his emperors and princes and lords and authors were
+entertained,--has converted the swimming lesson into the luxury of
+sport. And all told, so many, and so exhaustive, and so universal are
+the provisions for sport that I might have believed the Philadelphian
+had nothing in the world to do, save to invent amusements to help him
+through his empty hours.
+
+[Illustration: MANHEIM CRICKET GROUND]
+
+And, apparently, it is to provide for the same empty hours that those
+elaborate lunch places have multiplied on Chestnut Street, some
+delightful where you feast as only Philadelphia can, some horrible where
+you sit on high stools at counters and fight for your food; that little
+quiet discreet tea-places have sprung up in side streets; that gilded
+restaurants, boasting they reproduce the last London fads and fashions,
+have succeeded the old no restaurant at all; that hotels as big and
+strident as if they had strayed off Fifth Avenue increase in number year
+by year, culminating in the Adelphia, the latest giant, which I have not
+seen; that the old poky hotels of my day have branched out in roof
+gardens where on hot summer evenings you can sit up among the
+sky-scrapers, a near neighbour to William Penn on his tower, and get
+whatever air stirs over the red-hot furnace of Philadelphia; that a huge
+new hotel has appeared up Broad Street where it seems the Philadelphian
+sometimes goes with the feeling of adventure with which he once
+descended upon Logan Square. Even business hours are broken into; the
+lunch of a dozen oysters or a sandwich snatched up anywhere has gone out
+of fashion; the chop, in the Philadelphia imitation of a London
+chop-house that seemed luxurious in my Father's day, has become far too
+simple; and disaster was predicted to me for the Stock Exchange by a
+pessimistic member who knew that, from the new building that has
+followed the Courts to the centre of the town, brokers will be running
+over to lunch at the Bellevue and to incapacitate themselves more or
+less for the rest of the day, and business will go on drifting, as it
+has begun to, to New York and will all be done by telephone. And as if
+the feasting were not enough of a pastime, everywhere lunches, teas and
+dinners are served to the sound of music, so that distraction and
+diversion may be counted upon without the effort to talk for them. When
+I was young, the best Philadelphia could do in the way of combining
+music and eating--or principally drinking--was at the M�ennerchor Garden
+at Ninth and Green, where a pretzel might be had with a glass of beer,
+or a sherry cobbler, or a mint julep--"high-balls" had not been heard
+of--and the Philadelphia girl who went, though it was under the
+irreproachable charge of her brother, could feel that she was doing
+something very shocking and compromising. But in the new Philadelphia,
+it is music whenever the Philadelphian eats or drinks in public, which
+seems to be next to always.
+
+[Illustration: DOCK STREET AND THE EXCHANGE]
+
+It may be said that these are harmless innovations, part of the change
+in town life as lived in any other town as big. But the marvel to me was
+their conquest of Philadelphia, the town that used to pride itself on
+not being like other towns, and there they exaggerated themselves in my
+eyes into nothing short of revolution. The craving for novelty--that was
+at the root of it all: of the restlessness, the willingness to do what
+the old-fashioned Philadelphian would rather have been seen dead than
+caught doing, of the deliberate break with tradition. Nothing now can be
+left peacefully as it was. I felt the foundations of the world crumble
+when I heard that the Dancing Class has taken new quarters over in
+Horticultural Hall and the Assembly in the Bellevue, that Philadelphia
+consents to go up Broad Street for its opera, quieting its conscience by
+the compromise of going in carriages and motors and never on foot. There
+surely was the end of the old Philadelphia, the real Philadelphia. And
+it made matters no better to be assured that so rapidly does
+Philadelphia move with the times that the Philadelphian who stays away
+from home, or who is in mourning, for a year or so, finds on coming
+back, or out of retirement, that Philadelphia society has been as
+completely transformed in the meanwhile as Philadelphia streets. Nor did
+it make matters better to discover the different prices that different
+standards have brought in their train. I could see the new pace at which
+life in public is set, I heard much of the new pace set for it in
+private--servants' wages prohibitive according to old ways of thinking,
+provisions risen to a scale beyond belief, every-day existence as dear
+as in London--in Philadelphia, as elsewhere, people threatened with ruin
+from, not the high cost of living, but the cost of high living.
+
+
+V
+
+And the change is not simply in the outward panoply, in the parade of
+life, it is in the point of view, in the new attitude toward life--a
+change that impressed itself upon me in a thousand and one ways. I have
+already referred to my astonishment at finding Philadelphia occupying
+itself with art and literature. But really there is nothing with which
+it does not occupy itself. Universal knowledge has come into fashion and
+it makes me tired just to think of the struggle to keep up to it. Once
+the Philadelphian thought he knew everything that was necessary to know
+if he could tell you who every other Philadelphian's grandfather was.
+But now he, or I should say she--for it is the women who rule when it
+comes to fashion--is not content unless she knows everything, or thinks
+she does, from the first chapter in Genesis to the latest novelty on the
+Boulevards, the latest club gossip in Pall Mall. And how she can talk
+about it! I have made so many confessions in these pages that it will do
+no harm to add one more to their number, and to own my discomfiture
+when, on finding myself one of a group of Philadelphia women, I have
+been stunned into silence, in my ignorance reduced to shame and
+confusion by their encyclopedic, Baedeker-Murray information and their
+volubility in imparting it. It is wonderful to know so much, but, as the
+philosopher says, what a comfort, to be sure, a dull person may be at
+times.
+
+On the whole, it was the new interest in politics that most astonished
+me. That just when Philadelphia has plunged into incredible frivolity,
+it should develop an interest in problems it calmly shirked in its days
+of sobriety--that is astounding if you will. When I left home, politics
+were still beneath the active interest of the Philadelphian--still
+something to steer clear from, to keep one's hands clean of. A man who
+would rather live on the public than do an honest day's work, was my
+Father's definition of the politician. I remember what a crank we all
+thought one of my Brother's friends who amused himself by being elected
+to the Common Council. It was not at all good form--who of self-respect
+could so far forget himself as to become part, however humble, of the
+machine, a hail-fellow-well-met among the Bosses and liable to be
+greeted as Bill or Tom or Jim by the postman on his rounds or the
+policeman at the corner. Better far let the city be abominably governed
+and the tax-payers outrageously robbed, than to submit to such
+indignities. The Philadelphian who realized what he owed to himself and
+his position was superior to politics. But he is not any longer. I
+found him up to his eyes in politics--taking the responsibility of
+municipal reform, waging war against state corruption, running meetings
+for Roosevelt and Progress at the last Presidential election. And not
+only this. The women are sharing his labours--the women who of old
+hardly knew the meaning of politics, might have been puzzled even to
+know how to spell the unfamiliar word--they too are busy with civic
+reform, and turn a watchful but unavailing eye on the garbage, and run
+settlements in the slums, and qualify as policemen, and demand the
+vote--parade for it, hold public meetings for it, hob-nob with coloured
+women for it, run after the discredited English militant for it,--and
+talk politics on any and every occasion. There were days when I heard
+nothing but politics--politics at lunch, politics at tea, politics at
+dinner--think of it! politics at a Philadelphia dinner party, politics
+over the Soft Shell Crabs and the Shad and the Broiled Chicken and the
+Ice-cream from Sautter's and the Madeira! It is better and wiser and
+more improving, no doubt, than the old vapid talk--but then the old
+vapid talk was part of my Philadelphia, and my Philadelphia was what I
+wanted to come back to.
+
+[Illustration: THE LOCOMOTIVE YARD, WEST PHILADELPHIA]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX: PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY--CONTINUED
+
+
+I
+
+Of course I resented all the changes and, equally of course, it was
+unreasonable that I should. I had not stood stock still for a quarter of
+a century, why should I expect Philadelphia to?
+
+And little by little, as I got my breath again after my first indignant
+surprise, as I pulled myself together after my first series of shocks, I
+began to understand that the wonder was that anything should be left,
+and to see that Philadelphia has held on to enough of its character and
+beauty to impress the stranger, anyway, with the fine serenity that I
+missed at every turn. Philadelphia does not "bristle," Henry James wrote
+of it a very few years ago, by which he meant that it does not change,
+is incapable of changing, though to me it was, in this sense, so
+"bristling" that I tingled all over with the pricks. But, then, I knew
+what Philadelphia had been. That was why I was impressed first with the
+things that had changed, why, also, my pleasure was the keener in my
+later discovery of the things that had not.
+
+I can laugh now at myself for my joy in all sorts of dear, absurd
+trifles simply because of their homely proof that the new Philadelphia
+had saved some relics of the old. What they stood for in my eyes gave
+value to the little iced Cakes of my childhood; to the frequent street
+parade, glorified as it was beyond recognition by the new presence of
+the mounted police; to the City Troop, gorgeous and splendid as of old,
+and as of old turning out to decorate every public ceremony; to the nice
+old-fashioned "ma'am," unheard in England except, I believe, at court;
+to all the town, including my hotel, getting ready for the summer with
+matting and gauze and grey Holland. Old associations, old emotions, were
+stirred by the fragrance of the Cinnamon Bun that is never so fragrant
+out of Philadelphia, and one of the cruelest disappointments of my
+return was not to be able to devour it with the untrammelled appetite of
+youth when it was offered me in an interval between the Soft-Shell Crab
+and Ice-cream of a Philadelphia lunch and the Planked Shad and Broiled
+Chicken of a Philadelphia dinner. The row of heads at the Philadelphia
+Club windows, so embarrassing to me in my youth, borrowed beauty from
+association. I was thrilled by the decanter of Sherry or Madeira on the
+dinner table, where I had not seen it served in solitary grandeur since
+I had last dined in Philadelphia. The old rough kindliness of the
+people--when they were not aliens--in the streets, in the stores, in the
+trolleys, went to my heart. And in larger ways, too, the place filled me
+with pride for its constancy: for the steady development of all that
+made it great from the beginning--its schools, its charities, its
+hospitals, its libraries, its galleries; above all, for retaining what
+it could of its dignified reticence in keeping its private affairs to
+itself. It may live more in public than it did, but it still does not
+shriek all its secrets from the house-top. It does not thrust all its
+wealth down every man's throat. It still hides many of its luxurious
+private palaces behind modest brick fronts. It may have broken out in
+gaudy hotels and restaurants, but Friends still continue to go their
+peaceful way completely apart in their spacious houses and pleasant
+gardens. Nor would any other town be so shy in acknowledging to itself,
+and boasting to others of, its beauty.
+
+[Illustration: THE GIRARD TRUST COMPANY]
+
+
+II
+
+Philadelphia has always been over-modest as to its personal
+appearance,--always on the surface, indifferent to flattery. Nobody
+would suspect it of ever having heard that to a philosopher like
+Voltaire it was, without his seeing it, one of the most beautiful cities
+in the universe, that a matter-of-fact traveller like William Cobbett
+thought it a fine city from the minute he knew it, that all the old
+travel-writers had a compliment for it, and all the new travellers as
+well, down to Li Hung Chang, who described it felicitously as "one of
+the most smiling of cities"--the "Place of a Million Smiles." It was not
+because it had ceased to be beautiful that it assumed this indifference.
+As I recall it in my youth, it was beautiful with the beauty
+Philadelphians searched Europe for, while they were busy destroying it
+at home--the beauty that life in England has helped me to appreciate as
+I never did before, for it has given me a standard I had not when I knew
+only Philadelphia.
+
+Judged by this standard, I found Philadelphia in its old parts more
+beautiful than I remembered it. In a street like Clinton, which has
+escaped the wholesale destruction, or in a block here and there in other
+streets less fortunate, I felt as I never had before the austere
+loveliness of their red brick and white marble and pleasant green shade.
+As never before I realized the Eighteenth-Century perfection of the old
+State House and Carpenter's Hall. I know of no English building of the
+same date that has the dignity, the harmonious proportions, the
+restrained ornament of the State House,--none with so noble a background
+of stately rooms for those stately figures who were the makers of
+history in Philadelphia. And the old churches came as a new revelation.
+I questioned if I ever could have thought an English Cathedral in its
+close lovelier than red brick St. Peter's in its walled graveyard on a
+spring day, with the green in its first freshness and the great
+wide-spreading trees throwing soft shadows over the grassy spaces and
+the grey crumbling gravestones. The pleasure it gave me positively hurt
+when--after walking in the filth of Front Street, where the old houses
+are going to rack and ruin and where a Jew in his praying shawl at the
+door of a small, shabby synagogue seemed the explanation of the filth--I
+came upon the little green garden of a graveyard round the Old Swedes'
+Church, sweet and still and fragrant in the May sunshine, though the
+windows of a factory looked down upon it to one side, and out in front,
+on the railroad tracks, huge heavy freight cars rattled and rumbled and
+shrieked by, and beyond them rose the steam stacks of steamers from
+Antwerp and Liverpool that unload at its door the hordes of aliens who
+not only degrade, but "impoverish" Philadelphia, as the Irish porter in
+my hotel said to me. And what pleasure again, after the walk full of
+memories along Front and Second Streets, with the familiar odours and
+Philadelphia here quiet as of yore, to come upon Christ Church a part of
+the street like any French Cathedral and not in its own little green,
+but with a greater architectural pretension to make up for it, and with
+a gravestone near the sanctuary to testify that John Penn, one at least
+of the Penn family, lies buried in Philadelphia. And what greater
+pleasure in the old Meeting Houses--why had I not known, in youth as in
+age, their tranquil loveliness?--What repose there, down Arch Street, in
+that small simple brick building, with its small simple green, one bed
+of tulips at the door, shut off from the noise and confusion and dirt
+and double trolley lines of Arch Street by the old high brick wall; and
+no less in that equally small and simple brick building in South Twelfth
+Street, an old oasis, or resting place, in a new wilderness of
+sky-scrapers. With these churches and meeting-houses standing, can
+Philadelphians deplore the ugliness of their town?
+
+[Illustration: TWELFTH STREET MEETING HOUSE]
+
+And the old Eighteenth-Century houses? Would I find them as beautiful? I
+asked myself. Would they survive as triumphantly the test of my
+travelled years and more observant eyes? How foolish the question, how
+unnecessary the doubt! More beautiful all of them, because my eyes were
+better trained to appreciate their architectural merit; more peaceful
+all of them, with the feeling of peace so intense I wondered whether it
+came of the Colonial architecture or of associations with it.
+
+Germantown may be built up beyond recognition, its Lanes, many of them,
+turned into Streets for no reason the average man can see, but some of
+the big old estates, are still green and untouched as if miles away, and
+the old houses are more guarded than ever from change. One by one, I
+returned to them:--Stenton restored, but as yet so judicially that Logan
+would to-day feel at home in its halls and rooms, on its stairway,
+outside by the dovecote and the wistaria-covered walls,--at home in the
+garden full of tulips and daisies, and old familiar Philadelphia roses
+and Johnny-jump-ups, enclosed by hedges, every care taken to plant in it
+afresh just the blossoms he loved. But what would he have said to the
+factories opposite? To the rows of little two-story houses creeping
+nearer and nearer? And the Chew House--could the veterans of the
+Revolution return to it, as the veterans of the Civil War return every
+year to Gettysburg, how well they would know their way in the garden,
+how well, in the wide-pillared hall with the old portraits on the white
+wall, and in the rooms with their Eighteenth-Century panelling and
+cornices and fire-places, and in the broad hall upstairs could they
+follow the movements of the enemy that lost for them the Battle of
+Germantown? And Wyck white, cloistered, vine-laden, with fragrant garden
+and shade-giving trees! And the Johnson House, and the Wistar House, and
+the Morris House. And how many other old houses beyond Germantown!
+Solitude, and Laurel Hill, and Arnold's Mansion in the Park, Bartram's
+at Gray's Ferry.
+
+[Illustration: WYCK]
+
+I thought first I would not put Bartram's to the test, no matter how
+bravely the others came out of it--Bartram's, associated with the
+romance of work and the dawn of my new life. But how glad I am that I
+thought twice and went back to it! For I found it beautiful as ever,
+though I could reach it by trolley, and though it was unrecognizably
+spick and span in the little orchard, and under the labelled trees, and
+by the old house and the old stables, and in the garden where gardeners
+were at work among the red roses. But the disorder has not been quite
+done away with in the wilderness below the garden, and there was the
+bench by the river, and there the outlook up and down--had so many
+chimneys belched forth smoke and had the smoke been as black on the
+opposite bank, up the river, in the old days? Certainly there had not
+been so many ghosts--not one of those that now looked at me with
+reproachful eyes, asking me what I had done with the years, for which
+such ambitious plans had been made on that very spot ages and ages ago?
+
+
+III
+
+Philadelphia is not responsible for the ghosts; they are my affair; but
+it has made itself responsible for the beauty, not only at Bartram's but
+at as many other of the old places as it has been able to lay claims
+upon, converting them into what the French would call historic
+monuments. And Philadelphia, with the help of Colonial Dames, and an
+Automobile Club, and those societies and individuals who have learned at
+last to love the Philadelphia monuments though still indifferent to the
+town, has not been too soon in prescribing the desperate remedies their
+desperate case demands. In the new care of these old places, as well as
+in the new devotion to the old names and the old families, in the new
+keenness for historic meetings and commemorations, in the new local
+lectures on local subjects and traditions, in the very recent
+restoration of Congress Hall, in all this new native civic patriotism I
+seemed to see Philadelphia's desperate, if unconscious, struggle against
+the modern invader of the town's ancient beauty and traditions. The
+grown-up aliens who can be persuaded, as I am told they can be, to come
+and listen to papers on their own section of the town, whether it be
+Southwark, or Manayunk, or Frankford, or Society Hill, or the Northern
+Liberties, will probably in the end look up the old places and their
+history for themselves, just as the little aliens will who, in the
+schools, are given prizes for essays on local history:--offer anything,
+even a school prize, to a Russian Jew, and he will labour for it, in
+this case working indirectly for patriotism.
+
+[Illustration: THE MASSED SKY-SCRAPERS ABOVE THE HOUSETOPS]
+
+But I am not sure that the greatest good the Society of Colonial Dames
+is doing is not in emphasizing the value of the past to those who date
+back to it. It has helped one group of Philadelphians to realize that
+there are other people in their town no less old as Philadelphians and
+more important in the history of Philadelphia, what is called society
+luckily not having taken possession of the Colonial Dames in
+Philadelphia as in New York. If all who date back see in the age of
+their families their passport into the aristocracy of Philadelphia and
+therefore of America, they may join together as a formidable force
+against the advance of the formidable alien. Mr. Arnold Bennett was
+amused to discover that every Bostonian came over in the Mayflower, but
+he does not understand the necessity for the native to hold on like grim
+death to the family tree--pigmy of a tree as it must seem in Europe--if
+America is to remain American. My one fear is lest this zeal, new to me,
+is being overdone, for I fancy I see an ill-concealed threat of a new
+reaction, this time against it. What else does the Philadelphian's
+toying with the cause of the "loyalists" during the Revolution and his
+belated espousal of it mean, unless perhaps the childish Anglomania
+which fashion has imposed upon Philadelphia? People are capable of
+anything for the sake of fashion. The ugliest blot on the history of
+Philadelphia is its running after the British when they were in
+possession of the town that winter we ought to try to forget instead of
+commemorating its feasts--that winter when Philadelphia danced and
+Washington and his troops starved. Now Philadelphia threatens another
+blot as ugly by upholding the citizens who would have kept the British
+there altogether. However, this is as yet only a threat, Philadelphians
+are too preoccupied in their struggle for survival.
+
+
+IV
+
+Not only the new patriotism, but the new architecture is Colonial. For
+long after Colonial days Philadelphia kept to red brick and white
+facings in town, to grey stone and white porches in Germantown, often
+losing the old dignity and fine proportions, but preserving the unity,
+the harmony of Penn's original scheme, and the repose that is the
+inevitable result of unity. But there were many terrible breaks before
+and during my time--breaks that gave us the Public Buildings and
+Memorial Hall and many of the big banks and insurance offices down town,
+and a long list of regrettable mistakes;--breaks that burdened us with
+the brown stone period fortunately never much in favour, and the Furness
+period which I could wish had been less in favour so much too lavish was
+its gift of undesirable originality, and the awful green stone period of
+which a church here and a big mansion there and substantial buildings
+out at the University, too substantial to be pulled down for many a day,
+rise, a solid reproach to us for our far straying from righteousness;
+breaks that courted and won the admiration of Philadelphia for
+imitations of any and every style that wasn't American, especially if it
+was English, Philadelphia tremendously pleased with itself for the bits
+borrowed from the English Universities and dumped down in its own
+University and out at Bryn Mawr, there as unmistakable aliens as our own
+Rhodes Scholars are at Oxford.
+
+[Illustration: SUNSET. PHILADELPHIA FROM ACROSS THE DELAWARE]
+
+But from the moment Philadelphia began to look up its genealogy and
+respect it, the revival of Colonial was bound, sooner or later, to
+follow. It meant a change from which I could not escape, had I
+deliberately refused to see the many others. I was face to face with it
+at every step I took, in every direction I went--from the Navy Yard on
+League Island to the far end of North Broad Street; from Germantown, the
+old grey stone here returned to its own again, to West Philadelphia;
+from the University where the Law School building looks grave and
+distinguished and genuine in the midst of sham Tudor and sham I hardly
+know what, and deplorable green stone, to the Racquets Club in town;
+from the tallest sky-scraper to the smallest workman's dwelling--it was
+Colonial of one sort or another: sometimes with line results, at others
+with Colonial red brick and white facings and Colonial gables and
+Colonial columns and Colonial porches so abused that, after passing
+certain Colonial abortions repeated by the dozens, the hundreds, the
+thousands, in rows upon rows of two-story houses, all alike to the very
+pattern of the awning and the curves of the rocking chair on the
+invariable porch. I had it in my heart to wish that Philadelphia had
+never heard the word Colonial. However, on the whole, more good has been
+done than harm. The original model is a fine one, it belongs to
+Philadelphia, and in reviving it the Philadelphia architect is working
+along legitimate lines.
+
+But even as I write this, I realise that it is not to the revival of
+Colonial that Philadelphia owes all its new beauty. Indeed, the
+architecture that has done most for it in its new phase is that from
+which least would be expected by those who believe in appropriateness or
+utility as indispensable to architectural beauty. A town that has plenty
+of space to spread out indefinitely has no reason whatever to spread up
+in sky-scrapers, and this is precisely what Philadelphia has done and,
+moreover, looks all the better for having done. Its sky-scrapers compose
+themselves with marvellous effectiveness as a centre to the town, though
+they threaten by degrees to become too scattered to preserve the present
+composition; they provide an astounding and ever-varying arrangement of
+towers and spires from neighbouring corners and crossings; they give new
+interest as a background to some simple bit of old Philadelphia, as
+where Wanamaker's rises sheer and high above the little red brick
+meeting-house in Twelfth Street; they add to the charm of some ambitious
+bit of new Philadelphia as where the little Girard Trust
+Building--itself a happy return to standards that gave us Girard
+College and the Mint and Fairmount Water-Works--stands low among the
+clustered towers, just as many a town in the Alps or Apennines lies low
+in the cup of the hills, and is the lovelier for it; they redeem from
+ugliness buildings of later periods, as where they give the scale in the
+most surprising fashion to the Union League; from far up or down the
+long straight line of Broad Street they complete the perspective as
+impressively as the Arc de Triomphe completes that other impressive
+perspective from the Garden of the Tuileries in Paris. They are as
+beautiful when you see them from the bridges or from the Park, a great
+group of towers high above the houses, high above the lesser towers and
+spires, high above the curls and wisps of smoke that now hang over
+Philadelphia; and from the near country they give to the low-lying town
+a sky-line that for loveliness and grandeur is not to be surpassed by
+the famous first view of Pisa across the Italian plain.
+
+[Illustration: THE UNION LEAGUE BETWEEN THE SKY-SCRAPERS]
+
+Philadelphia is, in truth, such a beautiful town that I am surprised the
+world should be so slow in finding it out. The danger to it now is the
+Philadelphian's determination to thrust beauty upon it at any cost, not
+knowing that it is beautiful already. There is too much talk everywhere
+about town-planning as a reform, as a part of the whole tiresome
+business of elevating the masses. As I have said, Penn talked no
+nonsense of that kind, nor did Sir Christopher Wren when he made the
+fine design that London had not the sense to stick to, nor L'Enfant when
+he laid out Washington. For the town that gets into the clutches of the
+reformer, I feel much as Whistler did for art--"What a sad state the
+slut is in an these gentlemen can help her." A town, like a woman,
+should cultivate good looks and cannot be too fastidious in every
+detail. But that is no reason why it should confuse this decent personal
+care with a moral mission. There is too much reform in Philadelphia just
+now for my taste, or its good. The idea of the new Parkway; with fine
+buildings like the new Free Library and the new Franklin Institute,
+along its route through the town; with the City Hall at one end and the
+fine new Art Gallery in the Park at the other; promises well, and I
+suppose that eventually the silly little wooden pergolas will disappear
+and the new buildings go up in their place. But though I know it sounds
+like shocking heresy, I should feel more confidence if its completion
+were in the hands of the old corrupt government we never tired of
+condemning, which may have stolen some of our money but at least gave us
+in return a splendidly planned and thoroughly well-kept Park, one of the
+most beautiful in the world. I believe that not only this monumental,
+but more domestic experiments are in view, the workman this time to
+profit--our old self-reliant American workman to have a taste of the
+benevolent interference that has taken the backbone out of the English
+workman. Rumours have reached me of emissaries sent to spy out the land
+in the Garden Cities of Germany and England. But what have we, in our
+far-famed City of Homes, to learn from other people's Garden Cities?
+For comfort, is the workman anywhere better off at a lower rent than in
+the old streets of neat little two-story brick houses, or in the new
+streets of luxurious little Colonial abortions? And what does he want
+with the reformer's gardens when he lives in the green country town of
+Philadelphia?
+
+[Illustration: UP BROAD STREET FROM LEAGUE ISLAND]
+
+
+V
+
+Philadelphia might have lost more of its old architecture and been less
+successful with its new, and would still be beautiful, for as yet it has
+not ceased to respect Penn's wish to see it fair and green. It is not so
+green as it was, I admit--not so green as in the days of my childhood to
+which, in looking back, the spring always means streets too well lined
+with trees for my taste, since in every one those horrid green measuring
+worms were waiting to fall, crawling, upon me. There are great stretches
+in some streets from which the trees have disappeared, partly because
+they do not prosper so well in the now smoke-laden air; partly because
+every one blown down or injured must be replaced if replaced at all by
+some thrifty citizen held responsible for whatever damage it may do
+through no fault of his; partly, I believe, because at one time street
+commissioners ordered one or two in front of a house to be cut down,
+charged the landlord for doing it, and found too much profit not to
+persevere in their disastrous policy. Still, though Philadelphians in
+summer fly to little European towns to escape the streets they deplore
+as arid in Philadelphia, I know of no other town as large that is as
+green. The notes I made in Philadelphia are full of my surprise that I
+should have forgotten how green and shady are its streets, how tender is
+this green in its first spring growth under the high luminous sky, how
+lovely the wistaria-draped walls in town and the dogwood in the suburbs.
+Walk or drive in whatever direction I chose, and at every crossing I
+looked up or down a long green vista, so that I understood the
+Philadelphia business man who described to me his daily walk from his
+Spruce Street house to the Reading Terminal as a lesson in botany. On
+the other side of the Schuylkill, in any of the suburbs, every street
+became a leafy avenue. There were evenings in that last June I spent in
+Philadelphia, when, the ugly houses bathed in golden light and the trees
+one long golden-green screen in front of them, I would not have
+exchanged Walnut or Spruce Street in West Philadelphia or many a Lane in
+Germantown, for any famous road or boulevard the world over. Really, the
+trees convert the whole town into an annex, an approach to that Park
+which is its chief green beauty and which, to me, was more than
+sufficient atonement for the corrupt government Philadelphia is said to
+have groaned under all the years Fairmount was growing in grace and
+beauty. And beyond the Park, beyond the suburbs, the leafy avenues run
+on for miles through as beautiful country as ever shut in a beautiful
+town.
+
+[Illustration: FROM GRAY'S FERRY]
+
+
+VI
+
+After all, there is beauty enough left to last my time, and I suppose
+with that I should be content. But I cannot help thinking of the future,
+cannot help wondering, now that I see the change the last quarter of a
+century has made, what the next will do for Philadelphia--whether after
+twenty-five years more a vestige of my Philadelphia will survive. I do
+not believe it will; I may be wrong, but I am giving my impressions for
+what they are worth, and nothing on my return impressed me so much as
+the change everywhere and in everything. I think any American, from no
+matter what part of the country, who has been away so long, must, on
+going back, be impressed in the same way--must feel with me that America
+is growing day by day into something as different as possible from his
+America. For my part, I am just as glad I shall not live to see the
+Philadelphia that is to emerge from the present chaos, since I have not
+the shadow of a doubt that, whatever it may be, it will be as unlike
+Philadelphia as I have just learned to know it again, as this new
+Philadelphia is unlike my old Philadelphia, the beautiful, peaceful town
+where roses bloomed in the sunny back-yards and people lived in dignity
+behind the plain red brick fronts of the long narrow streets.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Abbey, Edwin A., 393
+
+  Academy of Fine Arts, 64, 231, 376, 379, 380, 389, 395, 402, 405, 407,
+      412, 428
+
+  Academy of Music, 206, 459
+
+  Academy of Natural Sciences, 64
+
+  Acorn Club, 494
+
+  Adams, John, 6, 50, 161, 297, 385, 418-422
+
+  Addams, Clifford, 407
+
+  Adelphia, the, 499
+
+  Adirondacks (mountains), 169
+
+  Aitken, Robert, 310
+
+  Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 243
+
+  Alexander, John W., 393
+
+  _Alhambra, The_, 315
+
+  Alicia, Mother, 371
+
+  Allen's, 125
+
+  America, new and old, 471
+
+  _American_, the (weekly), 249
+
+  American Army crossing the Delaware, 375
+
+  American Philosophical Society, 418
+
+  Angelo, Michael, 373
+
+  Annabel, Miss, school, 258
+
+  Annals, Watson's, 314
+
+  Antin, Mary, 467
+
+  Appian etchings, 395
+
+  _Arabian Nights, The_, 64
+
+  Arc de Triomphe, 405
+
+  Arch Street Meeting House, 120, 517
+
+  Arch Street Theatre, 67, 459
+
+  Ardea, Father, 191, 192
+
+  Arnold, Matthew, 161, 342-344
+
+  Arnold's Mansion, 521
+
+  _Arrah-na-Pogue_, 67
+
+  Art Gallery in the Park, proposed, 534
+
+  Art (Industrial) School, 257, 330, 332, 405
+
+  _Art Nouveau_, 408
+
+  Assembly, the (social), 153-174, 206, 216, 254, 260, 304, 316, 503
+
+  Atlantic City, 170, 246, 298
+
+  _Atlantic Monthly_, 243, 244, 257
+
+  Augustine's, 60, 148, 151, 153, 281, 438, 439, 449
+
+  Bailey, Banks & Biddle, 125, 456
+
+  Bala Country Club, 493, 495
+
+  Baldwin's Locomotive Works, 228, 477
+
+  Bank, Philadelphia, 49
+
+  Baptists, 176, 183
+
+  Bar Harbor, 169
+
+  Barber, Alice, 396
+
+  Barcelona (churches of), 199
+
+  Barrett, Lawrence, 324
+
+  Barrie (publisher of art books), 376
+
+  Bartram, John, 31, 300, 521
+
+  Bartram's Garden, 31, 42, 299-303, 337, 521, 522
+
+  Bayswater, England, 493
+
+  Beau Nash, 145
+
+  Beaux, Cecilia, 406
+
+  Beaux-Arts (school), 407
+
+  Beidleman (architecture), 361
+
+  Bellamy (_Looking Backward_), 338
+
+  Bellevue-Stratford (hotel), 148, 162, 414, 447, 500, 503
+
+  Belmont (Fairmount Park), 210, 299, 430, 496
+
+  Bennett, Arnold, 478, 486, 525
+
+  Biblioth�que Nationale, 12
+
+  Biddle, Miss Julia, 399
+
+  Biddles, 50, 145, 214-216
+
+  _Biglow Papers_, 320
+
+  _Black Crook, The_, 67
+
+  Blanchard (publisher), 313
+
+  Blitz, Signor, 91
+
+  Blum, Robert, artist, 246, 393
+
+  Board of Education, 257
+
+  Bobbelin, Father, 192
+
+  Boker, George H., 316, 323-325
+
+  Booth, Edwin, 68
+
+  Borghesi collection (art), 406
+
+  Borie, C. L. Jr., architect, 407
+
+  Bories, the, 31, 107
+
+  Borrow, George Henry, 320
+
+  Boswell, James, 290
+
+  Boudreau, Father, 193
+
+  Boudreau, Mother, 97
+
+  Bowie, Mrs., social leader, 146, 147
+
+  Boyle, John, sculptor, 396
+
+  Bradstreet, Anne, 309
+
+  _Breitmann Ballads_, 320, 456
+
+  Brennan, artist, 393
+
+  Brewster, Benjamin Harris, 342
+
+  Briggs, Richard, 424
+
+  Brillat-Savarin, 414
+
+  British Museum, 12, 309
+
+  Broad and Locust Streets, 257, 258, 259, 449
+
+  Broad and Walnut, 42
+
+  Broad Street, 324, 449, 489, 499-503, 529, 533
+
+  Broad Street, North, 459, 529
+
+  Broad Street Station, 12
+
+  Brook Farm, 347
+
+  Brown, Charles Brockden, 313, 363
+
+  Browning Societies, 352
+
+  Bryn Mawr, 98, 104, 173, 307, 364, 529
+
+  Bullitts, the, 107
+
+  Bunyan, John, 308
+
+  Burns's, 126, 210, 456
+
+  Burr, Anna Robeson, 363
+
+  Burr, Charles, 363
+
+  _Burton's Gentleman's Magazine_, 314
+
+  Business and Professional Club, 352
+
+
+  Cadwallader-Biddle, 343
+
+  Cadwalladers, 50, 145, 216
+
+  Caldwell, J. E. & Co., 125, 456
+
+  _Callista_, 59
+
+  Callowhill, Hannah, 417
+
+  Callowhill Street Bridge, 281
+
+  Camac Street, 351
+
+  Camden (N. J.), 293, 324-329
+
+  Campanini, opera singer, 401
+
+  Campbell, Helen, 338
+
+  Cape May, 170
+
+  Carlyle, Thomas, 243
+
+  Carpenter's Hall, 514
+
+  Carson, Hampton L., 6, 363
+
+  Cary (publisher), 313
+
+  _Casket, The_, 314, 428
+
+  Cassatt, Mary, 393
+
+  Castleman, Richard, 6
+
+  Cathedral, the, 120, 183, 184, 187, 198, 200, 203
+
+  Catholics, 176, 177-204, 258
+
+  Cavalcaselle, Giovanni B., 402
+
+  Centennial Exposition, 205-232, 233, 234, 253, 267, 276, 277, 357,
+      375, 390
+
+  _Century, The_, 337
+
+  Champs-Elys�es, 405
+
+  Chapman, Miss, school, 258
+
+  Charles the Bold, 337
+
+  Chartres Cathedral, 199
+
+  Chartreuse, the old, 444
+
+  Chase, William M., 246
+
+  Chester, 54, 152
+
+  Chestnut Hill, 78, 123, 129, 170, 258
+
+  Chestnut Street, 125, 144, 226, 227, 325, 342, 368, 449, 456, 459, 499
+
+  Chestnut Street Theatre, 67, 459
+
+  "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine," 119, 123, 151, 158, 182, 263,
+      297, 464
+
+  Chew House, 297, 298, 518
+
+  Childs, George W., 113, 342, 499
+
+  Chippendale furniture, 289
+
+  Christ Church, 114, 120, 183, 188, 277, 517
+
+  Christ Church Burial Ground, 120, 281
+
+  Church (painting), 246
+
+  Church of England, 183
+
+  Cimabue, Giovanni, 402
+
+  City Companies in London, 152
+
+  City Hall, 259, 260, 405, 489, 526, 534
+
+  City of Homes, 481, 534
+
+  City Troop, 64, 452, 510
+
+  Civic Club, 494
+
+  Civil War, the, 130, 146, 518
+
+  Claghorn's collection of old prints, 376, 394
+
+  Clements, Gabrielle, 396
+
+  Clinton Street, 514
+
+  Clover Club, 152, 443
+
+  Club (Art), South Broad Street, 406
+
+  Coates, Mrs. Florence Earle, 336, 362
+
+  Cobbett, William, 440, 485, 513
+
+  Coghlan, Father, 193
+
+  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 324
+
+  College Club, the, 494
+
+  Colonial (American) art, 381, 389
+
+  Colonial Congress, 253, 267
+
+  Colonial Dames, 219, 221, 361, 522, 525
+
+  Colonial days, 283, 526
+
+  Colonial doorways, 361
+
+  Colonial history, 9
+
+  Colonial houses, 6, 36, 73, 158, 282, 297, 298, 382, 443, 460, 496,
+      518, 526, 529
+
+  Colonial life and society, 6, 443
+
+  Colonists, 495
+
+  Colonnade (hotel), 148
+
+  Columbia (College), 364
+
+  Comegys, Mrs., school, 258
+
+  _Complete Cookery_ (Miss Leslie), 423-430
+
+  Concord (Mass.), 347-348
+
+  Coney Island, 213
+
+  Conflans (convent), 175
+
+  Congress Hall, 522
+
+  Connor, Mrs., social leader, 147
+
+  Contemporary Club, 352
+
+  _Continent, Our_, 293
+
+  Continental (hotel), 148
+
+  Convent, 27, 31, 36, 47, 55, 59, 63, 67, 68, 72 sq., 104, 117, 126,
+      133-137, 175 sq., 205, 238, 241, 258, 368, 372, 373, 374, 451
+
+  Convent at Paris, 222
+
+  Cooper, Colin Campbell, 396
+
+  Cope, Walter, architect, 407
+
+  Copley, John Singleton, 389
+
+  Country Clubs, 152, 162, 447, 494-496
+
+  Courts (of law), 468, 500
+
+  Cox, Kenyon (painting), 246
+
+  Cramp's shipyard, 228, 477
+
+  "Crazy Norah," 27, 35, 375
+
+  Crowe, Joseph Archer, 402
+
+  Cruikshank drawings, 375
+
+  Curtis Publishing Co. Building, 355
+
+  Cushman, Charlotte, 68
+
+
+  Dana, William P. W., artist, 393
+
+  Dancing Class, 138, 139, 143-145, 147, 148, 157, 182, 184, 203, 254,
+      260, 304, 316, 503
+
+  Darlington butter, 440
+
+  Darlington, J. G. & Co., 125, 456
+
+  Darwin, Charles, 242
+
+  Daughters of Pennsylvania, 219, 221
+
+  Davenports, the (actors), 64
+
+  Davis, Clarke, 246
+
+  Davis, Mrs. Rebecca Harding, 336
+
+  Davis, Richard Harding, 336
+
+  Day, Frank Miles, architect, 407
+
+  Declaration of Independence, 158, 214, 227, 253, 267, 418
+
+  Decorative Art Club, 399
+
+  Delaware River, 278, 294, 308, 455
+
+  Dexter's, 35, 88, 126, 456
+
+  Dickens, Charles, 6, 59, 375, 427
+
+  Dickinson, Jonathan, 15, 313
+
+  Dillaye, Blanche, 396
+
+  _Domestic Economy_ (Miss Leslie), 428
+
+  Drama-Reforming Societies, 352
+
+  Dreka Co. (engraver), 125, 148, 151, 456
+
+  Drew, Mrs. John (actress), 68
+
+  Drexel, Anthony J., 342
+
+  Drexel Institute, 405
+
+  Duclaux, Mme (Mary Robinson), 260
+
+  Duke of Westminster's collection (art), 406
+
+  Dundas house, 42, 108, 459
+
+  Dutch descent, 219
+
+  Dutch in New York, 16
+
+  Dutch Jew, 467
+
+
+  Earle's, 125
+
+  Eastern Shore, Maryland, 219, 245, 246
+
+  Eberlein, Harold Donaldson, 6, 361
+
+  Education, Board of, 257
+
+  Eleventh Street, 48
+
+  Eleventh and Spruce (streets), 44, 47, 48 sq., 94, 102, 104, 314, 427,
+      430
+
+  Eliot, George, 401
+
+  Eliphas, Levi, 242
+
+  Elkins art collection, 406
+
+  Ellwanger, G. H., 424
+
+  Elwood, Thomas, 15, 308
+
+  Episcopal Academy, 143, 162, 181, 258, 455
+    Head Master of, 181
+
+  Episcopalians, 176 177, 183, 187
+
+  _Evening Telegraph_, 246, 341
+
+  Ewing, Miss Julia, 341
+
+  Exposition, Centennial, 205, 232
+
+  Eyre, Wilson, 407
+
+
+  _Fabiola_, 59
+
+  Fairmount Park, 64, 129, 173, 210, 213, 281, 299, 444, 486, 496, 521,
+      533, 534, 538
+
+  Fairmount Water-Works, 299, 533
+
+  _Faith Gartney's Girlhood_, 59, 335
+
+  Ferris, Stephen, 394
+
+  Fildes, Luke, 231
+
+  Fisher, Sydney George, 6, 309, 358
+
+  Fishers, the, 31
+
+  Fish-House Club, 152, 443
+
+  Fitzgerald, Edward, 423
+
+  _Fool's Errand_, 338
+
+  _Forget-Me-Not_, 348
+
+  Fourth of July, 63
+
+  Fox, George, 15, 308
+
+  _Francesca da Rimini_, 324
+
+  Frankford, 81, 489, 522
+
+  Franklin, Benjamin, 24, 166, 215, 216, 253, 263, 281, 290, 355, 310,
+      313, 358, 386, 389, 400, 417, 422, 482
+
+  Franklin Inn, 351
+
+  Franklin Institute, 263, 534
+
+  Free Public Library, 307, 534
+
+  _French Revolution_ (Thiers), 375
+
+  Friends, 1, 9, 15, 16, 20, 92, 134, 166, 197, 203, 258, 283, 289, 290,
+      294, 307, 309, 357, 380, 386, 389, 513
+
+  Friends' School (Germantown), 258
+
+  Fromuth, marine painter, 406
+
+  Front Street, 278, 281, 290, 326, 514, 517
+
+  Frost, Arthur B., artist, 393
+
+  Furness (architecture), 407, 526
+
+  Furness, Dr. Horace Howard, 332, 335
+
+  Furness, Horace Howard, Jr., 362, 363
+
+  Furness, William Henry, D.D., 332, 335
+
+
+  Garber, Daniel, 407
+
+  Gebbie and Barrie, 125, 376
+
+  German mystics, 176
+
+  Germans (immigrants), 471
+
+  Germantown, 91, 123, 124, 258, 294, 297, 336, 468, 477, 496, 518, 521,
+      526, 529, 538
+
+  Germantown Cricket Ground, 496
+
+  Gettysburg (battle-fields), 518
+
+  Gibson collection, 379
+
+  _Gift, The_, 314
+
+  Gilchrist, Mrs. Alexander, 119, 284, 287
+
+  Gillespie, Mrs., social leader, 215, 216, 253
+
+  Giotto di Bondone, 402
+
+  Girard College, 123, 379, 533
+
+  Girard House, 148
+
+  Girard Trust Building, 530
+
+  Gissing, George, 239
+
+  Glackens, William J., illustrator, 406
+
+  Glackmeyer, Father, 193
+
+  Glasse, Mrs. (Cookery Book), 314, 423-428
+
+  _Godey's Lady's Book_, 314, 337
+
+  Gough Square (London), 324
+
+  Grafly, Charles, sculptor, 407
+
+  _Graham's_ (Magazine), 314, 337
+
+  Grants, the, 31
+
+  Gray's Ferry, 281, 299, 521
+
+  Green, Elizabeth Shippen, 406
+
+  Greene, General, 418
+
+  Grelaud, Miss, 107
+
+  Griggs (publisher), 313
+
+  Groton (school), 162
+
+
+  Haden, Seymour, etchings, 395, 396
+
+  Hale, Mrs. Sarah Josepha, 314, 428
+
+  Hallowell, Mrs. Sarah, 341
+
+  Hamilton, J. McLure, 393
+
+  Handy, Moses P., 245
+
+  _Hans Breitmann_, 320, 456
+
+  Harland, Marion, 428
+
+  _Harper's_ (magazine), 238, 337
+
+  Harrison, Alexander, 393
+
+  Harrison, Birge, 393
+
+  Harrison, John, 405
+
+  Harrison, Mrs. (Art Club), 399
+
+  Harvard (College), 162
+
+  Hassler's band, 140, 148
+
+  Haverford (school), 258
+
+  Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 347
+
+  Hawthorne, Rose, 347
+
+  Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 6, 157, 216, 220, 290, 307, 315,
+      364, 459
+
+  Hogarth's engravings, 376
+
+  Holloway, Edward Stratton, 406
+
+  Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 243
+
+  Holmesburg, 258
+
+  Holy Trinity (church), 183
+
+  Home Arts School (London), 257
+
+  Homer and Colladay's, 125
+
+  Hooper, Mrs. Lucy, 341
+
+  Hopkins, the, 31
+
+  Hopkins, Dr. (dentist), 64
+
+  Horticultural Hall, 347, 503
+
+  Hospital, Pennsylvania, 24, 114, 277, 358, 460
+
+  Hotel Meurice, 222
+
+  Howells, William Dean, 259, 401
+
+  Howland's Hotel at Long Branch, 103
+
+  Hubbell's, 126, 459
+
+  Hudson River School, 390
+
+  _Hugh Wynne_, 357, 358, 363
+
+  Hughes and M�ller, 456
+
+  Huguet, Madame, 77, 85
+
+  Hunt, Holman, 372, 373
+
+  Huntington Valley Club, 495
+
+  Hutchinson Ports, 363
+
+
+  Impressionists (artists), 390
+
+  Independence Hall, 467
+
+  Independence Square, 355, 467
+
+  Industrial Art School, 257, 330, 396, 399
+
+  Ingersolls, the, 145
+
+  _Initials, The_, 59
+
+  International expositions, 213, 231, 253
+
+  Irish immigrants, 471
+
+  Irving, Henry, 401
+
+  Irving, Washington, 315
+
+  Irwin, Miss, school, 140, 175, 258
+
+  Italians (immigrants), 464, 468
+
+
+  James, Henry, 6, 16, 401, 509
+
+  Janauschek (actress), 348
+
+  Janvier, Thomas Allibone, 169, 363, 433-437, 443
+
+  Jastrow, Dr. Morris, 364
+
+  Jefferson, Thomas, 50, 386, 418
+
+  Jenkins, Howard, 249
+
+  Jesuits, 191, 193, 197
+
+  Jew, Dutch, 467
+
+  Jew, Pennsylvania, 467, 514
+
+  Jew, Russian, 214, 282, 283, 297, 361, 460, 464-473, 525
+
+  Jews, religious liberty of, 177
+
+  Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 324
+
+  Johnson House, 297, 521
+
+  Johnson's, John G., art collection, 406
+
+  Jones's, 126, 210, 444, 456
+
+  Jourdain, M., 282
+
+  June, Jenny, 428
+
+
+  _Kate Vincent_, 178
+
+  Keatings, the, 31
+
+  Kellogg, Clara Louise, 67
+
+  Kensington, 228, 297, 477
+
+  Kensington, England, 493
+
+  Keppel, Frederick, 376
+
+  Kings, the, 31
+
+  Kirk, John Foster, 337
+
+  Kirkbride's Insane Asylum, 263
+
+  Kneller, portrait-painter, 389
+
+  Knight, Ridgway, 393
+
+  K�gler, Franz, 402
+
+
+  _La Belle H�l�ne_, 68
+
+  _La Grande Duchesse_, 68
+
+  La Pierre House, 148
+
+  _Ladies' Home Journal_, 355
+
+  Ladies of the Sacred Heart, 72, 93
+    Convent, 72 sq.
+
+  _Lady of Shalott_, 27, 373
+
+  Lalanne etchings, 395
+
+  Lamb, Charles, 126, 324
+
+  _Lamplighter, The_, 56
+
+  Long, John Luther, 363
+
+  Lathrop, Mr. and Mrs. George, 347
+
+  Latin Quarter, 411
+
+  Laurel Hill, 521
+
+  Law Courts, 468, 500
+
+  Law School, building, 529
+
+  Lea, Henry Charles, 313, 363
+
+  League Island, 529
+
+  Leary's, 126
+
+  _Ledger_ (newspaper), 113, 341, 355
+
+  Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 260
+
+  Leland, Charles Godfrey, 42, 234-238, 240-244, 254, 257, 263, 272,
+      275, 276, 316, 319-330, 332, 335, 344-348, 396, 399, 405
+
+  Leland, Charles Godfrey, _Memoirs_ of, 276
+
+  L'Enfant (architect), 533
+
+  Leslie, Margaret (artist), 396
+
+  Leslie, Miss, Cookery Book, 313, 423-437
+
+  Levi, Eliphas, 242
+
+  Lewises, 50
+
+  Li Hung Chang, 20, 513
+
+  Library, Bryn Mawr College, 307
+
+  Library of Congress, 309
+
+  Library, Free Public, 307, 534
+
+  Library, Friends', Germantown, 307
+
+  Library, Historical Society, 307
+
+  Library, Mercantile, 114, 241
+
+  Library, Philadelphia, 24, 114, 241, 290, 307, 455
+
+  Library, Ridgway, 241, 307, 364
+
+  _Life of Blake_, 119
+
+  Lionardo da Vinci, 402
+
+  Lippincott, Horace Mather, 6, 361
+
+  Lippincott, J. B., 124, 313
+
+  Lippincott's (book-store), 125, 313, 315
+
+  _Lippincott's Magazine_, 243, 314, 315, 337, 341, 427
+
+  Lithuanians (immigrants), 468, 473
+
+  "Little England" of Kensington, 19
+
+  "Little Street of Clubs, the," 351, 406
+
+  _Lives of the Artists_, 373
+
+  Locust Street, 472
+
+  Logan, Deborah, 309
+
+  Logan, James, 31, 177, 184, 241, 307, 417, 421, 518
+
+  Logan Square, 120, 162, 500
+
+  Loganian Library (see Ridgway), 364
+
+  Lombard Street, 472
+
+  Long Branch, 169
+
+  Longfellow, Henry W., 320, 329
+
+  _Looking Backward_, 338
+
+  _Lost Heiress, The_, 59
+
+  Lowell, James Russell, 316
+
+
+  Macalisters, the, 31
+
+  McCalls, the, 158
+
+  McCarter, Henry, artist, 407
+
+  MacVeagh, Wayne, 343
+
+  Madeira (wine), 55, 153, 417-423, 506, 510
+
+  M�ennerchor Garden, 500
+
+  Main Line, 31, 123, 297
+
+  Main Street in Germantown, 297
+
+  Manayunk, 522
+
+  Maria, Father de, 191
+
+  Marion, General Francis, 216
+
+  "Market, Arch, Race and Vine," 281
+
+  Market Street, 119, 120, 123, 157, 281, 294, 310, 329, 451, 456, 489
+
+  Martin, Madame, 137, 138
+
+  Maryland, Eastern Shore of, 219
+
+  Matisse, artist, 402
+
+  Mayflower (ship), 219, 525
+
+  Meeting-Houses, 188, 281, 517
+
+  _Meg Merrilies_, 27, 68, 375
+
+  Memorial Hall, 213, 405, 526
+
+  Mennonites in Germantown, 176
+
+  Mercantile Library, 114, 241, 307
+
+  Merritt, Mrs. Anna Lea, 393
+
+  Methodists, 183
+
+  Mifflin, Mrs. (Art Club), 399
+
+  Millais, John Everett, 275
+
+  Miller, Leslie, 396
+
+  Milton, John, 308
+
+  Mint, United States, 108, 130, 379, 459, 533
+
+  _Mischief in the Middle Ages_, 243
+
+  Mitchell, Dr. S. Weir, 6, 357, 363, 456
+
+  Moore, Mrs. Bloomfield, 379
+
+  Moran family, 394
+
+  Moravians, monasteries of, 176
+
+  Morrises, the, 216
+
+  Morris, Gouverneur, 133
+
+  Morris, Harrison S., 362
+
+  Morris House, 297, 521
+
+  Morris, William, 400, 408
+
+  Mother Goose, 242
+
+  Mount Airy, 170
+
+  Mount Pleasant, 31, 299
+
+  Moxon's _Tennyson_, 372
+
+  Moyamensing Prison, 263
+
+  Murillo (painting), 372
+
+  Mustin's, 125
+
+
+  Napoleon, pictures of, 374
+
+  Narragansett Pier, 169
+
+  Nash, Richard ("Beau"), 145
+
+  Natatorium, 139, 140, 145, 499
+
+  _Nation_, the (New York), 249
+
+  _National Observer_, 294
+
+  Navy Yard, 529
+
+  New Century Club, 494
+
+  New Testament (German), 310
+
+  New Year's Day, 152
+
+  New York magazines, 337
+
+  Newman's _Callista_, 59
+
+  Nilsson, Christine, 401
+
+  Ninth and Green (streets), 489, 500
+
+  Nordau, Max, 402
+
+  Norrises, the, 216
+
+  Norris, Isaac, 15, 417
+
+  _North American_, the, 355
+
+  Northern Liberties, 522
+
+
+  Oakdale Park, 293
+
+  Oakley, Thornton, 406
+
+  Oakley, Violet, 406
+
+  _Old Mam'selle's Secret_, 335
+
+  Old Swedes Church, 114, 120
+
+  Orpheus Club, 153
+
+  Ouida's Guardsman, 275
+
+  _Our American Cousin_, 67
+
+  _Our Continent_, 337, 341
+
+  _Our Convent Days_, 88, 358
+
+  _Ours_, 67
+
+  Oxford (England), 86, 529
+
+  Oxford, Dr. (cookery books), 424
+
+
+  Page, George Bispham, architect, 407
+
+  Paget, Violet (Vernon Lee), 260
+
+  Park (see Fairmount), 534, 538
+
+  Parkway, the new, 405, 534
+
+  Parrish, Maxfield, 406
+
+  Parrish, Stephen, 396
+
+  Patterson, General, house of, 108, 459
+
+  Peale, Charles Wilson, 389
+
+  Pegasus Societies, 352
+
+  Penn Club, 351
+
+  Penn, John, 517
+
+  Penn, William, 2, 9, 10, 15, 24, 31, 35, 36, 74, 85, 117, 219, 260,
+      282, 287-289, 290, 294, 375, 382, 408, 417, 421, 455, 456, 474,
+      500, 526, 533
+
+  Penn, William, statue of, 9
+
+  Pennell, Joseph, 1, 24, 203, 219, 237, 246, 268, 271-303, 308, 337,
+      338, 341, 348, 351, 357, 368, 376, 380, 393-395, 474
+
+  Pennock Brothers, 144, 439
+
+  Pennsbury, 31
+
+  Pennsylvania Historical Society, 6, 157, 216, 290, 315, 364
+
+  Pennsylvania Hospital, 24, 114, 277, 358, 460
+
+  Pennsylvania Jew, 467
+
+  Pennsylvania, promotion of science by, 309
+
+  Pennsylvania Railroad, 276
+
+  Pennsylvania Railroad Station, 276, 448, 451
+
+  Pennsylvania, University of, 143, 162, 173, 258, 358, 364, 473, 496,
+      526
+
+  Pennypacker, Governor, 307
+
+  Peppers, the, 50, 399
+
+  _Peterson's_ (magazine), 314, 337
+
+  Philadelphia Art Club, 324
+
+  Philadelphia Bank, 49
+
+  Philadelphia Club, 153, 316, 443, 510
+
+  Philadelphia Library, 24, 114, 241, 290, 307, 313, 315, 455
+
+  _Philadelphia Saturday Museum_, 314
+
+  Phillips, John S., 376
+
+  Philosophical Society, American, 418
+
+  Picasso, artist, 402
+
+  Plastic Club, 406
+
+  Pocahontas, 9
+
+  Poe, Edgar Allan, 27, 316
+
+  Poor Richard (club), 352
+
+  Poor Richard's Almanac, 310
+
+  Poore, Harry, 271, 272
+
+  Pope of Rome, 120
+
+  Pope's Head, 310
+
+  Porter and Coates, 125, 315
+
+  Post-Impressionists, 381
+
+  Powhatan, 9
+
+  Pre-Raphaelites, 373, 390
+
+  Presbyterian Building, 271
+
+  Presbyterians, 176, 183
+
+  _Press_, the, 245
+
+  Provence, 60
+
+  Public Buildings (see City Hall), 10, 526
+
+  Public Industrial Art School, 405
+
+  _Punch_ (London), 250
+
+  Puritans (New England), 417
+
+  Putnam (N. Y. publisher), 315
+
+  Pyle, Howard, 249, 393
+
+
+  Quakers (see Friends), 15
+
+  _Queechy_, 59, 335
+
+
+  Race (Sassafras) Street, 281
+
+  Racquets Club, 499, 529
+
+  Rafael (pictures), 372, 375
+
+  Ralph (Franklin's friend), 310
+
+  Randolph House, 463
+
+  Reading Terminal, 538
+
+  Redfield, Edward W., artist, 407
+
+  Rembrandt (painting), 246, 406
+
+  Renaissance, period of, 11
+
+  Repplier, Agnes, 6, 88, 358
+
+  Revolution (American), 382, 389, 418, 518, 525
+
+  Rhodes scholars, 80, 529
+
+  Richards, William T., artist, 393
+
+  Ridgway Library, 241, 307, 364
+
+  Rittenhouse Smiths, 363
+
+  Rittenhouse Square, 24, 91, 120, 139, 198, 456
+
+  Ritz-Carlton (hotel), 148, 414, 447
+
+  _Robin Hood_ (Howard Pyle's), 249
+
+  Robins, Edward, Jr., 358
+
+  Robins, Edward, Sr., 1, 50, 54, 56, 74, 81, 107, 111, 123, 130, 138,
+      178, 181, 183, 187, 200, 239, 244, 259, 260, 263, 294, 307, 323,
+      371, 372, 374, 375, 423, 427, 459, 500, 505
+
+  Robins, Grant, 139, 140, 147, 165, 216, 505
+
+  Robins, Mrs. Thomas, 40, 41, 43, 53, 54, 50, 60, 61, 183, 239, 268,
+      437
+
+  Robins, Thomas, 1, 35-36, 41, 43, 48-63, 107, 178, 183, 219, 222, 307,
+      314, 357, 373-375, 413, 421, 459
+
+  Robinson, Mary (Mme. Duclaux), 260
+
+  Rogers, Fairman, 493
+
+  "Rogers Group," 39, 374, 375
+
+  Romanticists (artists), 390
+
+  Roosevelt, Theodore, 506
+
+  Rorer, Mrs. (cookery book), 428
+
+  Ross, Betsy, house of, 281
+
+  Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 119, 372, 373
+
+  Rossetti, William Michael, 119, 284
+
+  _Routledge_, 59
+
+  Royal Academy, 389, 411
+
+  Royal Exchange, 411
+
+  _Rubaiyat_, the, 401
+
+  Rubens (painting), 246
+
+  Rue de Rivoli, 225
+
+  Rush, Dr. Benjamin, 241, 307
+
+  Rush, Mrs., social leader, 146
+
+  Ruskin, John, 287, 400, 402
+
+  Russian Jew, 214, 282, 283, 297, 361, 460, 464-471, 473
+
+
+  Sacred Heart, Ladies of the, 72
+    Convent of, 72 sq., 258
+
+  St. Andrew's (church), 184
+
+  St. Augustine's (church), 198
+
+  St. Clement's (church), 184, 278
+
+  St. James's (church), 183
+
+  St. John's (church), 183, 199, 200, 203
+
+  St. Joseph's (church), 64, 91, 183, 184, 187, 188, 191, 193-199
+
+  St. Mark's (church), 183, 200
+
+  St. Mary's (church), 184, 198, 199, 278
+
+  St. Michael's (church), 198
+
+  St. Patrick's (church), 91, 183, 199, 200, 203
+
+  St. Paul's (school), 162
+
+  St. Peter's (church), 108, 114, 183, 188, 277, 463, 514
+
+  Salons (Paris), 411
+
+  Sargent, John S., artist, 393
+
+  Sartain, Miss Emily, 338, 393
+
+  Sartain, William, 393
+
+  _Sartain's Union Magazine_, 314
+
+  Sassafras (Race) Street, 281
+
+  Saturday Club, 152
+
+  _Saturday Evening Post_, 355
+
+  Saur's New Testament, 310
+
+  Sautter's, 126, 444, 449, 456, 506
+
+  Schaumberg, Emily, 107
+
+  School Board, 259
+
+  School of Industrial Arts, 257, 330, 332, 405
+
+  Schools, Public, 335
+
+  Schuylkill (river), 173, 276, 281, 294, 299, 362, 451, 468, 481, 496,
+      538
+
+  Scott, Walter, 59
+    heroines of, 27, 375
+    novels of, 197, 335, 336, 427
+
+  Second Street, 42, 137, 147, 148, 166, 277, 517
+
+  Second Street Market, 114, 120, 277
+
+  Seminary at Villanova, 198
+
+  Senat, Prosper, 395
+
+  Seville (churches of), 199
+
+  Shakespeare Societies, 352
+
+  Shakespeare, William, 68, 332, 363, 401
+
+  Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 145, 313
+
+  Sheppard, J. B. & Sons, 125
+
+  Shinn (apothecary), 459
+
+  Shippen, Edward, 42
+
+  Shippen, Peggy, 31, 162
+
+  "Shippen, Peggy," 162, 356
+
+  Shippens, the, 158
+
+  Simses, the, 158
+
+  Sketch Club, 406
+
+  Sky-scrapers, 355, 530
+
+  Slavs (immigrants), 468, 471
+
+  Smarius, Father, 193
+
+  Smedley, William T., artist, 393
+
+  Smith, Albert, 263
+
+  Smith, Jessie Wilcox, 406
+
+  Smith, Lloyd, 242
+
+  Smith, Logan Pearsall, 364
+
+  Smith, Provost, house of, 281
+
+  Society Hill, 522
+
+  _Solon Shingle_, 67
+
+  Sons of Pennsylvania, 219, 221
+
+  Sothern, Edward Askew, 68
+
+  South Kensington, England, 408
+
+  South Street, 472
+
+  Southwark, 522
+
+  Southworth, Mrs. Emma D. E. Nevitt, 59
+
+  _Souvenir, The_, 314
+
+  Springett, Guli, 15
+
+  Spruce Street, 28, 42, 48 sq., 60, 63, 104, 107, 108, 113, 114, 215,
+      245, 253, 282, 460, 468, 538
+
+  State House, the, 113, 158, 220, 277, 358, 382, 471, 514
+
+  State in Schuylkill, 443
+
+  Station (Broad and Market), 489
+
+  Stations and terminals, 12, 28, 276, 481, 489, 538
+
+  Stations (railroad), 481, 489, 538
+
+  Steadmans, the, 31
+
+  Steevens, George, 449, 478
+
+  Stenton, 31, 297, 298, 518
+
+  Stephens (artist), 396
+
+  Stephens, Alice Barber, 396
+
+  Stephens, Charles H., 396
+
+  Stevenson, Mrs. Cornelius, 364
+
+  Stewardson, John, architect, 407
+
+  Stewart, Jules, 393
+
+  Stock Exchange, 54, 107, 111, 468, 486, 500
+
+  Stockton, Frank R., 336, 338
+
+  Stockton, Louise, 338
+
+  Stokes, Frank W., artist, 406
+
+  Strawberry Mansion, 210, 299, 430
+
+  Strawbridge and Clothier, 125
+
+  Stuart, Gilbert, artist, 389
+
+  Stuart, Gilbert, picture of Washington by, 41, 374, 375, 447
+
+  Swarthmore (school), 258
+
+  Swedes (immigrants), 471
+
+  Swedes Church, Old, 114, 277, 514
+
+
+  _Telegraph, Evening_, 246
+
+  Temple, the (London), 324
+
+  Tennyson's Poems, 27, 372, 373
+
+  Terminals (railroad), 12, 481, 489, 538
+
+  Terry, Ellen, 401
+
+  Thackeray (William Makepeace), 151, 294, 422
+
+  Thanksgiving Day, 63
+
+  Th��tre Fran�ais, 68
+
+  Theatres, 67
+
+  Thiers' _French Revolution_, 375
+
+  Third Street, 28, 107, 111, 113, 134, 137, 187, 206, 278, 290, 486
+
+  Thomas, George C., 307
+
+  Thompson, "Aunt Ad," 342
+
+  Thouron, Henry, 406
+
+  Torresdale, 28, 31, 72 sq., 123, 191, 258, 278, 451
+
+  Tourgee, Judge Albion W., 338
+
+  Traubel, Horace, 364
+
+  _Traveller, The_, 315
+
+  Treaty with the Indians (Penn), 375
+
+  Tree, Beerbohm, 68
+
+  Trollope, Anthony, 401
+
+  Trotter, Mary, 396
+
+  Trumbauer, Horace, architect, 407
+
+  Tuileries (Paris), 222, 533
+
+  Twelfth and Market, 489
+
+  Twelfth Street Market, 54
+
+
+  Union League, 152, 443, 447, 533
+
+  University of Pennsylvania, 143, 162, 173, 258, 307, 364, 473, 496,
+      526, 529
+
+  University, Provosts of, 119
+
+  University School (architecture), 407
+
+
+  Van Rensselaer, Mrs. John King, 363
+
+  Van Tromp, Miss, miniatures, 395
+
+  Vaux, Richard, 342
+
+  Vicaire (_Bibliographie_), 424
+
+  Vienna Caf�s (Centennial), 210, 227
+
+  Villanova Seminary, 198
+
+  Villon, Fran�ois, essay on, 238
+
+  Virginia Company, the first, 219
+
+  Virginia, early settlers in, 216, 219
+
+  Voltaire (author), 428, 513
+
+
+  Walnut Lane, 298, 538
+
+  Walnut Street, 184, 203, 297, 468, 489, 494, 538
+
+  Walnut Street Theatre, 67
+
+  Wanamaker's, 530
+
+  War, Civil, the, 130
+
+  Ward, Genevieve, 348
+
+  Wardle, Thomas (bookseller), 313
+
+  Washington (city), 226, 534
+
+  Washington, George, 44, 119, 215, 290, 482, 526
+
+  Washington's Birthday, 63
+
+  Washington's household, 44, 433
+
+  Washington, statue of, 386
+
+  Waterloo (eve of), 254
+
+  Water-Works (Fairmount), 64, 67, 299, 533
+
+  Watson, John, 6, 356, 357, 413
+
+  Watts, Harvey M., 362
+
+  Waugh, Frederick J., marine painter, 406
+
+  Welsh, John, 50
+
+  West, Benjamin, 64, 389
+
+  West Philadelphia, 126, 294, 297, 468, 529, 538
+
+  Wharton, Anne Hollingsworth, 6, 361
+
+  Whartons, the, 50, 145, 216
+
+  Whelans, the, 31
+
+  Whistler, James A. McNeill, 16, 395, 396, 405, 534
+
+  White, Ambrose, 78, 120
+
+  White, Bishop, 290
+
+  White, Dr. (dentist), 64
+
+  White, William, 144
+
+  White, Willie, 144, 145
+
+  Whitefield, George, 177
+
+  Whitman, Walt, 119, 316, 324-331, 336, 337, 344, 347, 364
+
+  Whittier, John G., 320
+
+  _Wide, Wide World, The_, 59, 335
+
+  Widener, Peter A. B., 307, 406
+
+  Wilde, Oscar, 344, 347
+
+  Williams, Dr. Francis Howard, 336, 362
+
+  Williams, Dr. Talcott, 364
+
+  Willing's Alley, 184
+
+  Willings, the, 158
+
+  Willis, N. P., 316
+
+  Willow Grove, 213
+
+  Wilstach Collection, 405
+
+  Wise, Herbert C., 361
+
+  Wissahickon (creek), 177, 298, 299
+
+  Wistar House, 297, 521
+
+  Wistar parties, 146
+
+  Wister, Mrs., authoress, 335, 336
+
+  Wister, Owen, 363
+
+  "Wister, Sally," 162, 356
+
+  Wisters, the, 107
+
+  Woman in White (German mystics), 176
+
+  Woman's School of Design, 405
+
+  Wood, Bishop, 200, 203
+
+  Woodland's, 126
+
+  Wren, Sir Christopher, 283, 289, 533
+
+  Wyck, 297, 521
+
+  Wyeth's, 126, 456
+
+
+  Yale (college), 162
+
+  Yearly Meeting, 289
+
+  _Yellow Buskin_, the, 405
+
+
+  Zantzinger, C. C., architect, 407
+
+  Zola, �mile, 259
+
+
+
+
+               IN THE LAND OF TEMPLES
+
+               By JOSEPH PENNELL
+
+               Reproductions of a series of lithographs
+               by him, together with impressions and
+               notes by the artist and an introduction by
+               W. H. D. ROUSE, M.A., L.H.D.
+
+               _Crown Quarto, printed on dull finished
+               paper, lithograph by Mr. Pennell on cover.
+               $1.25 net._
+
+
+               JOSEPH PENNELL'S PICTURES OF THE PANAMA
+               CANAL
+
+               Reproductions of a series of twenty-eight
+               lithographs made on the Isthmus of Panama,
+               January-March, 1912, with Mr. Pennell's
+               introduction, giving his experiences,
+               impressions, and full description of each
+               picture.
+
+               _Volume 7-1/4 by 10 inches. Beautifully
+               printed on dull finished paper. Lithograph
+               by Mr. Pennell on cover. $1.25 net._
+
+
+               LIFE OF JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
+
+               By ELIZABETH R. and JOSEPH PENNELL
+
+               The Pennells have thoroughly revised the
+               material in their Authorized Life, and
+               added much new matter, which for lack of
+               space they were unable to incorporate in
+               the elaborate two-volume edition now out
+               of print. Fully illustrated with 96 plates
+               reproduced from Whistler's works, more
+               than half reproduced for the first time.
+
+               _Crown octavo. Fifth and revised edition.
+               Whistler binding, deckle edge, $3.50 net.
+               Three quarters grain levant, $7.50 net._
+
+
+               J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
+               PUBLISHERS     PHILADELPHIA
+
+
+
+
+  +----------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Notes:                                           |
+  |                                                                |
+  | Obvious punctuation errors repaired.                           |
+  |                                                                |
+  | Printer errors corrected. These include:                       |
+  | - Page 74, Illustration caption "Loudorn" corrected to be      |
+  |   "Loudoun" (LOUDOUN, MAIN STREET GERMANTOWN)                  |
+  | - Page 152, word "Fast" corrected to be "East" (Italy and the  |
+  |   East)                                                        |
+  | - Page 157 and 313, word "Pensylvania" corrected to be         |
+  |   "Pennsylvania" (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)          |
+  | - Page 170, word "Philadephia" corrected to be "Philadelphia"  |
+  |   (reception in Philadelphia)                                  |
+  | - Page 174, word "to" corrected to be "too" (all too short at  |
+  |   the best)                                                    |
+  | - Page 402, word "Nordan" corrected to be "Nordau" (from       |
+  |   Lionardo to Nordau)                                          |
+  | - Page 486, word "Your" corrected to be "You" (You are welcome)|
+  |                                                                |
+  | Index entries that do not match their referred text corrected  |
+  | (except if the referred text is an obvious typo). These        |
+  | include:                                                       |
+  | - Index entry "Beidelman" corrected to be "Beidleman"          |
+  | - Index entry "Cimabu�" corrected to be "Cimabue"              |
+  | - Index entry "Francesco da Rimini" corrected to be "Francesca |
+  |   da Rimini"                                                   |
+  | - Index entry "Greland" corrected to be "Grelaud"              |
+  | - Index entry "Hughes and Muller" corrected to be              |
+  |   "Hughes and M�ller"                                          |
+  | - Index entry "Kugler" corrected to be "K�gler"                |
+  | - Index entry "Maennerchor" corrected to be "M�ennerchor"      |
+  | - Index entry "Racquet Club" corrected to be "Racquets Club"   |
+  | - Index entry "Tourg�e" corrected to be "Tourgee"              |
+  | - Index entry "Vieaire" corrected to be "Vicaire"              |
+  |                                                                |
+  | Index page references that erroneously lead to pages without   |
+  | text (blank or illustration only) were removed.                |
+  |                                                                |
+  | The author's variable spelling has been kept. This includes:   |
+  | - Both "ailantus" and "ailanthus"                              |
+  | - Both "baptised" and "baptized"                               |
+  | - Both "bookseller" and "book-seller"                          |
+  | - Both "colored" and "coloured"                                |
+  | - Both "Delancey" and "De Lancey"                              |
+  | - Both "dreamt" and "dreamed"                                  |
+  | - Both "encyclop�dia" and "encyclopedia"                       |
+  | - Both "everyday" and "every-day"                              |
+  | - Both "football" and "foot-ball"                              |
+  | - Both "forefathers" and "fore-fathers"                        |
+  | - Both "halfway" and "half-way"                                |
+  | - Both "learnt" and "learned"                                  |
+  | - Both "neighborhood" and "neighbourhood"                      |
+  | - Both "nowadays" and "now-a-days"                             |
+  | - Both "realise" and "realize"                                 |
+  | - Both "refashioning" and "re-fashioning"                      |
+  | - Both "reunion" and "re-union"                                |
+  | - Both "role" and "r�le"                                       |
+  | - Both "splendor" and "splendour"                              |
+  | - Both "uptown" and "up-town"                                  |
+  | - "Waterworks," "Water Works," and "Water-Works"               |
+  |                                                                |
+  | Some advertisements for other books published by J. B.         |
+  | Lippincot were moved from page ii to the end of the text.      |
+  |                                                                |
+  +----------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Our Philadelphia, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
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+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Our Philadelphia, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+
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+                   margin-right: 10%;}
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+
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+/* Images */
+.figcenter      {margin: auto;
+                 text-align: center;}
+
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+.poem           {margin-left:10%;
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+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Our Philadelphia, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Our Philadelphia
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+Illustrator: Joseph Pennell
+
+Release Date: November 21, 2011 [EBook #38076]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR PHILADELPHIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Wirawan, Suzanne Shell, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<br />
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="400" height="178" alt="Cover" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&nbsp;</span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Frontispiece" id="Frontispiece"></a>&nbsp;</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 298px;">
+<img src="images/gs001.jpg" width="298" height="400" alt="LOOKING UP BROAD STREET FROM SPRUCE STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">LOOKING UP BROAD STREET FROM SPRUCE STREET</span>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+<h1>OUR PHILADELPHIA</h1>
+
+<h3>DESCRIBED BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL<br />
+ILLUSTRATED WITH ONE HUNDRED &amp; FIVE<br />
+LITHOGRAPHS BY JOSEPH PENNELL</h3>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 99px;">
+<img src="images/tp.jpg" width="99" height="100" alt="Logo" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h4>PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON<br />
+J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY<br />
+MCMXIV</h4>
+
+<hr />
+<h5>COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY</h5>
+
+<h5>PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1914</h5>
+
+<h5>PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY<br />
+AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS<br />
+PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A.</h5>
+
+<hr />
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p>To-day, when it is the American born in the Ghetto,
+or Syria, or some other remote part of the earth, whose
+recollections are prized, it may seem as if the following
+pages called for an apology. I have none to make. They
+were written simply for the pleasure of gathering together
+my old memories of a town that, as my native place,
+is dear to me and my new impressions of it after an absence
+of a quarter of a century. But now I have finished I add
+to this pleasure in my book the pleasant belief that it will
+have its value for others, if only for two reasons. In
+the first place, J.'s drawings which illustrate it are his
+record of the old Philadelphia that has passed and the
+new Philadelphia that is passing&mdash;a record that in a few
+years it will be impossible for anybody to make, so continually
+is Philadelphia changing. In the second, my
+story of Philadelphia, perfect or imperfect, may in as
+short a time be equally impossible for anybody to repeat,
+since I am one of those old-fashioned Americans, American
+by birth with many generations of American
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'forefathers' and 'fore-fathers' were used in this text. This was retained.">fore-fathers</ins>,
+who are rapidly becoming rare creatures among
+the hordes of new-fashioned Americans who were anything
+and everything else no longer than a year or a week
+or an hour ago.</p>
+
+<h5 class="right"><span class="smcap">Elizabeth Robins Pennell</span></h5>
+<p><span class="smcap">3 Adelphi Terrace House, London</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">May, 1914</span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" width="90%" summary="Contents">
+<tr><td><h5 class="right">CHAPTER</h5></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td><h5 class="right">PAGE</h5></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">I.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">An Explanation</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">II.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">A Child in Philadelphia</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_24">24</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">III.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">A Child in Philadelphia</span> (Continued)</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_48">48</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IV.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">At the Convent</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">V.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Transitional</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_104">104</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VI.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Social Adventure</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_130">130</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VII.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Social Adventure: The Assembly</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_154">154</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">VIII.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">A Question of Creed</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_175">175</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">IX.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The First Awakening</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_205">205</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">X.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Miracle of Work</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_233">233</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XI.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Romance of Work</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_268">268</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XII.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Philadelphia and Literature</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_304">304</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIII.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Philadelphia and Literature</span> (Continued)</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_332">332</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIV.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Philadelphia and Art</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_368">368</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XV.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Philadelphia and Art</span> (Continued)</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_390">390</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XVI.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Philadelphia at Table</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_413">413</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XVII.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Philadelphia at Table</span> (Continued)</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_433">433</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XVIII.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Philadelphia after a Quarter of a Century</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_451">451</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XIX.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Philadelphia after a Quarter of a Century</span> (Continued)</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_477">477</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right">XX.</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Philadelphia after a Quarter of a Century</span> (Continued)</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_509">509</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Index</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_543">543</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+<hr />
+
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" width="90%" summary="Illustrations">
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;</td><td><h5 class="right">PAGE</h5></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Looking up Broad Street from Spruce Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Frontispiece"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap"><ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'Delancey' and 'De Lancey' were used in this text. This was retained.">Delancey</ins>
+Place</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_2">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">"Portico Row," Spruce Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_9">7</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Arch Street Meeting House</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_12">13</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Schuylkill South from Callowhill Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_16">17</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Friends' Graveyard, Germantown</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_20">21</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">In Rittenhouse Square</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_24">25</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Pennsylvania Hospital from the Grounds</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_28">29</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">"<span class="smcap">Eleventh and Spruce</span>"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_32">33</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Drawing Room at Cliveden</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_36">37</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Back-yards, St. Peter's Spire in the Distance</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_44">45</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Independence Square and the State House</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_53">51</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Christ Church Interior</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_59">57</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Classic Fairmount</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_67">65</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Down Pine Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_68">69</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Loudoun, Main Street, Germantown</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_74">75</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Entrance to Fairmount and the Washington Statue</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_82">83</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Main Street, Germantown</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_91">89</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Arch Street Meeting</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_94">95</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Train Shed, Broad Street Station</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_98">99</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">St. Peter's, Interior</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_104">105</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Pennsylvania Hospital from Pine Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_111">109</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Second Street Market</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_113">115</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Fourth and Arch Streets Meeting House</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_120">121</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Johnson House, Germantown</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_129">127</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Customs House</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_133">131</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Under Broad Street Station at Fifteenth Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_137">135</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Philadelphia Club, Thirteenth and Walnut Streets</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_140">141</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The New Ritz-Carlton; The Finishing Touches; The Walnut Street Addition Has Since Been Made</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_151">149</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Hall, Stenton</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_154">155</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">"<span class="smcap">Proclaim Liberty Throughout all the Land into all the Inhabitants Thereof</span>"</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_158">159</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Bed Room, Stenton, the Home of James Logan</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_162">163</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Tunnel in the Park</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_166">167</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Boat Houses on the Schuylkill</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_173">171</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Pulpit, St. Peter's</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_181">179</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Cathedral, Logan Square</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_184">185</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Christ Church, from Second Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_188">189</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">First Presbyterian Church, Seventh Street and Washington Square</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_197">195</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Old Swedes' Church</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_200">201</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Independence Hall: The Original Desk on Which the Declaration of Independence was Signed and the Chair Used by the President of Congress, John Hancock, in 1776</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_206">207</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Philadelphia from Belmont</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_210">211</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Dining Room, Stenton</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_216">217</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Down the Aisle at Christ Church</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_222">223</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Bridge Across Market Street from Broad Street Station</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_231">229</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">State House Yard</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_237">235</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Penitentiary</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_246">247</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">On the Reading, at Sixteenth Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_250">251</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Locust Street East from Broad Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_257">255</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Broad Street, Looking South from above Arch Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_260">261</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Clinton Street, with the Pennsylvania Hospital at its End</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_264">265</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Cherry Street Stairs Near the River</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_268">269</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Morris House on Eighth Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_272">273</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Old Coaching-Inn Yard</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_281">279</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Franklin's Grave</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_284">285</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Arch Street Meeting</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_290">291</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Cliveden, the Chew House</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_294">295</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Bartram's</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_300">301</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Carpenter's Hall, Interior</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_304">305</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Main Street, Germantown</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_313">311</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Arch Street Meeting&mdash;Interior</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_319">317</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Front and Callowhill</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_320">321</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Elevated at Market Street Wharf</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_329">327</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Dr. Furness's House, West Washington Square, Just Before it was Pulled Down</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_332">333</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Germantown Academy</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_337">339</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The State House from Independence Square</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_344">345</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">"The Little Street of Clubs," Camac Street Above Spruce Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_348">349</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Down Sansom Street from Eighth Street. The Low Houses at Seventh Street Have Since Been Torn Down and the Western End of the Curtis Building Now Occupies Their Place</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_352">353</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Double Stairway in the Pennsylvania Hospital</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_357">359</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Carpenter's Hall, Built 1771</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_364">365</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Independence Hall&mdash;Lengthwise View</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_371">369</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Girard College</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_379">377</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Upsala, Germantown</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_385">383</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Hall at Cliveden, the Chew House</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_386">387</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Old <ins title="Transcriber's Note: 'Waterworks,' 'Water Works,' and 'Water-Works' were used in this text. This was retained.">Water-Works</ins>, Fairmount Park</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_390">391</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Stairway, State House</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_399">397</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Upper Room, Stenton</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_405">403</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Wyck&mdash;The Doorway from Within</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_408">409</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Philadelphia Dispensary from Independence Square</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_414">415</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Morris House, Germantown</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_421">419</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The State House Colonnade</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_427">425</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Smith Memorial, West Fairmount Park</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_430">431</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Basin, Old <ins title="Transcriber's Note: 'Waterworks,' 'Water Works,' and 'Water-Works' were used in this text. This was retained.">Water-Works</ins></span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_434">435</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Girard Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_439">441</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Union League, from Broad and Chestnut Streets</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_444">415</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Broad Street Station</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_452">453</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Wanamaker's</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_456">457</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">St. Peter's Churchyard</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_460">461</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">City Hall from the Schuylkill</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_467">465</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Chestnut Street Bridge</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_471">469</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Narrow Street</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_474">475</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Market Street Elevated at the Delaware End</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_481">479</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Railroad Bridges at Falls of Schuylkill</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_485">483</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Parkway Pergolas</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_486">487</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Market Street West of the Schuylkill</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_490">491</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Manheim Cricket Ground</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_499">497</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Dock Street And The Exchange</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_503">501</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Locomotive Yard, West Philadelphia</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_506">507</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Girard Trust Company</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_513">511</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Twelfth Street Meeting House</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_517">515</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Wyck</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_521">519</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Massed Sky-scrapers Above the Housetops</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_525">523</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Sunset. Philadelphia from Across the Delaware</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_529">527</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Union League Between the Sky-scrapers</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_533">531</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Up Broad Street from League Island</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_537">535</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">From Gray's Ferry</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_538">539</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>OUR PHILADELPHIA</h1>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER I: AN EXPLANATION</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>I think I have a right to call myself a Philadelphian,
+though I am not sure if Philadelphia is of the same
+opinion. I was born in Philadelphia, as my Father
+was before me, but my ancestors, having had the sense to
+emigrate to America in time to make me as American as
+an American can be, were then so inconsiderate as to
+waste a couple of centuries in Virginia and Maryland,
+and my Grandfather was the first of the family to settle
+in a town where it is important, if you belong at all, to
+have belonged from the beginning. However, J.'s ancestors,
+with greater wisdom, became at the earliest available
+moment not only Philadelphians, but Philadelphia
+Friends, and how very much more that means Philadelphians
+know without my telling them. And so, as he
+does belong from the beginning and as I would have belonged
+had I had my choice, for I would rather be a
+Philadelphian than any other sort of American. I do not
+see why I cannot call myself one despite the blunder of
+my <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'forefathers' and 'fore-fathers' were used in this text. This was retained.">forefathers</ins>
+in so long calling themselves something
+else.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I might hope that my affection alone for Philadelphia
+would give me the right, were I not Philadelphian enough
+to know that Philadelphia is, as it always was and always
+will be, cheerfully indifferent to whatever love its
+citizens may have to offer it. I can hardly suppose my
+claim for gratitude greater than that of its Founder or
+the long succession of Philadelphians between his time
+and mine who have loved it and been snubbed or bullied in
+return. Indeed, in the face of this Philadelphia indifference,
+my affection seems so superfluous that I often
+wonder why it should be so strong. But wise or foolish,
+there it is, strengthening with the years whether I will or
+no,&mdash;a deeper rooted sentiment than I thought I was
+capable of for the town with which the happiest memories
+of my childhood are associated, where the first irresponsible
+days of my youth were spent, which never
+ceased to be home to me during the more than a quarter
+of a century I lived away from it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 308px;">
+<img src="images/gs002.jpg" width="308" height="400" alt="DELANCEY PLACE" title="" />
+<span class="caption"><ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'Delancey' and 'De Lancey' were used in this text. This was retained.">DELANCEY</ins> PLACE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Besides, Philadelphia attracts me apart from what it
+may stand for in memory or from the charm sentiment
+may lend to it. I love its beauty&mdash;the beauty of tranquil
+streets, of red brick houses with white marble steps, of
+pleasant green shade, of that peaceful look of the past
+Philadelphians cross the ocean to rave over in the little
+old dead towns of England and Holland&mdash;a beauty that
+is now fast disappearing. I love its character&mdash;the calm,
+the dignity, the reticence with which it has kept up through<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+the centuries with the American pace, the airs of a demure
+country village with which it has done the work and
+earned the money of a big bustling town, the cloistered
+seclusion with which it enjoys its luxury and hides its
+palaces behind its plain brick fronts&mdash;a character that also
+is fast going. I love its history, though I am no historian,
+for the little I know colours its beauty and accounts for
+its character.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>It is not for nothing that I begin with this flourish
+of my birth certificate and public confession of love. I
+want to establish my right, first, to call myself a Philadelphian,
+and then, to talk about Philadelphia as freely
+as we only can talk about the places and the people and
+the things we belong to and care for. I would not dare to
+take such a liberty with Philadelphia if my references
+were not in order, for, as a Philadelphian, I appreciate the
+risk. Not that I have any idea of writing the history of
+Philadelphia. I hope I have the horror, said to be peculiar
+to all generous minds, of what are commonly called
+facts, and also the intelligence not to attempt what I know
+I cannot do. Another good reason is that the history has
+already been written more than once. Philadelphians,
+almost from their cave-dwelling period, have seemed conscious
+of the eye of posterity upon them. They had
+hardly landed on the banks of the Delaware before they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+began to write alarmingly long letters which they preserved,
+and elaborate diaries which they kept with equal
+care. And the letter-writing, diary-keeping fever was so
+in the air that strangers in the town caught it: from
+Richard Castleman to John Adams, from John Adams to
+Charles Dickens, from Charles Dickens to Henry James,
+every visitor, with writing for profession or amusement,
+has had more or less to say about it&mdash;usually more.
+The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has gathered the
+old material together; our indispensable antiquary, John
+Watson, has gleaned the odds and ends left by the way;
+and no end of modern writers in Philadelphia have ransacked
+their stores of information: Dr. Weir Mitchell
+making novels out of them, Mr. Sydney Fisher and Miss
+Agnes Repplier, history; Mr. Hampton Carson using
+them as the basis of further research; Miss Anne Hollingsworth
+Wharton resurrecting Colonial life and society and
+fashions from them, Mr. Eberlein and Mr. Lippincott, the
+genealogy of Colonial houses; other patriotic citizens helping
+themselves in one way or another; until, among them
+all, they have filled a large library and prepared a sufficiently
+formidable task for the historian of Philadelphia in
+generations to come without my adding to his burden.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>It is an amusing library, as Philadelphians may believe
+now they are getting over the bad habit into which
+they had fallen of belittling their town, much in their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>
+town's fashion of belittling them. I am afraid it was
+partly their fault if the rest of America fell into the same
+habit. As I recall my old feelings and attitude, it seems
+to me that in my day we must have been brought up to
+look down upon Philadelphia. The town surely cut a
+poor figure in my school books, and the purplest patches
+in Colonial history must have been there reserved for
+New England or New York, Virginia or the Carolinas,
+for any and every colony rather than the Province of
+Pennsylvania, or I would not have left school better
+posted in the legends of Powhatan and Pocahontas than
+in the life of William Penn, and more edified by the burning
+of witches and the tracking of Indians than by the
+struggles of Friends to give every man the liberty to go
+to Heaven his own way. The amiable contempt in which
+Philadelphians held William Penn revealed itself in their
+free-and-easy way of speaking of him, if they spoke of
+him at all, as Billy Penn, though Penn would have been
+the last to invite the familiarity. Probably few outside the
+Society of Friends could have said just what he had done
+for their town, or just what they owed to him. If I am
+not mistaken, the prevailing idea was that his chief greatness
+consisted in the cleverness with which he fooled the
+land out of the Indians for a handful of beads.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 304px;">
+<img src="images/gs003.jpg" width="304" height="400" alt="&quot;PORTICO ROW&quot; SPRUCE STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;PORTICO ROW&quot; SPRUCE STREET</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The present generation could not be so ignorant if it
+wanted to. The statue of Penn, in full-skirted coat and
+broad-brimmed hat, dominating Philadelphia from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>
+ugly tower of the Public Buildings, though it may not be
+a thing of beauty, at least suggests to Philadelphians that
+it would not have been put up there, the most conspicuous
+landmark from the streets and the surrounding country,
+if Penn had not been somebody, or done something, of
+some consequence. As for the rest of America, I doubt
+if it often comes so near to Philadelphia that it can see
+the statue. The last time I went to New York from London
+I met on the steamer a man from Michigan who had
+obviously been but a short time before a man from Cork,
+and who was so keen to stop in Philadelphia on his way
+West that I might have been astonished had I not heard
+so much of the miraculously rapid Americanization of the
+modern emigrant. Most people do not want to stop in
+Philadelphia unless they have business there, and he had
+none, and naturally I could not imagine any other motive
+except the desire to see the town which is of the greatest
+historic importance in the United States and which still
+possesses proofs of it. But the man from Michigan gave
+me to understand, and pretty quick too, that he did not
+know Philadelphia had a history and old buildings to
+prove it, and what was more, he did not care if it had. He
+guessed history wasn't in his line. What he wanted was
+to take the next train to Atlantic City; folks he knew had
+been there and said it was great. And I rather think this
+is the way most Americans, from America or from Cork,
+feel about Philadelphia.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>It is not my affair to enlighten them or anybody else.
+I have a more personal object in view. Philadelphia may
+mean to other people nothing at all&mdash;that is their loss;
+I am concerned entirely with what it means to me. In
+those wonderful Eighteen-Nineties, now written about
+with awe by the younger generation as if no less prehistoric
+than the period of the Renaissance, until it makes
+me feel a new Methusaleh to own that I lived and worked
+through them, we were always being told that art should
+be the artist's record of nature seen through a temperament,
+criticism the critic's story of his adventures among
+the world's masterpieces, and though I am neither artist
+nor critic, though I am not sure what a temperament is,
+much less if I have one, still I fancy this expresses in a
+way the end I have set myself in writing about Philadelphia.
+For I should like, if I can, to record my personal
+impressions of the town I love and to give my adventures
+among the beautiful things, the humorous things, the
+tragic things it contains in more than ample measure. My
+interest is in my personal experiences, but these have been
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'colored' and 'coloured' were used in this text. This was retained.">coloured</ins>
+by the history of Philadelphia since I have
+dabbled in it, and have become richer and more amusing.
+I have <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>,
+with age and reading and travelling, that
+Philadelphia as it is cannot really be known without some
+knowledge of Philadelphia as it was: also that Philadelphia,
+both as it is and as it was, is worth knowing. Americans
+will wander to the ends of the earth to study the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+psychology&mdash;as they call it of people they never could
+understand however hard they tried; they will shut themselves
+up in a remote town of Italy or Spain to master the
+secrets of its prehistoric past; they will squander months
+in the Biblioth&egrave;que Nationale or the British Museum to
+get at the true atmosphere of Paris or London; when, had
+they only stopped their journey at Broad Street Station
+in Philadelphia or, if they were Philadelphians, never
+taken the train out of it, they could have had all the psychology
+and secrets and atmosphere they could ask for,
+with much less trouble and expense.</p>
+
+<p>I have never been to any town anywhere, and I have
+been to many in my time, that has more decided character
+than Philadelphia, or to any where this character is more
+difficult to understand if the clue is not got from the past.
+For instance, people talk about Philadelphia as if its one
+talent was for sleep, while the truth is, taking the sum of
+its achievements, no other American town has done so
+much hard work, no other has accomplished so much for
+the country. Impressed as we are by the fact, it would be
+impossible to account for the reputation if it were not
+known that the people who made Philadelphia presented
+the same puzzling contradiction in their own lives&mdash;the
+only people who ever understood how to be in the world
+and not of it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs004.jpg" width="400" height="314" alt="ARCH STREET MEETING HOUSE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ARCH STREET MEETING HOUSE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The usual alternative to not being of the world is to be
+in a cloister or to live like a hermit, to accept a
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'role' and 'r&ocirc;le' were used in this text. This was retained.">role</ins> in
+common or to renounce social intercourse. But the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+Friends did not have to shut themselves up to conquer
+worldliness, they did not have to renounce the world's work
+and its rewards. For "affluence of the world's goods,"
+Isaac Norris, writing from Philadelphia, could felicitate
+Jonathan Dickinson, "knowing both thyself and dear
+wife have hearts and souls fit to use them." That was
+better than shirking temptation in a monk's cell or a
+philosopher's tub. If George Fox wore a leather suit, it
+was because he found it convenient, but William Penn, for
+whom it would have been highly inconvenient, had no
+scruple in dressing like other men of his position and
+wearing the blue ribbon of office. Nor because religion
+was freed from all unessential ornament, was the house
+stripped of comfort and luxury. I write about Friends
+with hesitation. I have been married to one now for many
+years and can
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>
+the better therefore that none save
+Friends can write of themselves with authority. But I
+hope I am right in thinking, as I always have thought
+since I read Thomas Elwood's <i>Memoirs</i>, that their attitude
+is excellently explained in his account of his first
+visit to the Penningtons "after they were become
+Quakers" when, though he was astonished at the new
+gravity of their look and behaviour, he found Guli Springett
+amusing herself in the garden and the dinner "handsome."
+For the world's goods never being the end they
+were to the World's People, Friends were as undisturbed
+by their possession as by their absence and, as a consequence,
+could meet and accept life, whether its gifts were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+wealth and power or poverty and obscurity, with the
+serenity few other men have found outside the cloister.
+Moreover, they could speak the truth, calling a spade a
+spade, or their enemy the scabbed sheep, or smooth silly
+man, or vile fellow, or inhuman monster, or villain infecting
+the air with a hellish stench, he no doubt was, and
+never for a moment lose their tempers. This serenity&mdash;this
+"still strength"&mdash;is as the poles apart from the
+phlegmatic, constitutional slowness of the Dutch in New
+York or, on the other hand, from the tranquillity Henry
+James traces in progressive descent from taste, tradition,
+and history, even from the philosopher's calm of achieved
+indifference, and Friends, having carried it to perfection
+in their own conduct, left it as a legacy to their town.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs005.jpg" width="400" height="308" alt="THE SCHUYLKILL SOUTH FROM CALLOWHILL STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE SCHUYLKILL SOUTH FROM CALLOWHILL STREET</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The usual American town, when it hustles, lets nobody
+overlook the fact that it is hustling. But Philadelphia
+has done its work as calmly as the Friends have done theirs,
+never boasting of its prosperity, never shouting its success
+and riches from the house-top, and its dignified serenity
+has been mistaken for sleep. Whistler used to say that if
+the General does not tell the world he has won the battle,
+the world will never hear of it. The trouble with Philadelphia
+is that it has kept its triumph to itself. But we
+have got so far from the old Friends that no harm can be
+done if Philadelphians begin to interpret their town's
+serenity to a world capable of confusing it with drowsiness.
+If America is ready to forget, if for long Philadelphians
+were as ready, it is high time we should remember<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+ourselves and remind America of the services Philadelphia
+has rendered to the country, and its good taste in
+rendering them with so little fuss that all the country has
+done in return is to laugh at Philadelphia as a back
+number.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>Philadelphians have grown accustomed to the laugh.
+We have heard it since we were in our cradles. We are
+used to have other Americans come to our town and,&mdash;in
+the face of our factory chimneys smoking along the
+Schuylkill and our ship-building yards in full swing on
+the Delaware, and our locomotives pouring out over the
+world by I do not know how many thousands from the
+works in Broad Street, and our mills going at full pressure
+in the "Little England" of Kensington, in Frankford and
+Germantown,&mdash;in the face of our busy schools and hospitals
+and academies,&mdash;in the face of our stores and banks
+and charities,&mdash;that is, in the face of our industry, our
+learning, and our philanthropy that have given tips to the
+whole country,&mdash;see only our sleep-laden eyes and hear
+only our sluggish snores. We know the foolish stories
+they tell. We have heard many more times than we can
+count of the Bostonian who retires to Philadelphia for
+complete intellectual rest, and the New Yorker who when
+he has a day off comes to spend a week in Philadelphia,
+and the Philadelphian who goes to New York to eat the
+snails he cannot catch in his own back-yard. We have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+heard until we have it by heart that Philadelphia is a
+cemetery, and the road to it, the Road to Yesterday. We
+are so familiar with the venerable <i>clich&eacute;</i> that we can but
+wonder at its gift of eternal youth. Never was there a
+jest that wore so well with those who make it. The comic
+column is rarely complete without it, and it is forever
+cropping up where least expected. In the last American
+novel I opened Philadelphia was described as hanging on
+to the last strap of the last car to the sound of Gabriel's
+horn on Judgment Day; in the last American magazine
+story I read the Philadelphia heroine by her Philadelphia
+calm conquered the cowboys of the west, as Friends of
+old disarmed their judges in court. In the general Americanization
+of London, even the London papers have seized
+upon the slowness of Philadelphia as a joke for Londoners
+to roar at. Li Hung Chang couldn't visit Philadelphia
+without dozing through the ceremonies in his honour and
+noting the appropriateness of it in his diary. And so it
+goes on, the witticism to-day apparently as fresh as it was
+in the Stone Age from which it has come down to us.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs006.jpg" width="400" height="309" alt="FRIENDS&#39; GRAVEYARD, GERMANTOWN" title="" />
+<span class="caption">FRIENDS&#39; GRAVEYARD, GERMANTOWN</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>If Philadelphians laugh, that is another matter&mdash;every
+man has the right to laugh at himself. But we have
+outlived our old affectation of indifference to our town,
+I am not sure that we are not pushing our profession of
+pride in it too far to the other extreme. I remember the
+last time I was home I went to a public meeting called to
+talk about the world's waterways, and no Philadelphian
+present, from the Mayor down, could talk of anything<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+but Philadelphia and its greatness. But whatever may be
+our pose now, or next year, or the year after, there is
+always beneath it a substantial layer of affection, for we
+cannot help knowing, if nobody else does, what Philadelphia
+is and what Philadelphia has done. Certainly, it is because
+I know that I, for one, would so much rather be the
+Philadelphian I am, and my ancestors were not, than any
+other sort of American, that, as I have grown older, my
+love for my town has surprised me by its depth, and makes
+my confession of it now seem half pleasure, half duty.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER II: A CHILD IN PHILADELPHIA</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>If I made my first friendships from my perambulator,
+or trundling my hoop and skipping my rope, in
+Rittenhouse Square, as every Philadelphian should,
+they were interrupted and broken so soon that I have no
+memory of them.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 310px;">
+<img src="images/gs007.jpg" width="310" height="400" alt="IN RITTENHOUSE SQUARE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">IN RITTENHOUSE SQUARE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was my fate to be sent to boarding-school before I
+had time to lay in a store of the associations that are the
+common property of happier Philadelphians of my generation.
+I do not know if I was ever taken, as J. and other
+privileged children were, to the Pennsylvania Hospital
+on summer evenings to see William Penn step down from
+his pedestal when he heard the clock strike six, or to the
+Philadelphia Library to wait until Benjamin Franklin,
+hearing the same summons, left his high niche for a neighbouring
+saloon. I cannot recall the firemen's fights and
+the cries of negroes selling pop-corn and ice-cream through
+the streets that fill some Philadelphia reminiscences I have
+read. I cannot say if I ever went anywhere by the
+omnibus sleigh in winter, or to West Philadelphia by the
+stage at any time of the year. I never coasted down the
+hills of Germantown, I never skated on the Schuylkill.
+When my contemporaries compare notes of these and
+many more delightful things in the amazing, romantic,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+incredible Philadelphia they grew up in, it annoys me
+to find myself out of it all, sharing none of their recollections,
+save one and that the most trivial. For, from the
+vagueness of the remote past, no event emerges so clearly
+as the periodical visit of "Crazy Norah," a poor, harmless,
+half-witted wanderer, who wore a man's hat and top
+boots, with bits of ribbon scattered over her dress, and
+who, on her aimless rounds, drifted into all the Philadelphia
+kitchens to the fearful joy of the children; and my
+memory may be less of her personally than of much talk
+of her helped by her resemblance, or so I fancied, to a
+picture of Meg Merrilies in a collection of engravings
+of Walter Scott's heroines owned by an Uncle, and almost
+the first book I can remember.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>But great as was my loss, I fancy my memories of old
+Philadelphia gain in vividness for being so few. One of
+the most vivid is of the interminable drive in the slow
+horse-car which was the longest part of the journey to
+and from my Convent school,&mdash;which is the longest part of
+any journey I ever made, not to be endured at the time
+but for the chanting over and over to myself of all the
+odds and ends of verse I had got by heart, from the dramas
+of <i>Little Miss Muffett</i> and <i>Little Jack Horner</i> to Poe's
+<i>Bells</i> and Tennyson's <i>Lady of Shalott</i>&mdash;but in memory a
+drive to be rejoiced in, for nothing could have been more
+characteristic of Philadelphia as it was then. The Convent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+was in Torresdale on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and
+the Pennsylvania Depot&mdash;Philadelphia had as yet no
+Stations and Terminals&mdash;was in the distant, unknown
+quarter of Frankford. I believe it is used as a freight
+station now and I have sometimes thought that, for sentiment's
+sake, I should like to make a pilgrimage to it over
+the once well-travelled road. But the modern trolley has
+deserted the straight course of the unadventurous horse-car
+of my day and I doubt if ever again I could find my
+way back. The old horse-car went, without turn or twist,
+along Third Street. I started from the corner of Spruce,
+having got as far as that by the slower, more infrequent
+Spruce Street car, and after I had passed the fine old
+houses where Philadelphians&mdash;not aliens&mdash;lived, a good
+part of the route lay through a busy business section. But
+there has stayed with me as my chief impression of the
+endless street a sense of eternal calm. No matter how
+much solid work was being done, no matter how many
+fortunes were being made and unmade, it was always
+placid on the surface, uneventful and unruffled. The car,
+jingling along in leisurely fashion, was the one sign of
+animation.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 311px;">
+<img src="images/gs008.jpg" width="311" height="400" alt="THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM THE GROUNDS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM THE GROUNDS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Or often, in spring and summer, I went by boat, from&mdash;so
+false is memory&mdash;I cannot say what wharf, up the
+Delaware. This was a pleasanter journey and every bit
+as leisurely and as characteristic in its way of Philadelphia
+life. For though I might catch the early afternoon
+boat, it was sure to be full of business men returning<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+from their offices to their houses on the river. Philadelphians
+did not wait for the Main Line to be invented to
+settle in the suburbs. They have always had a fancy for
+the near country ever since Penn lived in state at Pennsbury,
+and Logan at Stenton; ever since Bartram planted
+his garden on the banks of the Schuylkill, and Arnold
+brought Peggy Shippen as his bride to Mount Pleasant;
+ever since all the Colonial country houses we are so proud
+of were built. I have the haziest memory of the places
+where the boat stopped between Philadelphia and Torresdale
+and of the people who got out there. But I cannot
+help remembering Torresdale for it was as prominent a
+stopping-place in my journey through youth as it is in the
+journey up the Delaware. The Convent was my home
+for years, and I had many friends in the houses down by
+the riverside and scattered over the near country. Their
+names are among the most familiar in my youthful recollections:
+the Macalisters, the Grants&mdash;one of my brothers
+named after the father&mdash;the Hopkins&mdash;another of my
+brothers marrying in the family&mdash;the Fishers, Keatings,
+Steadmans, Kings, Bories, Whelans. It was not often I
+could go or come without meeting somebody I knew on
+board. I am a cockney myself, I love the town, but I can
+understand that Philadelphians whose homes were in the
+country, especially if that country lay along the shores
+of the Delaware, liked to get back early enough to profit
+by it; that, busy and full of affairs as they might be, they
+not only liked but managed to, shows how far hustling<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+was from the old Philadelphia scheme of things.
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'nowadays' and 'now-a-days' were used in this text. This was retained.">Nowadays</ins>
+the motor brings the country into town and town into
+the country. But the miles between town and country
+were then lengthened into leagues by the leisurely boat and
+the leisurely horse-car which, as I look back, seem to set the
+pace of life in Philadelphia when I was young.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>At first my holidays were spent mostly at the Convent.
+My Father, with the young widower's embarrassment
+when confronted by his motherless children, solved the
+problem the existence of my Sister and myself was to him
+by putting us where he knew we were safe and well out of
+his way. I do not blame him. What is a man to do when
+he finds himself with two little girls on his clumsy masculine
+hands? But the result was he had no house of his
+own to bring us to when the other girls hurried joyfully
+home at Christmas and Easter and for the long summer
+holiday. It hurt as I used to watch them walking briskly
+down the long path on the way to the station. And yet,
+I scored in the end, for Philadelphia was the more marvellous
+to me, visiting it rarely, than it could have been to
+children to whom it was an
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'everyday' and 'every-day' were used in this text. This was retained.">everyday</ins> affair.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 308px;">
+<img src="images/gs009.jpg" width="308" height="400" alt="&quot;ELEVENTH AND SPRUCE&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;ELEVENTH AND SPRUCE&quot;</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>For years my Grandfather's house was the scene of
+the occasional visit. He lived in Spruce Street above
+Eleventh&mdash;the typical Philadelphia Street, straight and
+narrow, on either side rows of red brick houses, each with
+white marble steps, white shutters below and green<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+shutters above, and along the red brick pavement rows of
+trees which made Philadelphia the green country town
+of Penn's desire, but the Philadelphian's life a burden in
+the springtime before the coming of the sparrows. Philadelphia,
+as I think of it in the old days at the season when
+the leaves were growing green, is always heavy with the
+odour of the evil-smelling
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'ailantus' and 'ailanthus' were used in this text. This was retained.">ailantus</ins>
+and full of measuring
+worms falling upon me from every tree. My fear of
+"Crazy Norah" is hardly less clear in my early memories
+than the terror these worms were to the dear fragile little
+Aunt who had cared for me in my first motherless years,
+and who still, during my holidays, kept a watchful eye on
+me to see that I put my "gums" on if I went out in the
+rain and that I had the money in my pocket to stop at
+Dexter's for a plate of ice-cream. I can recall as if it
+were yesterday, her shrieks one Easter Sunday when she
+came home from church and found a green horror on her
+new spring bonnet and another on her petticoat, and her
+miserable certainty all through the early Sunday dinner
+that many more were crawling over her somewhere. But,
+indeed, the Philadelphians of to-day can never know from
+what loathsome creatures the sparrows have delivered
+them.</p>
+
+<p>My Grandfather's house was as typical as the street&mdash;one
+of the quite modest four-story brick houses that were
+thought unseemly sky-scrapers and fire-traps when they
+were first built in Philadelphia. I can never go by the old
+house of many memories&mdash;for sale, alas! the last time I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+passed and still for sale according to the last news to
+reach me even as I correct my proofs&mdash;without seeing
+myself as I used to be, arriving from the Convent, small,
+plain, unbecomingly dressed and conscious of it, with my
+pretty, always-becomingly-dressed because nothing was
+unbecoming to her, not-in-the-least-shy Sister, both standing
+in the vestibule between the inevitable Philadelphia
+two front doors, the outer one as inevitably open all day
+long. And I see myself, when, in answer to our ring, the
+servant had opened the inner one as well, entering in a
+fresh access of shyness the wide lofty hall, with the front
+and back parlours to the right; Philadelphians had no
+drawing-rooms then but were content with parlours, as
+Penn had been who knew them by no other name. Compared
+to the rich Philadelphian's house to-day, my Grandfather's
+looks very unpretending, but when houses like it,
+with two big parlours separated by folding doors, first
+became the fashion in Philadelphia, they passed for palaces
+with Philadelphians who disapproved of display, and
+the "tradesmen" living soberly in them were rebuked for
+aspiring to the luxury of princes. I cannot imagine why,
+for the old Colonial houses are, many of them, as lofty
+and more spacious, though it was the simple spaciousness
+of my Grandfather's and the loftiness of its ceilings that
+gave it charm.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs010.jpg" width="400" height="315" alt="DRAWING ROOM AT CLIVEDEN" title="" />
+<span class="caption">DRAWING ROOM AT CLIVEDEN</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>My Grandfather's two parlours, big as they were,
+would strike nobody to-day as palatial. It needs the
+glamour time throws over them for me to discover princely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+luxury in the rosewood and reps masterpieces of a deplorable
+period with which they were furnished, or in
+their decoration of beaded cushions and worsted-work
+mats and tidies, the lavish gifts of a devoted family. But
+I cannot remember the parlours and forget the respect
+with which they once inspired me. I own to a lingering
+affection for their crowning touch of ugliness, an ottoman
+with a top of the fashionable Berlin work of the day&mdash;a
+white arum lily, done by the superior talent of the fancy
+store, on a red ground filled in by the industrious giver.
+It stood between the two front windows, so that we might
+have the additional rapture of seeing it a second time in the
+mirror which hung behind it. Opposite, between the two
+windows of the back parlour, was a "Rogers Group" on
+a blue stand; and a replica, with variations, of both the
+ottoman and the "Rogers Group" could have been found
+in every other Philadelphia front and back parlour. I
+recall also the three or four family portraits which I held
+in tremendous awe, however I may feel about them now;
+and the immensely high vases, unique creations that could
+not possibly have been designed for any purpose save to
+ornament the Philadelphia mantelpiece; and the transparent
+lamp-shade, decorated with pictures of cats and
+children and landscapes, that at night, when the gas was
+lit, helped to keep me awake until I could escape to bed;
+and the lustre chandeliers hanging from the ceiling&mdash;what
+joy when one of the long prisms came loose and I could
+capture it and, looking through it, walk across the parlours<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+and up the stairs straight into the splendid dangers of
+Rainbow Land!</p>
+
+<p>I had no time for these
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'splendor' and 'splendour' were used in this text. This was retained.">splendours</ins>
+on my arrival, nor,
+fortunately for me, was I left long to the tortures of my
+shyness. At the end of the hall, facing me, was the wide
+flight of stairs leading to the upper stories, and on the first
+landing, at their turning just where a few more steps
+led beyond into the back-building dining-room, my Grandmother,
+in her white cap and purple ribbons, stood waiting.
+In my memory she and that landing are inseparable.
+Whenever the door bell rang, she was out there at the first
+sound, ready to say "Come right up, my dear!" to whichever
+one of her innumerable progeny it might he. To her
+right, filling an ample space in the windings of the back
+stairs, was the inexhaustible pantry which I knew, as well
+as she, we should presently visit together. Though there
+could not have been in Philadelphia or anywhere quite
+such another Grandmother, even if most Philadelphians
+feel precisely the same way about theirs, she was typical
+too, like the house and the street. She belonged to the
+generation of Philadelphia women who took to old age
+almost as soon as they were mothers, put on caps and large
+easy shoes, invented an elderly dress from which they
+never deviated for the rest of their lives, except to exchange
+cashmere for silk, the
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'everyday' and 'every-day' were used in this text. This was retained.">everyday</ins>
+cap for one of
+fine lace and wider ribbons, on occasions of ceremony, and
+who as promptly forgot the world outside of their household<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>
+and their family. I do not believe my Grandmother
+had an interest in anybody except her children, or in anything
+except their affairs; though this did not mean that
+she gave up society when it was to their advantage that she
+should not. In her stiff silks and costly caps, she presided
+at every dinner, reception, and party given at home,
+as conscientiously as, in her sables and demure velvet
+bonnet, she made and returned calls in the season.</p>
+
+<p>My other memories are of comfortable, spacious rooms,
+good, solid, old-fashioned furniture, a few more old and
+some better-forgotten new family portraits on the walls,
+the engraving of Gilbert Stuart's Washington over the
+dining-room mantelpiece, the sofa or couch in almost every
+room for the Philadelphia nap before dinner, the two
+cheerful kitchens where, if the servants were amiable, I
+sometimes played, and, above all, the most enchanting
+back-yard that ever was or could be&mdash;we were not so
+elegant in those days as to call it a garden.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>Since it has been the fashion to revive everything old
+in Philadelphia, most Philadelphians are not happy until
+they have their garden, as their
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'forefathers' and 'fore-fathers' were used in this text. This was retained.">forefathers</ins>
+had, and very
+charming they often make it in the suburbs. But in town
+my admiration has been asked for gardens that would have
+been lost in my Grandfather's back-yard, and for a few
+meagre plants springing up about a cold paved square<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+that would have been condemned as weeds in his luxuriant
+flower beds.</p>
+
+<p>The kindly magnifying glasses of memory cannot convert
+the Spruce Street yard into a rival of Edward Shippen's
+garden in Second Street where the old chronicles say
+there were orchards and a herd of deer, or of Bartram's
+with its trees and plants collected from far and wide, or
+of any of the old Philadelphia gardens in the days when
+in Philadelphia no house, no public building, almost no
+church, could exist without a green space and great trees
+and many flowers about it, and when Philadelphians loved
+their gardens so well, and hated so to leave them, that there
+is the story of one at least who came back after death to
+haunt the shady walks and fragrant lawns that were fairer
+to her than the fairest Elysian Fields in the land beyond
+the grave. Much of the old beauty had gone before I was
+born, much was going as I grew from childhood to youth.
+My Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, has described the
+Philadelphia garden of his early years, "with vines twined
+over arbours, where the magnolia, honeysuckle and rose
+spread rich perfume of summer nights, and where the
+humming bird rested, and scarlet tanager, or oriole, with
+the yellow and blue bird flitted in sunshine or in shade."
+Though I go back to days before the sparrows had driven
+away not only the worms but all others of their own race,
+I recall no orioles and scarlet tanagers, no yellow and
+blue birds. Philadelphia's one magnolia tree stood in
+front of the old Dundas house at Broad and Walnut.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>All the same, my Grandfather's was a back-yard of
+enchantment. A narrow brick-paved path led past the
+kitchens; on one side, close to the wall dividing my Grandfather's
+yard from the next door neighbour's, was a border
+of roses and Johnny-jump-ups and shrubs&mdash;the shrubs
+my Grandmother used to pick for me, crush a little in her
+fingers, and tie up in a corner of my handkerchief, which
+was the Philadelphia way&mdash;the most effective way that
+ever was&mdash;to make them give out their sweetness. Beyond
+the kitchens, where the yard broadened into a large
+open space, the path enclosed, with a wider border of
+roses, two big grass plots which were shaded by fruit
+trees, all pink and white in the springtime. Wistaria
+hung in purple showers over the high walls. I am sure
+lilacs bloomed at the kitchen door, and a vine of Isabella
+grapes&mdash;the very name has an old Philadelphia flavour
+and fragrance&mdash;covered the verandah that ran across the
+entire second story of the back-building. If sometimes
+this delectable back-yard was cold and bare, in my
+memory it is more apt to be sweet and gay with roses,
+shrubs and Johnny-jump-ups,&mdash;summer and its pleasures
+oftener waiting on me there: probably because my visits
+to my Grandfather's were more frequent in the summer
+time. But I have vague memories of winter days, when
+the rose bushes were done up in straw, and wooden steps
+covered the marble in front, and ashes were strewn over
+the icy pavement, and snow was piled waist-high in the
+gutter.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>From the verandah there was a pleasant vista, up and
+down, of the same back-yards and the same back buildings,
+just as from the front windows there was a pleasant vista,
+up and down, of the same red-brick fronts, the same white
+marble steps, the same white and green shutters,&mdash;only
+one house daring upon originality, and this was Bennett's,
+the ready-made clothes man, whose unusually large garden
+filled the opposite corner of Eleventh and Spruce with
+big country-like trees over to which I looked from my
+bedroom window. As a child, instinctively I got to know
+that inside every house, within sight and beyond, I would
+find the same front and back parlours, the same back-building
+dining-room, the same number of bedrooms, the
+same engraving of George Washington over the dining-room
+mantelpiece, the same big red cedar chest in the
+third story hall and, in summer, the same parlours turned
+into cool grey cellars with the same matting on the floor,
+the same linen covers on the chairs, the same curtainless
+windows and carefully closed shutters, the same white
+gauze over mirrors and chandeliers&mdash;to light upon an item
+for gauze "to cover pictures and glass" in Washington's
+household accounts while he lived in Philadelphia is one
+of the things it is worth searching the old archives for.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 312px;">
+<img src="images/gs011.jpg" width="312" height="400" alt="BACK-YARDS, ST. PETER&#39;S SPIRE IN THE DISTANCE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">BACK-YARDS, ST. PETER&#39;S SPIRE IN THE DISTANCE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Instinctively, I got to know too that, in every one of
+these well-regulated interiors where there was a little girl,
+she must, like me, be striving to be neither seen nor heard<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+all the long morning, and sitting primly at the front window
+all the long afternoon, and that, if she ever played at
+home it was, like me, with measured steps and modulated
+voice: at all times cultivating the calm of manner expected
+of her when she, in her turn, would have just such a
+red brick house and just such a delectable back-yard of
+her own. Thus, while the long months at the Convent
+kept me busy cultivating every spiritual grace, during the
+occasional holiday at Eleventh and Spruce I was well
+drilled in the Philadelphia virtues.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER III: A CHILD IN PHILADELPHIA&mdash;CONTINUED</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>Naturally, I could not live in Spruce Street
+and not believe, as every Philadelphian should
+and once did, that no other kind of a house except
+the Spruce Street house was fit for a Philadelphian to
+live in. The Philadelphian, from infancy, was convinced
+by his surroundings and bringing-up that there was but
+one way of doing things decently and respectably and that
+was the Philadelphia way, nor can my prolonged exile
+relieve me from the sense of crime at times when I catch
+myself doing things not just as Philadelphians used to
+do them.</p>
+
+<p>I was safe from any such crime in my Grandfather's
+house. All Philadelphia might have been let in without
+fear. Had skeletons been concealed in the capacious cupboards,
+they would have been of the approved Philadelphia
+pattern. My Grandfather was not at all of Montaigne's
+opinion that order in the management of life is sottish,
+but looked upon it rather as "Heaven's first law." His
+day's programme was the same as in every red brick house
+with white marble steps and a back-yard full of roses and
+shrubs and Johnny-jump-ups. Everything at Eleventh
+and Spruce was done according to the same Philadelphia<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+rules at the same hour, from the washing of the family linen
+on Monday, when Sunday's beef was eaten cold for dinner,
+to the washing of the front on Saturday morning, when
+Philadelphia streets from end to end were all mops and
+maids, rivers and lakes.</p>
+
+<p>When my Grandfather, with his family on their knees
+around him, began the day by reading morning prayers
+in the back-building dining-room, he could have had the
+satisfaction of knowing that every other Philadelphia
+head of a family was engaged in the same edifying duty,
+but I hope, for every other Philadelphia family's sake,
+with a trifle less awe-inspiring solemnity. After being
+present once at my Grandfather's prayers, nobody needed
+to be assured that life was earnest.</p>
+
+<p>He did not shed his solemnity when he rose from his
+knees, nor when he had finished his breakfast of scrapple
+and buckwheat cakes and left the breakfast table. He
+was as solemn in his progress through the streets to the
+Philadelphia Bank, at Fourth and Chestnut, of which
+he was President, and having said so much perhaps I
+might as well add his name, Thomas Robins, for in his
+day he was widely known and it is a satisfaction to remember,
+as widely appreciated both in and out of Philadelphia.
+His clothes were always of the most admirable cut and
+fit and of a fashion becoming to his years, he carried a substantial
+cane with a gold top, his stock was never laid aside
+for a frivolous modern cravat, his silk hat was as indispensable,
+and his slow walk had a dignity royalty might<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+have envied. He was a handsome old man and a noticeable
+figure even in Philadelphia streets at the hour when
+John Welsh from the corner, and Biddles and Cadwalladers
+and Whartons and Peppers and Lewises and a
+host of other handsome old Philadelphians with good
+Philadelphia names from the near
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'neighborhood' and 'neighbourhood' were used in this text. This was retained.">neighborhood</ins>, were
+starting downtown in clothes as irreproachable and with a
+gait no less dignified. The foreigner's idea of the American
+is of a slouchy, free-and-easy man for ever cracking
+jokes. But slouchiness and jokes had no place in the
+dictionary or the deportment of my Grandfather and his
+contemporaries, at a period when Philadelphia supplied
+men like John Welsh for its country to send as representatives
+abroad and there carry on the traditions of Franklin
+and John Adams and Jefferson. My Father&mdash;Edward
+Robins&mdash;inherited more than his share of this old-fashioned
+Philadelphia manner, making a ceremony of the morning
+walk to his office and the Sunday walk to church. But it
+has been lost by younger generations, more's the pity. In
+memory I would not have my Grandfather a shade less
+solemn, though at the time his solemnity put me on anything
+but easy terms with him.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>The respectful bang of the front door upon my Grandfather's
+dignified back after breakfast was the signal for
+the family to relax. The cloth was at once cleared, my
+Grandmother and my Aunts&mdash;like all Philadelphia<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+mothers and daughters&mdash;brought their work-baskets into
+the dining-room and sat and gossiped there until it was
+time for my Grandmother to go and see the butcher and
+the provision dealer, or for my Aunts to make those
+formal calls for which the morning then was the unpardonable
+hour.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 308px;">
+<img src="images/gs012.jpg" width="308" height="400" alt="INDEPENDENCE SQUARE AND THE STATE HOUSE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">INDEPENDENCE SQUARE AND THE STATE HOUSE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It seems to me, in looking back, as if my Grandmother
+could never have gone out of the house except on
+an errand to the provision man, such an important part
+did it play in her daily round of duties. She never went
+to market. That was not the Philadelphia woman's business,
+it was the Philadelphia man's. My Grandfather, at
+the time of which I write, must have grown too old for the
+task, which was no light one, for it meant getting up at
+unholy hours every Wednesday and every Saturday, leaving
+the rest of the family in their comfortable beds, and
+being back again in time for prayers and eight o'clock
+breakfast. I cannot say how this division of daily labour
+was brought about. The century before, a short time as
+things go in Philadelphia, it was the other way round and
+the young Philadelphia woman at her marketing was one
+of the sights strangers in the town were taken to see. But
+in my time it was so much the man's right that as a child
+I believed there was something essentially masculine in
+going to market, just as there was in making the mayonnaise
+for the salad at dinner. A Philadelphia man valued
+his salad too highly to trust its preparation to a woman.
+It was almost a shock to me when my Father allowed my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+motherly little Aunt to relieve him of the responsibility in
+the Spruce Street house. And later on, when he re-married
+and again lived in a house of his own, and my Step-Mother
+made a mayonnaise quite equal to his or to any
+mere man's, not even to her would he shift the early marketing,&mdash;his
+presence in the Twelfth Street Market as essential
+on Wednesday and Saturday mornings as in the Stock
+Exchange every day&mdash;and his conscientiousness was the
+more astonishing as his genius was by no means for
+domesticity. Philadelphia women respected man's duties
+and rights in domestic, as in all, matters. I remember
+an elderly Philadelphian, who was stopping at Blossom's
+Hotel in Chester, where all Americans thirty years
+ago began their English tour, telling me the many sauces
+on the side table had looked so good she would have liked
+to try them and, on my asking her why in the world she
+had not, saying they had not been offered to her and she
+thought perhaps they were for the gentlemen. Only a
+Philadelphian among Americans could have given that
+answer.</p>
+
+<p>Towards three o'clock in the Spruce Street house, my
+Grandmother would be found, her cap carefully removed,
+stretched full-length upon the sofa in the dining-room.
+The picture would not be complete if I left out my
+Father's rage because the dining-room was used for her
+before-dinner nap as for almost every purpose of domestic
+life by the women of the family. I have often wondered
+where he got such an un-Philadelphia idea. In every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+house where there was a Grandmother, she was taking her
+nap at the same hour on the same sofa in the same dining-room.
+I could never see the harm. It was the most comfortable
+room in the house, without the isolation of the bedroom
+or the formality of the parlours.</p>
+
+<p>At four, my Grandfather returned from his day's
+work, the family re-assembled, holding him in sufficient
+awe never to be late, and dinner was served. The hour
+was part of the leisurely life of Philadelphia as ordered
+in Spruce Street. Philadelphians had dined at four during
+a hundred years and more, and my Grandfather, who
+rarely condescended to the frivolity of change, continued
+to dine at four, as he continued to wear a stock, until the
+end of his life. It was no doubt because of the contrast
+with Convent fare that the dinner in my recollection remains
+the most wonderful and elaborate I have ever eaten,
+though I rack my brains in vain to recall any of its special
+features except the figs and prunes on the high dessert
+dishes, altogether the most luscious figs and prunes ever
+grown and dried, and the decanter at my Grandfather's
+place from which he dropped into his glass the few drops
+of brandy he drank with his water while everybody else
+drank their water undiluted. When friends came to
+dinner, I recall also the Philadelphia decanter of Madeira,
+though otherwise no greater ceremony. Dinner was always
+as solemn an affair in my Grandfather's house as
+morning prayers or any act of daily life over which he
+presided, the whole house, at all times when he left it,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+relapsing into dressing-gown and slippered ease after the
+full-dress decorum his presence required of it.</p>
+
+<p>The eight o'clock tea is a more definite function in my
+memory, perhaps because the hours of waiting for it crept
+by so slowly. After dinner, the Aunts, my Father, the one
+Uncle who lived at home, vanished I never knew where,
+though no doubt Philadelphia supplied some amusement
+or occupation for the forlorn wreck four o'clock dinner
+made of the afternoon. But the interval was spent by
+my Grandfather and Grandmother at one of the front
+parlour windows, the old-fashioned Philadelphia afghan
+over their knees, their hands folded, while I, alone, my
+Sister having had the independence to vanish with the
+grown-ups, sat at the other, not daring to break the
+silence in which they looked out into the drowsy street for
+the people who seldom came and the events that never
+happened; nothing disturbing the calm of Spruce Street
+save the Sunday afternoon invasion of the
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'colored' and 'coloured' were used in this text. This was retained.">colored</ins> people
+in their Sunday clothes from every near alley. It gives
+me a pang now to pass and see the window empty that
+once was always filled, in the hour before twilight, by
+those two dear grey heads.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>As I grew a little older, I had the courage to bring a
+book to the window. It was there I read <i>The Lamplighter</i>
+which I confuse now with the memory of our own lamplighter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+making his rounds; and <i>The Initials</i> with a haughty
+Hilda for heroine&mdash;she must have been haughty for all
+real heroines then were; and <i>Queechy</i> and <i>The Wide, Wide
+World</i> and <i>Faith Gartney's Girlhood</i>, against whose sentiment
+I am glad to say I revolted. And mixed up with
+these were Mrs. Southworth's <i>Lost Heiress</i> and the anonymous
+<i>Routledge</i>, light books for whose presence I cannot
+account in my Grandfather's serious house. Does anybody
+read <i>Routledge</i> now? Has anybody now ever heard
+of it? What trash it was, but, after the improving romances
+with a religious moral of the Convent Library,
+after Wiseman's edifying <i>Fabiola</i> and Newman's scholarly&mdash;beyond
+my years&mdash;<i>Callista</i>, how I revelled in it, with
+what a choking throat I galloped through the lovesick
+chapters! I could recite pages of it to myself to
+relieve the dreariness of those long drives in the Third
+Street car, or the long waiting in the dreary station. To
+this day I remember the last sentence&mdash;"with his arm
+around my waist and my face hidden on his shoulder, I
+told him of the love, folly and pride that had so long kept
+me from him." Could <i>Queechy</i>, could <i>Faith Gartney's
+Girlhood</i> have been more sentimental than that? I dare
+not look up the old books to see, lest their charm as well as
+their sentiment should fade in the light of a more critical
+age. Then Scott and Dickens, Miss Edgeworth, more
+often <i>Holiday House</i>, filled the hours before tea. After
+all, the old division of the day, the young generation
+would be ashamed to go back to, had its uses.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 312px;">
+<img src="images/gs013.jpg" width="312" height="400" alt="CHRIST CHURCH INTERIOR" title="" />
+<span class="caption">CHRIST CHURCH INTERIOR</span>
+</div><p>
+
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>The tea, when announced, was worth waiting, or putting
+down the most entrancing book, for. Had I my way
+I would make Philadelphia dine again at four o'clock for
+the sake of the tea&mdash;of the frizzled beef that only Philadelphia
+ever frizzled to a turn, the smoked salmon that
+only Philadelphia ever smoked as an art, the Maryland
+biscuits that ought to be called Philadelphia biscuits for
+they were never half so good in their native land, the
+home-made preserves put up in that sunshiny kitchen
+where lilacs bloomed at the door. After all this long
+quarter of a century, the smell of beef frizzling would take
+me back to Eleventh and Spruce on a winter evening as
+straight as the fragrance of the flowering bean carries me
+to Pompeii in the early springtime, or of garlic to the little
+sunlit towns of Provence at any season of the year. The
+tea was a triumph of simplicity, but when there were guests
+it became a feast. As a rule, it was the meal to which the
+children and grandchildren who did not live in the Spruce
+Street house were invited, and loved best to be invited.
+For on these occasions my Grandmother could be relied
+upon to provide stewed oysters, the masterpiece of
+Margaret, her old grey-haired cook; and oyster croquettes
+from Augustine's&mdash;my Grandfather would as soon
+have begun the day without prayers as my Grandmother
+have given a feast without the help of Augustine, that
+caterer of colour who was for years supreme in Philadelphia;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+brandy peaches that, like the preserves, had been
+put up at home, the brandy poured in with unexpected
+lavishness for so temperate a household; and little round
+cakes with white icing on top&mdash;what dear little ghosts
+from out a far past they seemed when, after a quarter
+of a century in a land where people know nothing of the
+delights of little round cakes with white icing on top, I ate
+them again at Philadelphia feasts. If the solemn, dignified
+Grandfather at one end of the table kept our enjoyment
+within the bounds of ceremony, we felt no restraint
+with the little old Grandmother who beamed upon us from
+the other, as she poured out the tea and coffee with hands
+trembling so that, in her later years, the man servant,&mdash;usually
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'colored' and 'coloured' were used in this text. This was retained.">coloured</ins>
+and not to Philadelphia as yet known as
+butler or footman,&mdash;always stood close by to catch the tea
+or coffee pot when it fell, which it never did.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>I recall more formal family
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'reunion' and 're-union' were used in this text. This was retained.">reunions</ins>,
+above all the
+Golden Wedding, as impressive as a court function, the
+two old people enthroned at the far end of the front parlour,
+the sons and daughters and grandchildren approaching
+in a solemn line&mdash;an embarrassed line when it came to
+the youngest, always shy in the awful presence of the
+Grandfather&mdash;and offering, each in turn, their gifts. We
+were by no means a remarkable family, to the unprejudiced
+we may have seemed a commonplace one, my
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'forefathers' and 'fore-fathers' were used in this text. This was retained.">forefathers</ins>
+evidently having decided that leaving England<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+for America was a feat remarkable enough to satisfy
+the ambitions of any one family and having then proceeded
+to rest comfortably on their respectable laurels, but
+we took each other with great seriousness. The oldest
+Aunt, who was married and lived in New York, received
+on her annual visit to Spruce Street the homage due to a
+Princess Royal, and no King or Emperor could have
+caused more of a flutter than my Grandfather when he
+honoured one of his children with a visit. Family anniversaries
+were scrupulously observed, the legend of family
+affection was kept up as conscientiously, whatever it cost
+us in discomfort, and there were times when we paid
+heavily. I would have run many miles to escape one Uncle
+who, when he met me in the street, would stop to ask how I
+was, and how we all were at home, and then would stand
+twisting his moustache in visible agony, trying to think
+what the affectionate intimacy between us that did not
+exist required him to say, while I thanked my stars that
+we were in the street and not in a house where he would
+have felt constrained to kiss me. We were horribly exact
+in this matter of kissing. There was a family legend of
+another Uncle from New York who once, when he came
+over for some family meeting, was so eager to do his duty
+by his nieces that he kissed not only all of them&mdash;no light
+task&mdash;but two or three neighbours' little girls into the bargain.
+I think, however, that every Philadelphia family
+took itself as seriously and that our scruples were not a
+monopoly brought with us from Virginia and Maryland.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+In a town where family names are handed down from
+generation to generation, so that a family often will boast,
+as ours did, not only a "Jr." but a "3d," and lose no
+opportunity to let the world know it, family feeling is not
+likely to be allowed to wilt and die.</p>
+
+<p>Every public holiday also was a family affair to be
+observed with the rigours of the family feast. Christmas
+for me, when I did not celebrate it at the Convent with
+Midnight Mass and a <i>Cr&egrave;che</i> in the chapel and kind nuns
+trying to make me forget I had not gone home like other
+little girls, took me to the Spruce Street house in time
+to look on at the succession of Uncles and Aunts who
+dropped in on Christmas Eve and went away laden with
+bundles, and carrying in some safe pocket a collection of
+envelopes with a crisp new greenback in each, the sum
+varying from one hundred dollars to five according to the
+age of the child or grandchild whose name was on the
+envelope&mdash;my Grandfather gave with the fine patriarchal
+air he maintained in all family relations. The family
+appropriation of Thanksgiving Day and Washington's
+Birthday I did not grasp until after I left school, for
+while I was at the Convent they were both spent there,
+where they dwindled into insignificance compared to
+Reverend Mother's feast and its glories. As a rule, I
+must have been at the Convent as well for the Fourth of
+July, though I retain one jubilant vision of myself and a
+bag of torpedoes in the back-yard, solemnizing a little
+celebration among the roses. And I have larger visions<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>
+of military parades in broiling sunshine and of the City
+Troop filling the quiet streets with their gorgeousness
+which awed me long before the knowledge of their historic
+origin and uniform inspired me with reverence.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>Other duties and pleasures and observances that for
+most Philadelphia children were scattered through the
+interminable year, were crowded into my short holiday:
+visits to the dentist, to Dr. Hopkins, Dr. White's assistant,
+it being a test of Philadelphia respectability to have one's
+teeth seen to by Dr. White or one of his assistants or students,
+and the regular appointment was as much of obligation
+for me as Mass on Sunday; visits to the Academy
+of Fine Arts in the old Chestnut Street building, as I
+remember set back at the end of a court that made of it a
+place apart, a consecrated place which I entered with as
+little anticipation of amusement as St. Joseph's Church
+hidden in Willing's Alley, and was the more surprised
+therefore to be entertained, as I must have been, by Benjamin
+West, for of no other painter there have I the faintest
+recollection; visits to the Academy of Natural Sciences,
+where I liked the rows upon rows of stuffed birds, and the
+strange things in bottles, and the colossal skeletons that
+filled me with the same delicious shivers as the stories of
+afreets and genii in <i>The Arabian Nights</i>; visits to Fairmount
+Park, leagues away, houses left behind before it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+was reached, where the mysterious machinery of the
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: 'Waterworks,' 'Water Works,' and 'Water-Works' were used in this text. This was retained.">Waterworks</ins>
+was as terrifying as the skeletons, and I
+thought it much pleasanter outside under the blue sky;
+visits to the theatre&mdash;the most wonderful visits of all, for
+they took me out into the night that I knew only from
+stolen vigils in the Convent dormitory, or glimpses from
+the Spruce Street windows. Romance was in the dimly-lit
+streets, in the stars above, in the town after dark, which
+I was warned I was never to brave alone until I can laugh
+now to think how terrified I was the first time I came home
+late by myself, in my terror jumping into a street-car
+and claiming the protection of a contemptuous young
+woman whom work had not allowed to draw a conventional
+line between day and night.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 312px;">
+<img src="images/gs014.jpg" width="312" height="400" alt="CLASSIC FAIRMOUNT" title="" />
+<span class="caption">CLASSIC FAIRMOUNT</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I have never got rid of that suggestion of romance,
+not so much in the theatre itself as in the going to it, and,
+to this day, a matin&eacute;e in broad daylight will bring back a
+little of the old thrill. But nothing can bring back to any
+theatre the glitter, the brilliancy, the
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'splendor' and 'splendour' were used in this text. This was retained.">splendour</ins>
+of the old
+Chestnut, the old Walnut, the old Arch, then already
+dingy with age I have no doubt, but transfigured by my
+childhood's ecstasies in them. Nothing can persuade me
+that any plays have been, or could be, written to surpass in
+beauty, pathos and humour, <i>Solon Shingle</i>, and <i>Arrah-na-Pogue</i>,
+and <i>Our American Cousin</i>, and <i>The Black Crook</i>,
+and <i>Ours</i>, though I have forgotten all but their names;
+that in opera Clara Louise Kellogg ever had a rival; that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+in gaiety and wit <i>La Grande Duchesse</i> and <i>La Belle
+H&eacute;l&egrave;ne</i> could be eclipsed; or that any actors could compete
+with Sothern and Booth and Mrs. Drew and the Davenports,
+and Charlotte Cushman as <i>Meg Merrilies</i>&mdash;there
+was a bit of good old melodramatic acting to make a small
+Convent girl's flesh creep! Shakespeare was redeemed
+by Booth from the dulness of the Convent reading-book
+and entered gloriously into my Convent life. For one
+happy winter, it was not I who led the long procession
+down to the refectory, though nobody could have suspected
+it, but the Ghost of Hamlet's Father, with, close
+behind me, in gloom absorbed, the Prince of Denmark,
+mistaken by the unknowing for the little girl, my friend,
+whose father, with more than the usual father's amiable
+endurance, had taken me with her and her sister to see
+the play of <i>Hamlet</i> during the Christmas holidays.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 306px;">
+<img src="images/gs015.jpg" width="306" height="400" alt="DOWN PINE STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">DOWN PINE STREET</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The theatre has become part of the modern school
+course. If an actor like Forbes-Robertson gives a farewell
+performance of <i>Hamlet</i>, or a manager like Beerbohm
+Tree produces a patriotic melodrama, or the company
+from the Th&eacute;&acirc;tre Fran&ccedil;ais perform one of the rare
+classics that the young person may be taken to, I have
+seen a London theatre filled with school girls and boys.
+From what I hear I might imagine the theatre and the
+opera to be the most serious studies of every Philadelphia
+school. At the Convent I should have envied the modern
+students could I have foreseen their liberty, but they have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+more reason to envy me. The gilt has been rubbed too
+soon off their gingerbread, too soon has the tinsel of their
+theatre been tarnished. My Spartan training gave me a
+theatre that can never cease to be a Wonderland, just as it
+endowed me with a Philadelphia that will endure, until this
+world knows me no more, as a beautiful, peaceful town
+where roses bloom in the sunny back-yards, and people live
+with dignity behind the plain red brick fronts of its long,
+straight streets.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV: AT THE CONVENT</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>As the theatre, in my memory, still gives the crowning
+glory to my holiday in Philadelphia, so, in
+looking back, the brief holiday seems the spectacle,
+the romance, the supreme moment, of my early years.
+The scene of my
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'everyday' and 'every-day' were used in this text. This was retained.">every-day</ins>
+life was that Convent of the
+Sacred Heart at Torresdale which was the end of the interminable
+ride in the Third Street horse-car and the shorter
+ride in the Pennsylvania Railroad train.</p>
+
+<p>The Philadelphian who did not live in the Convent
+would have seen it the other way round, for the Convent
+was unlike enough to Philadelphia to suggest the romance
+of the unusual. Only in one or two respects did it provide
+me with facts that every proper Philadelphian was brought
+up to know, and let me say again that because I had to
+find out the others&mdash;the more characteristically Philadelphia
+facts&mdash;for myself, I think they probably made a
+stronger impression upon me than upon the Philadelphian
+guiltless of ever straying, or of ever having been allowed
+to stray, from the approved Philadelphia path.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>When the Ladies of the Sacred Heart decided to
+open a Convent in Philadelphia, an uncertain enterprise
+if it is considered how un-Catholic Philadelphia was, they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+began in a fairly modest way by taking a large house at
+Torresdale, with lawns and gardens and woods and a great
+old-fashioned barn, the country seat of a Philadelphian
+whose name I have forgotten. It stood to the west of the
+railroad, at a discreet distance from the little cluster of
+houses by the riverside that alone meant Torresdale to the
+Philadelphians who lived in them.</p>
+
+<p>The house, I can now see, was typical as I first knew
+it, the sort the Philadelphian built for himself in the
+suburbs at a period too removed from Colonial days for
+it to have the beauty of detail and historic interest of the
+Colonial house, and yet near enough to them for dignity
+of proportion and spaciousness to be desirable, if not
+essential to a Philadelphian's comfort. A wide, lofty hall
+ran from the front door to the back, on either side were
+two large airy rooms with space between for the broad
+main stairway, a noble structure, and the carefully concealed
+back stairway&mdash;<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'halfway' and 'half-way' were used in this text. This was retained.">half-way</ins>
+up which in my time was
+the little infirmary window where, at half past ten every
+morning, Sister Odille dispensed pills and powders to
+those in need of them. Along the entire front of the
+house was a broad porch,&mdash;the indispensable Philadelphia
+piazza&mdash;its roof supported by a row of substantial columns
+over which roses and honeysuckle clambered fragrantly
+and luxuriantly in the June sunshine. The house was
+painted a cheerful yellow that went well with the white
+of the woodwork about the windows and the porch: not
+a very beautiful type of house, but pleasant, substantial,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+luxurious, and making as little outward show of its luxury
+as the plain red brick town house of the wealthy Philadelphian.</p>
+
+<p>How comfortable a type of house it was to live in,
+I know from experience of another, not a school, within
+sight, a ten minutes' walk across the fields, and like it
+in design and arrangement and even colour, in everything
+except size,&mdash;which my Father took one summer:
+to me a most memorable summer as it was the first I spent
+outside the Convent limits from the beginning to the end
+of the long holiday. The jerry-builder had had no part in
+putting up the solid, well-constructed walls which stood
+firm against winter storms and winds, and were no less a
+protection from the torrid heat of a Philadelphia summer.
+But fashion can leave architecture no more alone than
+dress. Already, the newer group of houses down by the
+Delaware were built of the brown stone which, to my
+mind, dates the beginning of the Philadelphian's fall from
+architectural grace, the beginning of his distrust in William
+Penn's plans for his well-being and of his foolish
+hankering after the fleshpots of New York.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 309px;">
+<img src="images/gs016.jpg" width="309" height="400" alt="LOUDOUN, MAIN STREET GERMANTOWN" title="" />
+<span class="caption"><ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'LOUDORN'">LOUDOUN</ins>, MAIN STREET GERMANTOWN</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Convent, before I came to it, had been a victim
+to the brown stone fashion. With success, the pleasant old
+country house had grown too small for the school into
+which it had been converted, and a southern wing had been
+added: a long, low building with the Chapel at the far end,
+all built in brown stone and in a style that passed for
+Gothic and that a thousand times I could have wished<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+based upon any other model. For the upper room in the
+wing, ambitiously christened by somebody Gothic Hall,
+had a high pointed roof that made it an ice-house in winter
+and, for our sins, it was used as the Dormitory of the
+Sacred Heart where I slept. I can recall mornings when
+the water was frozen in our pitchers while the big stove,
+in the middle of the high-pitched room, burned red hot
+as if to mock at us as, with numbed fingers, we struggled
+to make our beds and wash ourselves and button and hook
+on our clothes. And the builders had so contrived that
+summer turned our fine Gothic Dormitory into a fiery
+furnace. How many June nights, contrary to all the rules,
+have I hung out of the little, horribly Gothic window at the
+head of my alcove, gasping in the warm darkness that was
+so sweet and stifling with the fragrance of the flowers in
+Madame Huguet's garden just below.</p>
+
+<p>I had not been long at the Convent before another
+brown stone wing extended to the north and two stories
+were added to the main building which, for the sake of
+harmony, was now painted brown from top to bottom. In
+a niche on this new fa&ccedil;ade, a statue of the Sacred Heart
+was set, and all semblance to the old country house was
+gone, except for the broad porch without and the well-proportioned
+rooms within. But these, and later improvements,
+additions and alterations cannot make me forget
+the Convent as it was when I first came to it, growing up
+about the simple, solidly-built, spacious yellow house that
+was once the Philadelphian's ideal of suburban comfort<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+and so like the house where I spent my most memorable
+summer, so like, save for the size and the colour, my Great-Grandfather
+Ambrose White's old house on the Turnpike
+at Chestnut Hill, so like innumerable other country houses
+of the same date where I visited.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>The Convent rule and discipline could not alter the
+changing of the seasons as Philadelphia ordered them.
+They might appear to us mainly regulated by feasts and
+fasts&mdash;All Saints and All Souls, the milestones on the
+road to Christmas; Lent and the month of St. Joseph
+heralding the approach of spring; the month of Mary
+and the month of the Sacred Heart, Ascension and
+Corpus-Christi, as ardent and splendid as the spring and
+summer days they graced. But, all the same, each season
+came laden with the pleasures held in common by all fortunate
+Philadelphia children who had the freedom of the
+country or the countrified suburbs.</p>
+
+<p>The school year began with the fall, when any night
+might bring the first frost and the first tingle in the air&mdash;champagne
+to quicken the blood in a school girl's veins,
+and make the sitting still through the long study and class
+hours a torture. The woods shone with gold; the Virginia
+creeper flamed on the front porch; sickel pears fell, ripe
+and luscious, from the tree close to the Chapel where it was
+against the law to go and pick them up but where no law
+in the world could have barred the way; chestnuts and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+hickory nuts and the walnuts that stained my fingers black
+to open offered a substantial dessert after as substantial
+a dinner as ever children were served with. But those
+were the joyful years when hunger never could be satisfied
+and digestion was equal to any surfeit of raw chestnuts&mdash;or
+raw turnips for that matter, if the season supplied no
+lighter dainties, or of next to anything that could be
+picked up and eaten. I know I drew the line only at the
+huge, white, oversweet mulberries strewing the grass by
+the swings in Mulberry Lane, that favourite scene of the
+war to the knife we waged under the name of Old Man and
+Bands, primitive games not to be outdone by the Tennis
+and Hockey of the more sophisticated modern school girl.</p>
+
+<p>The minute the Refectory was left for the noonday
+hour of recreation on a brisk autumn day, there was a wild
+scamper to the woods where, just beyond the gate that led
+into them, the hoary old chestnut trees spread their shade
+and dropped their fruit on either side the hill between the
+Poisonous Valley, a thrill in its deadly name, and the
+graveyard, few crosses then in the green enclosure which
+now, alas! is too well filled. The shadow of death lay so
+lightly upon us that I recall to-day only the delicious rustle
+of eager feet through the fallen leaves, and the banging of
+stone upon stone as hickory nuts cracked between them,
+I feel only the delicious pricking of the chestnut burrs
+in the happy, hardened fingers of the school girl. And
+these, anyway, are memories I share with every Philadelphian
+who, as a child, wandered in the suburbs or the near<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+country when the woods were gold and scarlet, and the way
+through them was carpeted with leaves hiding rich stores
+of nuts for the seeker after treasure.</p>
+
+<p>But no Philadelphia child in the shelter of her own
+house could know the meaning of the Philadelphia winter
+as I knew it in the Convent, half frozen in that airy dormitory
+of the Sacred Heart, shivering in shawl and hood
+through early Mass in the icy Chapel, still huddled in my
+shawl at my desk or scurrying as fast as discipline would
+wink at through the windy passages. The heating arrangements,
+somehow, never succeeded in coping with the
+extreme cold of a severe winter in the large rooms and
+halls of the new wings, and I must confess that we were
+often most miserably uncomfortable. I cannot but wonder
+what the pampered school girls of the present generation
+in the same Convent would say to such discomfort. But it
+did us no harm. Indeed, though I shiver at the memory,
+I am sure it did us good. We came out the healthier and
+hardier for it, much as the Englishman does from his cold
+house, the coldest in the world. The old conditions of a
+hardier life, that either killed or cured, did far more to
+make a vigorous people than all the new-fangled eugenics
+ever can.</p>
+
+<p>If I had little of the comfort of the Philadelphia child
+in the Philadelphia house, I shared with him the outdoor
+pleasures which winter provided by way of compensation&mdash;the
+country white under snow for weeks and weeks,
+snowballs to be made and snow houses built, sliding to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>
+had on the frozen lake, and coasting down the long hill
+just beyond the gate into the woods, when there were sleds
+to coast on. And what excitement in the marvellous snow-storms
+that have vanished with other marvels of my youth&mdash;the
+storms that put the new blizzard to shame, when the
+snow drifts were mountains high, and it took all the men
+on the farm, with Big John at their head, to clear a way
+through the near paths and roads. I recall one storm in
+particular when my Father, who had been making his
+periodical visit to my Sister and myself, left the Convent
+at six, was snowed up in his train, and never reached the
+dingy Depot in Frankford until three the next morning,
+and when for days we got out of the house only for a
+solemn ten minutes' walk each noon on the wide front
+porch, where it was a shocking breach of discipline to be
+seen at all other times except on Thursday and Sunday,
+the Convent visiting days. Of the inspiriting rigours of
+a Philadelphia winter I was never in ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>In the snow drifts and storms of winter Big John and
+his men were not more helpless than in the floods and
+slush that began with the first soft breath of the Philadelphia
+spring. Wearing our big shapeless overshoes, we
+waded through the puddles and jumped over the streams
+in the Convent paths and roads as, in town, Philadelphia
+children, with their "gums" on, jumped over the streams
+and waded through the puddles in the abominably paved
+streets. But then hope too began when the first spaces of
+green were uncovered by the melting snow. The first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+spring-beauty in the sunny spaces of the woods, the first
+flowery frost in the orchard, the first blooming of the tulip
+trees, were among the great events of the year. And what
+joy now in the new hunt!&mdash;what treasure of spring-beauties
+everywhere in the woods as the sun grew warmer,
+of shyer, retired hepaticas, of white violets running wild
+in the swampy fields beyond the lake, of sweet trailing
+arbutus, of Jacks-in-the-pulpit flourishing best in the
+damp thickets of the Poisonous Valley into which I never
+wandered without a tremor not merely because it was a
+forbidden adventure, but because, though I passed through
+it unscathed, I had seen so often the horrible and unsightly
+red rash one whiff from over its bushes and trees
+could bring out on the faces and hands of my schoolmates
+with a skin more sensitive than mine. Games lost their
+charm in the spring sunshine and our one pleasure was in
+the hunt, no longer for chestnuts and walnuts and hickory
+nuts, but solely for flowers, bringing back great bunches
+wilting in our hot little hands, to place before the shrine
+that aroused the warmest fervours of our devotion or was
+tended by the nun of our special adoration.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 306px;">
+<img src="images/gs017.jpg" width="306" height="400" alt="ENTRANCE TO FAIRMOUNT AND THE WASHINGTON STATUE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ENTRANCE TO FAIRMOUNT AND THE WASHINGTON STATUE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And before we knew it, the spring-beauties and hepaticas
+and white violets and Jacks-in-the-pulpit disappeared
+from the woods, and the flowery frost from the orchard,
+and the great blossoms from the tulip trees, and summer
+was upon us&mdash;blazing summer when we lay perspiring on
+our little beds up there in Gothic Hall where a few months
+before we shivered and shook, perspiration streamed from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+our faces on our school books at the study hour, more a
+burden than ever as we drooped and drowsed in the heat;&mdash;blazing
+summer when the fragrance of the roses hung
+heavy over Madame Huguet's garden and mingled with
+the too sweet fragrance of the honeysuckle about the
+columns of the porch and over every door;&mdash;blazing summer
+when all day long meadows and gardens and lawns
+swooned under the pitiless sunshine and we, who had
+braved the winter cold undismayed, never put as much as
+our noses out of doors until the hour of sunset;&mdash;blazing
+summer when for many years I saw the other girls going
+home, the gaiety of sea and mountain and change awaiting
+them, while my Sister and I stayed on, desolate at heart
+despite the efforts of the nuns to help us forget, feeling
+forlornly forsaken as we watched the green burnt up into
+brown and the summer flowers wilt and die, and the
+drought turn the roads to dust, and all Nature parched as
+we parched with it. The holiday dragged terribly and,
+reversing the usual order of things, I counted the days
+until school would begin again. However, at least I can
+say that I saw the Philadelphia summer in its full terrors
+as every Philadelphia child ever born, for whom wealth or
+chance opens no gate of escape, must see it and did see it
+of old.</p>
+
+<p>And so for me in the Convent the seasons were the
+same as for the child in Philadelphia and its suburbs. And
+I <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learnt</ins>
+how cold Philadelphia can be, and how hot&mdash;if
+Penn, safe in England, was grateful for the greater nearness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+of his town to the sun, not a Philadelphian on the
+spot, sweltering through its midsummer heat, has ever yet
+shared his gratitude. And I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learnt</ins>
+how beautiful Philadelphia
+is as it grows mild again after winter has done its
+worst, or as it cools off in the friendlier autumn sun. And
+not to know these facts is not to know Philadelphia.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>In the Convent regulation of daily life lay the unconquerable
+difference. Philadelphia has its laws and
+traditions that guide the Philadelphian through every hour
+and duty of the day, and the Philadelphian, who from the
+cradle does not obey these traditions and laws, can never be
+quite as other Philadelphians. The Sacred Heart is a
+French order, and the nuns imported their laws and traditions
+from France, qualified, modified, perhaps, on the
+way, but still with an unmistakable foreign flavour and
+tendency that could not pass unquestioned in a town where
+the first article of faith is that everybody should do precisely
+what everybody else does.</p>
+
+<p>I remember when the Rhodes scholars were first sent
+from America to Oxford a friend of mine professed serious
+concern for the future of the University should they introduce
+buckwheat cakes on Oxford breakfast tables. And,
+really, he was not as funny as he thought. A man is a good
+deal what his food makes him. The macaroni-fed Italian
+is not as the sausage-and-sauerkraut-fed German, nor the
+Hindu who thrives on rice as the Irishman bred upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+potatoes. Never was a town more concerned with the
+Question of Food than Philadelphia and I now see quite
+plainly that I, beginning my day at the Convent on coffee
+and rolls, could not have been as the correct Philadelphia
+child beginning the day in Philadelphia or the suburbs on
+scrapple and buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. Thus,
+the line of separation was drawn while I was still in short
+skirts with my hair cropped close.</p>
+
+<p>The Convent day continued, as it began, with differences.
+I sat down at noon to the substantial French
+breakfast which at the Convent, as a partial concession to
+American ideals, became dinner. At half past three, like
+a little French girl, I had my <i>go&ucirc;ter</i>, for which even the
+French name was retained&mdash;how well I remember the big,
+napkin-lined basket, full of hunks of good gingerbread,
+or big crackers, or sweet rolls, passed round by Sister
+Duffy, probably the most generous of all generous Irishwomen,
+who would have slipped an extra piece into every
+little hand if she could, but who was so shockingly cross-eyed
+that we got an idea of her as a disagreeable old thing,
+an ogress, always watching to see if we took more than our
+appointed share. Quite recently I argued it all out again
+with the few old Sisters left to greet me on my first and
+only visit to the Convent during thirty years and, purely
+for the sake of the sentiment of other days. I refused to
+believe them when they insisted that Sister Duffy, who now
+lies at peace in the little graveyard on the hillside in the
+woods, wasn't cross at all, but as tender as any Sister who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+ever waited on hungry little girls! I would have given a
+great deal could she have come back, cross-eyes and all,
+with her big basket of gingerbread to make me feel at
+home again, as I could not in the Visitors' dining-room
+where my <i>go&ucirc;ter</i> was set out on a neatly spread table,
+even though on one side of me was "Marie" of <i>Our Convent
+Days</i>, my friend who had been Prince of Denmark
+in our Booth-stricken period, and on the other Miss Repplier,
+the chronicler of our childish adventures. It was the
+first time we three had sat there together since more years
+than I am willing to count, and I think we were too conscious
+that youth now was no longer of the company not to
+feel the sadness as keenly as the pleasure of the
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'reunion' and 're-union' were used in this text. This was retained.">reunion</ins> in
+our old home.</p>
+
+<p><i>Go&ucirc;ter</i>, with its associations, has sent me wandering
+far from the daily routine which ended, in the matter of
+meals, with a supper of meat and potatoes and I hardly
+know what, at half past six, when little Philadelphia girls
+were probably just finishing their cambric tea and bread-and-butter,
+and even the buns from Dexter's when these
+had been added as a special treat or reward. How could
+we, upon so much heavier fare, have seen things, how could
+we have looked upon life, just as those other little girls
+did?</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>We did not play, any more than we ate, like the child
+in Philadelphia or its suburbs. One memory of our playtime
+I have common to all Philadelphia children of my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+generation: the memory of Signor Blitz, on a more than
+usually blissful Reverend Mother's Feast, taking rabbits
+out of our hats and bowls of gold-fish out of his sleeve, and
+holding a long conversation with the immortal Bobby, the
+most prodigious puppet that ever conversed with any professional
+ventriloquist. But this was a rare ecstasy never
+repeated.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs018.jpg" width="400" height="314" alt="MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN" title="" />
+<span class="caption">MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>What games the children in Rittenhouse Square and
+the Lanes of Germantown had, I cannot record, but of
+one thing I am sure: they did not go to the tune and the
+words of "<i>Sur le pont d'Avignon</i>," or "<i>Qu' est-ce qui
+passe ici si tard</i>," or "<i>Il &eacute;tait un avocat</i>." Nor, I fancy,
+were "<i>Malbrough s'en va-t'en guerre</i>" and "<i>Au clair de la
+lune, mon ami Pierrot</i>," the songs heard in the Philadelphia
+nursery. Nor is it likely that "<i>C'est le mois de
+Marie</i>," which we sang as lustily all through May as the
+devout in France sing it in every church and every cathedral
+from one end of their land to the other, was the
+canticle of pious little Catholic children celebrating the
+month of Mary at St. Joseph's or St. Patrick's. Nor
+outside the Convent could the Bishop on his pastoral
+rounds have been welcomed with the "<i>Vive! Vive! Vive!
+Monseigneur au Sacr&eacute; Coeur, Quel Bonheur!</i>" which, the
+title appropriately changed, was our form of welcome to
+every distinguished visitor. And, singing these songs and
+canticles, how could the associations and memories we were
+laying up for ourselves be the same as those of Philadelphia
+children whose ears and voices were trained on "Juanita"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>
+and "Listen to the Mocking Bird," or, it may be, "Marching
+through Georgia" and "Way down upon the Swanee
+River"? These things may make subtle distinctions, but
+they are distinctions that can never be overcome or outgrown.</p>
+
+<p>In study hours, as in playtime and at meals, we were
+seldom long out of this French atmosphere. French class
+was only shorter than English. If we were permitted to
+talk at breakfast, it was not at all that we might amuse
+ourselves, but that we might practise our French which
+did not amuse us in the least. Many of the nuns were
+French, often, it is true, French from Louisiana or Canada,
+but their English was not one bit more fluent on that
+account. Altogether, there was less of Philadelphia than
+of France in the discipline, the devotions, and the relaxations
+of the Convent.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>But, of all the differences, the most fundamental, I
+think, came from the fact that the Convent was a Convent
+and taught us to accept the conventual, the monastic interpretation
+of life. We were there in, not only a French, but
+a cloistered atmosphere&mdash;the atmosphere that Philadelphia
+least of all towns could understand. The Friends had
+attained to peace and unworldliness by staying in their own
+homes and fulfilling their duty as fathers and mothers of
+families, as men and women of business. But the nuns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+saw no way to achieve this end except by shutting themselves
+out of the world and avoiding its temptations. The
+Ladies of the Sacred Heart are cloistered. They leave the
+Convent grounds only to journey from one of their houses
+to another, for care is taken that they do not, by staying
+over long in one school, form too strong an attachment to
+place or person. Where would be the use of being a nun
+if you were not made to understand the value of sacrifice?
+Their pupils are, for the time, as strictly cloistered. Not
+for us were the walks abroad by which most girls at boarding
+school keep up with the times&mdash;or get ahead of them.
+We were as closely confined to the Convent grounds as the
+nuns, except during the holidays or when a friend or relation
+begged for us a special outing. It was not a confinement
+depending on high stone walls and big gates with
+clanging iron chains and bars. But the wood fences running
+with the board walk above the railroad and about the
+woods and the fields and the gardens made us no less
+prisoners&mdash;willing and happy prisoners as we might be,
+and were. This gave us, or gave me at any rate, a curious
+idea of the Convent as a place entirely apart, a place that
+had nothing to do with the near town or the suburb in
+which it stood&mdash;a blessed oasis in the sad wilderness of the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>There is no question that, as a result, I felt myself
+in anticipation a stranger in the wilderness into which I
+knew I must one day go from the oasis, and in which I used<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+to imagine I should be as much of an exile as the Children
+of Israel in the desert. Of course I was not quite that
+when the time came, but that for an interval I was convinced
+I must be explains how unlike in atmosphere the
+Convent was to Eleventh and Spruce.</p>
+
+<p>In all sorts of little ways I was confirmed in this belief
+by life and its duties at the Convent. For all that concerned
+me nearly, for all that was essential to existence
+here below, Philadelphia seemed to me as remote as Timbuctoo.
+I got insensibly to think of myself first not as
+a Philadelphian, not as an American, but as a "Child of
+the Sacred Heart,"&mdash;the first question under all circumstances
+was what I should do, not as a Philadelphian, but
+as a Child of the Sacred Heart.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs019.jpg" width="400" height="308" alt="ARCH STREET MEETING" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ARCH STREET MEETING</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I cannot say how much the mere name of the thing
+represented&mdash;the honour and the privilege&mdash;and there was
+not a girl who had been for any time a pupil who did not
+prize it as I did. And we were not given the chance to
+forget or belittle it. We were impressed with the importance
+of showing our appreciation of the distinction Providence
+had reserved for us&mdash;of showing it not merely by
+our increased faith and devotion, but by our bearing and
+conduct. We might be slack about our lessons. That
+was all right at a period when slackness prevailed in girls'
+schools and it was unfeminine, if not unladylike, to be too learned.
+But we were not let off from the diligent cultivation
+of our manners. Our faith and devotion were
+attended to in a daily half hour of religious instruction.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+But Sunday was not too holy a day for the Politeness
+Class that was held every week as surely as Sunday came
+round, in which we were taught all the mysteries of a
+Deportment that might have given tips to the great Turveydrop
+himself,&mdash;how to sit, how to walk, how to carry
+ourselves under all circumstances, how to pick up a handkerchief
+a passer-by might drop&mdash;an unspeakable martyrdom
+of a class when each unfortunate student, in turn, went
+through her paces with the eyes of all the school upon her
+and to the sound of the stifled giggles of the boldest. We
+never met one of our mistresses in the corridors that we
+did not drop a laboured curtsey&mdash;a shy, deplorably awkward
+curtsey when I met the Reverend Mother, Mother
+Boudreau, a large, portly, dignified nun from Louisiana
+and a model of deportment, who inspired me with a respectful
+fear I never have had for any other mortal. We
+could not answer a plain "Yes" or "No" to our mistresses,
+but the "Madam" must always politely follow.
+"Remember" was a frequent warning, "remember that
+wherever, or with whom, you may be, to behave like children
+of the Sacred Heart!" A Child of the Sacred Heart,
+we were often told, should be known by her manners. And
+so impressed were we with this precept that I remember a
+half-witted, but harmless, elderly woman whom the nuns,
+in their goodness, had kept on as a "parlour boarder"
+after her school days were over, telling us solemnly that
+when she was in New York and went out shopping with
+her sister, the young men behind the counter at Stewart's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+would all look at her with admiring eyes and whisper to
+each other, "Is it not easy to see that Miss C. is a Child
+of the Sacred Heart?"</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs020.jpg" width="400" height="309" alt="THE TRAIN SHED, BROAD STREET STATION" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE TRAIN SHED, BROAD STREET STATION</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Seriously, the training did give something that nothing
+else could, and an admirable training it was for which girls
+to-day might exchange more than one brain-bewildering
+course at College and be none the worse for it. In my own
+case, I admit, I should not mind having had more of the
+other training, as it has turned out that my work in life
+is of the sort where a quick intelligence counts for more
+than an elegant deportment. But I can find no fault with
+the Convent for neglect. Girls then were not educated
+to work. If you had asked any girl anywhere what was
+woman's mission, she would have answered promptly&mdash;had
+she been truthful&mdash;"to find a husband as soon as
+possible;" if she were a Convent girl,&mdash;a Child of the
+Sacred Heart&mdash;she would have added, "or else to become
+a nun." Her own struggles to fit herself for any other
+career the inconsiderate Fates might drive her into, so
+far from doing her any harm, were the healthiest and most
+bracing of tonics. Granted an average mind, she could
+teach herself through necessity just the important things
+school could not teach her through a routine she didn't see
+the use of. She emerged from the ordeal not only heroically
+but successfully, which was more to the point. A
+young graduate from Bryn Mawr said to me some few days
+ago that when she looked at her mother and the women<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+of her mother's generation and
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>d
+all they had accomplished
+without what is now called education, she wondered
+whether the girls of her generation, who had the benefit of
+all the excess of education going, would or could accomplish
+more, or as much. To tell the truth, I wonder myself.
+But then it may be said that I, belonging to that
+older generation, am naturally prejudiced.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VII</h3>
+
+<p>There are moments when, reflecting on all I lost as a
+Philadelphian, I am half tempted to regret my long years
+of seclusion, busy about my soul and my manners, at the
+Convent. A year or so would not have much mattered one
+way or the other. I led, however, no other life save the
+Convent life until I was seventeen. I knew no other
+standpoint save the Convent standpoint.</p>
+
+<p>But the temptation to regret flies as quickly as it
+comes. I loved the life too well at the time, I love it too
+well in the retrospect, to have wanted then, or to want now,
+to do without it. It was a happy life to live, though I
+would not have been a school girl had I not, with the school
+girl's joy in the morbid, liked nothing better than to pose
+as the unhappiest of mortals&mdash;to be a school girl was to
+be misunderstood I would have vowed, had I, in my safe
+oasis, ever heard the expression or had the knowledge to
+guess at its meaning. I loved every stone in the house,
+brown and ugly as every stone might be, I loved every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+tree in the woods whether or no it dropped pleasant things
+to devour, I loved every hour of the day whatever might
+be its task. I had a quick memory, study was no great
+trouble to me, and I enjoyed every class and recitation.
+I enjoyed getting into mischief&mdash;I wore once only the
+Ribbon for Good Conduct&mdash;and I enjoyed being punished
+for it. In a word, I got a good deal out of my life,
+if it was not exactly what a girl was sent to school to get.
+And it is as happy a life to remember, with many picturesque
+graces and absurdities, joys and sorrows, that an
+uninterrupted existence at Eleventh and Spruce could not
+have given.</p>
+
+<p>I have no desire to talk sentimental nonsense about
+my school days having been my happiest. That sort of
+talk is usually twaddle. It was not as school that I loved
+the Convent, though as school it had its unrivalled attractions;
+it was as home. When the time came to go from it
+I suffered that sharp pang felt by most girls on leaving
+home for school. I remember how I, who affected a sublime
+scorn for the cry-baby, blubbered like one myself
+when I was faced with the immediate prospect of life in
+Philadelphia. How well I recall my despair&mdash;how vividly
+I see the foolish scene I made in the empty Refectory,
+shadowy in the dusk of the June evening, where I was
+rehearsing the valedictory of the Graduating Class which
+I had been chosen to recite, and where, after the first few
+lines I broke down to my shame, and sniffled and gurgled
+and sobbed in the lap of the beloved mistress who was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>
+doing her best to comfort me, and also to keep me from
+disgracing her, as I should have done by any such scene on
+the great day itself.</p>
+
+<p>If the Convent stands for so much in my memory, it
+would be ungrateful to regret the years I spent in it. The
+sole reason would be my loss, not as a student, but as a
+Philadelphian, for this loss was the price I paid. But the
+older I grow, the better I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>
+that to the loss I owe an
+immeasurable gain. For as a child I never got so accustomed
+to Philadelphia as not to see it at all. The thing
+we know too well is often the thing we see least clearly, or
+we should not need the philosopher to remind us that that
+is best which nearest lieth. All through my childhood and
+early youth I saw Philadelphia chiefly from the outside,
+and so saw it with more awe and wonder and lasting delight
+than those Philadelphians who, in childhood and
+early youth, saw it only from the inside,&mdash;too near for
+it to come together into the picture that tells.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER V: TRANSITIONAL</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>And so it was with a great fear in my heart that,
+in the course of time and after I had
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins> as
+little as it was decent for Philadelphia girls to
+learn in the days before Bryn Mawr, I left the Convent
+altogether for Philadelphia. I can smile now in recalling
+the old fear, but it was no smiling matter at seventeen: a
+weeping matter rather, and many were the tears I shed in
+secret over the prospect before me. My holidays had not
+revealed Philadelphia to me as a place of evil and many
+dangers. But as I was to live there, it represented the
+world,&mdash;the sinful world, worse, the unknown world, to
+battle with whose temptations my life and training at the
+Convent had been the preparation.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 313px;">
+<img src="images/gs021.jpg" width="313" height="400" alt="ST PETER&#39;S, INTERIOR" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ST PETER&#39;S, INTERIOR</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It added to the danger that sin could wear so peaceful
+an aspect and temptation keep so comfortably out of
+sight. During an interval, longer than I cared to have it,
+for I did not "come out" at once as a Philadelphia girl
+should and at the Convent I had made few Philadelphia
+friends, my personal knowledge of Philadelphia did not
+go much deeper than its house fronts. For the most part
+they bore the closest family resemblance to those of
+Eleventh and Spruce, with the same suggestion of order
+and repose in their well-washed marble steps and neatly-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>drawn
+blinds. My Father had then moved to Third
+Street near Spruce, and there rented a red brick house, one-half,
+or one-third, the size of my Grandfather's, but very
+like it in every other way, to the roses in the tiny back-yard
+and to the daily family routine except that, with a
+courageous defiance of tradition I do not know how we
+came by, we dined at the new dinner hour of six and said
+our prayers in the privacy of our bedrooms. The Stock
+Exchange was only a minute away, and yet, at our end,
+Third Street had not lost its character as a respectable
+residential street. We had for neighbours old Miss Grelaud
+and the Bullitts and, round the corner in Fourth Street,
+the Wisters and Bories and Schaumbergs,&mdash;with what
+bated breath Philadelphia talked of the beauty and talents
+of Miss Emily Schaumberg, as she still was!&mdash;and many
+other Philadelphia families who had never lived anywhere
+else. Life went on as silently and placidly and
+regularly as at the Convent. I seemed merely to have
+exchanged one sort of monastic peace for another and the
+loudest sound I ever heard, the jingling of my old friend
+the horse-car, was not so loud as to disturb it.</p>
+
+<p>If I walked up Spruce Street, or as far as Pine and up
+Pine, silence and peace enfolded me. Peace breathed,
+exuded from the red brick houses with their white marble
+steps, their white shutters below and green above, their
+pleasant line of trees shading the red brick pavement.
+The occasional brown stone front broke the uniformity
+with such brutal discord that I might have imagined the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+devil I knew was waiting for me somewhere lurked behind
+it, and have seen in its pretentious aping of New York
+fashion the sin in which Philadelphia, as the Sinful World,
+must abound. I cannot say why it seemed to me, and still
+seems, so odious, for there were other interruptions to the
+monotony I delighted in&mdash;the beautiful open spaces and
+great trees about the Pennsylvania Hospital and St.
+Peter's; the old Mint which, with its severe classical fa&ccedil;ade,
+seemed to reproach the frivolity of the Chestnut Street
+store windows on every side of it; General Paterson's
+square grey house with long high-walled garden at Thirteenth
+and Locust; the big yellow Dundas house at Broad
+and Walnut, with its green enclosure and the magnolia
+for whose blossoming I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learnt</ins>
+to watch with the coming
+of spring; that other garden with wide-spreading trees
+opposite my Grandfather's at Eleventh and Spruce: old
+friends these quickly grew to be, kindly landmarks on the
+way when I took the walks that were so solitary in those
+early days, through streets where it was seldom I met
+anybody I knew, for the Convent had made me a good
+deal of a stranger in my native town,&mdash;where it was seldom,
+indeed, I met anybody at all.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>When I went out, I usually turned in the direction of
+Spruce and Pine, for to turn in the other, towards Walnut,
+was to be at once in the business part of the town where
+Philadelphia women preferred not to be seen, having no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+desire to bridge over the wide gulf of propriety that then
+yawned between the sex and business. Except for the
+character of the buildings and the signs at the doors, I
+might not have been conscious of the embarrassing difference
+between this and my more familiar haunts. Bankers'
+and stock-brokers' offices were on every side, but the
+Third Street car did not jingle any louder as it passed,
+my way was not more crowded, peace still enveloped me.
+I gathered from my Father, who was a broker, that the
+Stock Exchange, when buying and selling had to be done
+on the spot and not by telephone as in our degenerate days,
+was now and then a scene of animation, and it might be of
+noise and disorder, more especially at Christmas, when a
+brisker business was done in penny whistles and trumpets
+than in stocks and shares. But the animation overflowed
+into Third Street only at moments of panic, to us welcome
+as moments of prosperity for they kept my Father busy&mdash;we
+thrived on panics&mdash;and then, once or twice, I saw staid
+Philadelphians come as near running as I ever knew them
+to in the open street.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs022.jpg" width="400" height="316" alt="THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM PINE STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM PINE STREET</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Now and then youth got the better of me and I sought
+adventure in the unadventurous monotony of Walnut
+Street where the lawyers had their offices, the courts not
+having as yet migrated up to Broad Street. It was usually
+lost in heavy legal slumber and if my intrusion was bold,
+at least nobody was about to resent it. Nor could there
+be a doubt of the eminent respectability into which I intruded.
+The recommendation to Philadelphia of its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+lawyers was not the high esteem in which they were held
+throughout the country, but their social standing at home&mdash;family
+gave distinction to the law, not the law to family.
+Approved Philadelphia names adorned the signs at almost
+every office door and not for some years was the evil day
+to dawn when the well-known Philadelphia families who
+inherited the right of the law would be forced to fight
+for it with the alien and the Jew. For me, I think I am at
+an age when I may own that the irreproachable names on
+the signs were not the principal attraction. Sometimes,
+from one of the somnolent offices, a friendly figure would
+step into the somnolent street to lighten me on my way,
+and it was pleasanter to walk up Walnut in company than
+alone. When I went back the other day, after many years
+and many changes for Philadelphia and myself, I found
+most of the familiar signs gone, but at one door I was met
+by a welcome ghost&mdash;but, was it the ghost of that friendly
+figure or of my lonely youth grasping at romance or its
+shadow? How many years must pass, how many experiences
+be gone through, before a question like that can be
+asked!</p>
+
+<p>If I followed Third Street beyond Walnut to Chestnut,
+I was in the region of great banks and trust companies
+and newspaper offices and the old State House and the
+courts. I had not had the experience, or the training, to
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>
+what architectural monstrosities most of the new, big,
+heavy stone buildings were, nor the curiosity to investigate
+what went on inside of them, but after the quiet red brick<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+houses they seemed to have business written all over them
+and the street, compared to Spruce and Walnut, appeared
+to my unsophisticated eyes so thronged that I did not have
+to be told it was no place for me. It was plain that most
+women felt as I did, so careful were they to efface themselves.
+I remember meeting but few on Chestnut Street
+below Eighth until Mr. Childs began to devote his leisure
+moments and loose change to the innocent amusement of
+presenting a cup and saucer to every woman who would
+come to get it, and as most women in Philadelphia, or out
+of it, are eager to grab anything they do not have to pay
+for, many visited him in the <i>Ledger</i> office at Sixth and
+Chestnut.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 322px;">
+<img src="images/gs023.jpg" width="322" height="400" alt="SECOND STREET MARKET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">SECOND STREET MARKET</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>As I shrank from doing what no other woman did, and,
+as the business end of Chestnut Street did not offer me the
+same temptation as Walnut, I never got to know it well,&mdash;in
+fact I got to know it so little that my ignorance would
+seem extraordinary in anybody save a Philadelphian, and
+it remained as strange to me as the street of a foreign town.
+I could not have said just where my Grandfather's Bank
+was, not once during that period did I set my foot across
+the threshold of the State House, unwilling as I am to confess
+it. But perhaps I might as well make a full confession
+while I am about it, for the truth will have to come out
+sooner or later. Let me say then, disgraceful as I feel it
+to be, that though I spent two years at least in the Third
+Street house, with so much of the beauty of Philadelphia's
+beautiful past at my door, it was not until some time afterwards,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
+when we had gone to live up at Thirteenth and
+Spruce, that I began to appreciate the beauty as well as
+my folly in not having appreciated it sooner. St. Peter's
+Church and the Pennsylvania Hospital I could not ignore,
+many of my walks leading me past them. But I was
+several years older before I saw Christ Church, inside or
+out. The existence of the old Second Street Market was
+unknown to me; had I been asked I no doubt would have
+said that the Old Swedes Church was miles off; I was
+unconscious that I was surrounded by houses of Colonial
+date; I was blind to the meaning and dignity of great
+gables turned to the street, and stately Eighteenth Century
+doorways, and dormer windows, and old ironwork,
+and a patchwork of red and black brick; I was indifferent
+to the interest these things might have given to every step
+I took at a time when, too often, every step seemed forlornly
+barren of interest or its possibility. Into the old
+Philadelphia Library on Fifth Street I did penetrate once
+or twice, and once or twice sat in its quiet secluded alcoves
+dipping into musty volumes: a mere accident it must have
+been, my daily reading being provided for at the easy-going,
+friendly, pleasantly dingy, much more modern
+Mercantile Library in Tenth Street. But the memory
+of these visits, few as they were, is one of the strongest
+my Third Street days have left with me, and I think, or
+I hope, I must have felt the charm of the old town if I
+may not have
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>d
+that I did, for I can never look back<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+to myself as I was then without seeing it as the background
+to all my comings and goings&mdash;a background that lends
+colour to my colourless life.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>I can understand my ignorance and blindness and indifference,
+if I cannot forgive them. All my long eleven
+years at the Convent I had had the virtue of obedience duly
+impressed upon me, and, though there custom led me easily
+into the temptation of disobedience, when I returned to
+Philadelphia I was at first too frightened and bewildered
+to defy Philadelphia's laws written and especially unwritten,
+for in these I was immediately concerned. I was
+the more bewildered because I had come away from the
+Convent comfortably convinced of my own importance,
+and it was disconcerting to discover that Philadelphia, so
+far from sharing the conviction, dismissed me as a person of
+no importance whatever. I had also my natural indolence
+and moral cowardice to reckon with. I have never been
+given to taking the initiative when I can avoid it and it is
+one of my great grievances that, good and thorough American
+as I am, I should have been denied my rightful share
+of American go. Anyway, I did not have to stay long in
+Philadelphia to learn for myself that the Philadelphia
+law of laws obliged every Philadelphian to do as every
+other Philadelphian did, and that every Philadelphian
+was too much occupied in evading what was not the thing
+in the present to bother to cultivate a sentiment for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+past. Moreover, I had to contend against what the Philadelphians
+love to call the Philadelphia inertia, while all the
+time they talk about it they keep giving substantial proofs
+of how little reason there is for the talk. The Philadelphia
+inertia only means that it is not good form in Philadelphia
+to betray emotion on any occasion or under any circumstance.
+The coolness, or indifference, of Philadelphians
+at moments and crises of great passion and excitement has
+always astonished the outsider. If you do not understand
+the Philadelphia way, as I did not then, you take the Philadelphian's
+talk literally and believe the beautiful Philadelphia
+calm to be more than surface deep, as I did who had
+not the sense as yet to see that, even if this inertia was
+real, it was my business to get the better of it and to develop
+for myself the energy I imagined my town and its
+people to be without. I have often thought that the Philadelphia
+calm is a little like the London climate that either
+conquers you or leaves you the stronger for having conquered
+it.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>If one of Philadelphia's unwritten laws closed my eyes
+to what was most worth looking at when I took my walks
+abroad, another, no less stringent, limited those walks to a
+small section of the town. On the map Philadelphia might
+stretch over a vast area with the possibility of spreading
+indefinitely, but for social purposes it was shut in to the
+East and the West by the Delaware and the Schuylkill,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+to the North and the South by a single line of the old
+rhyming list of the streets: "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce
+and Pine." I have not the antiquarian knowledge to say
+who drew that rigid line, or when what had been all right
+for Washington and Provosts of the University and no
+end of distinguished people became all wrong for ordinary
+mortals&mdash;I have heard the line ridiculed, but never explained.
+No geographical boundary has been, or could be,
+more arbitrary, but there it was, there it is, and the
+Philadelphian who crosses it risks his good name. Nor can the
+stranger, though unwarned, disregard it with impunity.
+I remember when I met Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist, the
+first friend I made in London, and she told me the number
+of the house away out North Twenty-second Street where
+she lived for two years in Philadelphia, I had a moment of
+Philadelphia uncertainty as to whether her literary distinction
+could outbalance her social indiscretion. Philadelphia
+never had a doubt, but was serenely unconscious of
+her presence during her two years there. And yet she had
+then edited and published, with the help of the Rossettis,
+her husband's <i>Life of Blake</i> which had brought her fame
+in England, and her
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'uptown' and 'up-town' were used in this text. This was retained.">up-town</ins>
+house must have been one
+of the most interesting to visit. Walt Whitman was a
+daily guest and few American men of letters passed
+through Philadelphia without finding their way to it.
+Philadelphia, however, would scruple going to Heaven
+were Heaven north of Market Street.</p>
+
+<p>It is an absurd prejudice, but I am not sure if I have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+got rid of it now or if I ever shall get rid of it, and when
+I was too young to see its absurdity I would as soon have
+questioned the infallibility of the Pope. It was decreed
+that nobody should go north of Market or south of Pine;
+therefore I must not go; the reason, probably, why I never
+went to Christ Church&mdash;a pew had not been in my family
+for generations to excuse my presence in North Second
+Street&mdash;why I never, even by accident, passed the Old
+Swedes or the Second Street Market. It was bad enough
+to cross the line when I could not help myself. I am
+amused now&mdash;though my sensitive youth found no amusement
+in it&mdash;when I think of my annoyance because my
+Great-Grandfather, on my Mother's side, old Ambrose
+White whose summer home was in Chestnut Hill, lived not
+many blocks from the Meeting House and the Christ
+Church Burial Ground where Franklin lies, in one of those
+fine old Arch Street houses in which Friends had lived for
+generations since there had been Arch Street houses to live
+in. Besides, Mass and Vespers in the Cathedral led me to
+Logan Square, to my dismay that religion should lead
+where it was as much as my reputation was worth to be
+met. I have wondered since if it was as compromising
+for the Philadelphian from north of Market Street to be
+found in Rittenhouse Square.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs024.jpg" width="400" height="308" alt="FOURTH AND ARCH STREETS MEETING HOUSE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">FOURTH AND ARCH STREETS MEETING HOUSE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Outwardly I could see no startling difference between
+the forbidden Philadelphia and my Philadelphia&mdash;"there
+is not such great odds, Brother Toby, betwixt good and
+evil as the world imagines," I might have said with Mr.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+Shandy had I known that Mr. Shandy said it or that there
+was a Mr. Shandy to say anything so wise. The Philadelphia
+rows of red brick houses, white marble steps, white
+shutters below and green above, rows of trees shading
+them, were much the same north of Market Street and
+south of Pine, except that south of Pine the red brick
+houses shrank and the white marble and white shutters
+grew shabby, and north of Market their uniformity was
+more often broken by brown stone fronts which, together
+with the greater width of many of the streets, gave a
+richer and more prosperous air than we could boast down
+our way. But it was not for Philadelphians, of all people,
+to question why, and it must have been two or three years
+later, when I was less awed by Philadelphia, that I went
+up town of my own free will and out of sheer defiance.
+I can remember the time when an innocent visit to so harmless
+a place as Girard College appeared to me in the light
+of outrageous daring. That is the way in my generation
+we were taught and
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+our duty in Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>My excursions to the suburbs, except to Torresdale,
+were few, which was my loss for no other town's suburbs
+are more beautiful, and they were not on Philadelphia's
+Index. Time and the alien had not yet driven the Philadelphian
+out to the Main Line as an alternative to "Chestnut,
+Walnut, Spruce and Pine," but many had country
+houses there; Germantown was popular, Chestnut Hill
+and Torresdale were beyond reproach. My Father, however,
+who cultivated most of Philadelphia's prejudices,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+was unexpectedly heterodox in this particular. He could
+not stand the suburbs&mdash;poor man, he came to spending
+suburban summers in the end&mdash;and of them all he held
+Germantown most sweepingly in disfavour. I cannot
+remember that he gave a reason for his dislike. It may be
+that its grey-stone houses offended him as an infidelity to
+Philadelphia's red brick austerity. But he could never
+speak of it with patience and from him I got the idea that
+it was the abyss of the undesirable. One of the biggest
+surprises of my life was, when I came to look at it with
+my own eyes, to find it as desirable a place as beauty and
+history can make.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>The shopping I had not the money to do would have
+kept me within a more exclusive radius, for a shopping
+expedition restricted the Philadelphian who had any respect
+for herself to Chestnut Street between Eighth and
+Fifteenth. Probably I was almost the only Philadelphian
+who knew there were plenty of cheap stores in Second
+Street, but that I bought the first silk dress I ever possessed
+there was one of the little indiscretions I had the sense to
+keep to myself. A bargain in Eighth Street might be disclosed
+as a clever achievement, if not repeated too often.
+The old Philadelphia name and the historic record of
+Lippincott's, for generations among the most successful
+Philadelphia publishers, would have permitted a periodical
+excursion into Market Street, even if unlimited latitude,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
+anyway, had not been granted to wholesale houses in the
+choice of a street. The well-known reliability of Strawbridge
+and Clothier might warrant certain purchases
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'uptown' and 'up-town' were used in this text. This was retained.">up-town</ins>
+and a furniture dealer as reliable, whose name and
+address I regret have escaped me, sanction the housekeeper's
+penetrating still further north. But it was safer,
+everything considered, to keep to Chestnut Street, and on
+Chestnut Street to stores approved by long patronage&mdash;you
+were hall-marked "common" if you did not, and the
+wrong name on the inside of your hat or under the flap of
+your envelope might be your social undoing. The self-respecting
+Philadelphian would not have bought her
+needles and cotton anywhere save at Mustin's, her ribbons
+anywhere save at Allen's. She would have scorned the
+visiting card not engraved by Dreka. She would have
+gone exclusively to Bailey's or Caldwell's for her jewels
+and silver; to Darlington's or Homer and Colladay's for
+her gloves and dresses; to Sheppard's for her linen; to
+Porter and Coates, after Lippincott's, for her books; to
+Earle's for her pictures;&mdash;prints were such an exotic taste
+that Gebbie and Barrie could afford to hide in Walnut
+Street, and the collector of books such a rarity that Tenth,
+or was it Ninth? was as good as any other street for the old
+book store where I had so unpleasant an experience that I
+could not well forget it though I have forgotten its proprietor's
+name. A sign in the window said that old books
+were bought, and one day, my purse as usual empty but
+my heart full of hope, I carried there two black-bound,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+gilt-edged French books of the kind nobody dreams of
+reading that I had brought home triumphantly as prizes
+from the Convent: but I and my poor treasures were dismissed
+with such contempt and ridicule that my spirit was
+broken and I could not summon up pluck to carry them
+to Leary's, in Ninth Street, who were more liberal even
+than Charles Lamb in their definition, and to whom anything
+printed and bound was a book to be bought and sold.</p>
+
+<p>If hunger overtook the shopper, she would have eaten
+her oyster stew only at Jones's on Eleventh Street or
+Burns's on Fifteenth; or if the heat exhausted her, she
+would have cooled off on ice-cream only at Sautter's or
+Dexter's, on soda-water only at Wyeth's or Hubbell's.
+The hours for shopping were as circumscribed as the district.
+To be seen on Chestnut Street late in the afternoon,
+if not unpardonable, was certainly not quite the thing.</p>
+
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>Shopping without money had no charm and could never
+help to dispose of my interminable hours. The placid
+beauty of the shopless streets was of a kind to appeal more
+to age than youth. I wonder to this day at the time I
+allowed to pass before I shook off my respect for Philadelphia
+conventions sufficiently to relieve the dulness of
+my life by straying from the Philadelphia beaten track.
+The most daring break at first was a stroll on Sunday
+afternoon over to West Philadelphia and to Woodland's.
+Later, when, with a friend, I went on long tramps through<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+the Park, by the Wissahickon, to Chestnut Hill, it was
+looked upon as no less unladylike on our part than the
+new generation's cigarette and demand for the vote on
+theirs. But if I did my duty, I was sadly bored by it.
+Often I turned homeward with that cruel aching of the
+heart the young know so well, longing for something, anything,
+to happen on the way to interrupt, to disorganize,
+to shatter to pieces the daily routine of life. I still shrink
+from the sharp pain of those cool, splendid October days
+when Philadelphia was aglow and quiveringly alive, and
+with every breath of the brisk air came the desire to be up
+and away and doing&mdash;but away where in Philadelphia?&mdash;doing
+what in Philadelphia? I still shrink from the sharp
+pain of the first langourous days of spring when every
+Philadelphia back-yard was full of perfume and every
+Philadelphia street a golden green avenue leading direct
+to happiness could I have found the way along its bewildering
+straightness.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs025.jpg" width="400" height="307" alt="JOHNSON HOUSE, GERMANTOWN" title="" />
+<span class="caption">JOHNSON HOUSE, GERMANTOWN</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>If youth only knew! There was everywhere to go,
+everything to do, every happiness to claim. Philadelphia
+waited, the Promised Land of action and romance, had I
+not been hide-bound by Philadelphia conventions, absorbed
+in Philadelphia ideals, disdaining all others with the
+intolerance of my years. According to these conventions
+and ideals, there was but one adventure for the Philadelphia
+girl who had finished her education and arrived at the
+appointed age&mdash;the social adventure of coming out.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI: THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>Let me say at once that I know no adventure is more
+important for the Philadelphian, and that mine
+was scarcely worth the name as these things go
+in Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>It is the one adventure that should be roses all the way,
+but for me it was next to no roses at all. To begin with,
+I was poor. My Father had lost his money in the years of
+upheaval following the Civil War and had never got it
+back again. <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'nowadays' and 'now-a-days' were used in this text. This was retained.">Nowadays</ins>
+this would not matter. A girl
+of seventeen, when she comes home from school, can turn
+round, find something to do, and support herself. She
+could in the old days too, if she was thrown on her own
+resources. I had friends no older than myself who taught,
+or were in the Mint&mdash;that harbour of refuge for the young
+or old Philadelphia lady in reduced circumstances. But
+my trouble was that I was not supposed to be thrown on
+my own resources. A Philadelphia father would have felt
+the social structure totter had he permitted his daughter
+to work as long as he was alive to work for her. When he
+had many daughters and luck went against him, the advantage
+of this attitude was less obvious to them than to
+him. Exemplary as was the theory, which I applaud my
+Father for acting up to since it happened to be his, it had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+its inconvenience when put into practice. To be guarded
+from the hardship of labour by the devoted father did not
+always put money into the daughter's pocket.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 310px;">
+<img src="images/gs026.jpg" width="310" height="400" alt="THE CUSTOMS HOUSE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE CUSTOMS HOUSE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Had I been more at home in Philadelphia, my poverty
+might not have stood so much in my light. A hundred
+years before Gouverneur Morris had praised Philadelphia,
+which in its respect for "virtuous poverty" he thought so
+much more generous than other capitals where social
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'splendor' and 'splendour' were used in this text. This was retained.">splendour</ins>
+was indispensable, and in this the town had not
+changed. It was to Philadelphia's credit that a girl's social
+success did not depend on the length of her dressmaker's
+bill or the scale of her entertaining. More than one as poor
+as I would have a different story to tell. But I suffered
+from having had no social training or apprenticeship. The
+Convent had been concerned in preparing me for society
+in the next world, not in this, and I had stayed in the
+Convent too long to make the many friendships that do
+more than most things to launch a girl on her social career&mdash;too
+long, for that matter, to know what society meant.</p>
+
+<p>It was a good thing that I did not know, did not
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>
+what was ahead of me, that I allowed myself to be led
+like a Philadelphian to the slaughter, for a little experience
+of society is good for everybody. Unless men are to live
+like brutes&mdash;or like monks&mdash;they must establish some sort
+of social relations, and if the social game is played at all,
+it should be according to the rules. Nowhere are the rules
+so rigorous as in Philadelphia, nowhere in America based
+upon more inexorable, as well as dignified, traditions, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+I do not doubt that because of the stumbling blocks in
+my path, I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+more about them than the Philadelphia
+girl whose path was rose-strewn. Were history my
+mission, it would be amusing to trace these traditions to
+their source&mdash;first through the social life of the Friends
+who, however, are so exclusive that should this part of the
+story ever be told, whether as romance or history, it must
+come from the inside; and then, through the gaieties of the
+World's People who flatter themselves they are as exclusive,
+and who have the name for it, and whose exclusiveness
+is wholesale license compared to that of the Friends:&mdash;through
+the two distinct societies that have lived and
+flourished side by side ever since Philadelphia was. But
+my concern is solely with the gaieties as I, individually,
+shared in them. Now that I have outlived the discomforts
+of the experience, I can flatter myself that, in my small,
+insignificant fashion, I was helping to carry on old and
+fine traditions.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>The most serious of these discomforts arose from the
+question of clothes, a terrifying question under the existing
+conditions in the Third Street house, involving more
+industrious dress-making upstairs in the third story front
+bedroom than I cared about, and a waste of energies that
+should have been directed into more profitable channels.
+I sewed badly and was conscious of it. At the Convent,
+except for the necessity of darning my stockings, I had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+been as free from this sort of toiling as a lily of the field,
+and yet I too had gone arrayed, if hardly with the same
+conspicuous success, and, in my awkward hands, the white
+tarlatan&mdash;who wears tarlatan now?&mdash;and the cheap silk
+from Second Street, which composed my coming out trousseau,
+were not growing into such things of beauty as to
+reconcile me to my new task.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 317px;">
+<img src="images/gs027.jpg" width="317" height="400" alt="UNDER BROAD STREET STATION AT FIFTEENTH STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">UNDER BROAD STREET STATION AT FIFTEENTH STREET</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>As unpleasant were the preliminary lessons in dancing
+forced upon me by my family when, in my pride of recent
+graduation with honours, it offended me to be thought
+by anybody in need of learning anything. One evening
+every week during a few months, two or three friends
+and cousins joined me in the Third Street parlour to be
+drilled into dancing shape for coming out by Madame
+Martin, the large, portly Frenchwoman who, in the same
+crinoline and heelless, sidelaced shoes, taught generations
+of Philadelphia children to dance. Even the Convent
+could not do without her, though there, to avoid the sinfulness
+of "round dances," we had, under her tuition,
+waltzed and polkaed hand in hand, a method which my
+family feared, if not corrected, might lead to my disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>I seem rather a pathetic figure as I see myself
+obediently stitching and practising my steps without an
+idea of the true meaning and magnitude of the adventure
+I was getting ready for, or a chance of being set about it
+in the right way. That right way would have been for
+somebody to give a party or a dance or a reception especially
+for me to come out at. But nobody among my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+friends and relations was obliging enough to accept the
+responsibility, and at home my Father could not get so
+far as to think of it. He would have needed too disastrous
+a panic in Third Street to provide the money. Madame
+Martin's lessons were already an extravagance and when,
+on top of them, he had gone so far as to pay for my subscription
+to the Dancing Class, and, in a cabless town,
+for the carriage, fortunately shared with friends, to go to
+it in, he had done all his bank account allowed him to do
+to start me in life.</p>
+
+<p>It would be as useful to explain that the sun rises in
+the east and sets in the west as to tell a Philadelphian that
+the Dancing Class to which I refer was not of the variety
+presided over by Madame Martin, but one to which Philadelphians
+went to make use of just such lessons as I had
+been struggling with for weeks. The origin of its name
+I never knew, I never asked, the Dancing Class being one
+of the Philadelphia institutions the Philadelphian took
+for granted: then, as it always had been and still is, I believe,
+a distinguished social function of the year. To
+belong to it was indispensable to the Philadelphian with
+social pretensions. It was held every other Monday, if I
+remember&mdash;to think I should have a doubt on a subject
+of such importance!-and the first of the series was given
+so early in the winter that with it the season may be said
+to have opened. Perhaps this fact helped my family to
+decide that it was at the Dancing Class I had best make
+my first appearance.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Youth is brave out of sheer ignorance. When the
+moment came, it never occurred to me to hesitate or to
+consider the manner of my introduction to the world. I
+was content that my Brother should be my sole chaperon.
+I rather liked myself in my home-made white tarlatan, feeling
+very much dressed in my first low neck. I entertained
+no misgivings as to the fate awaiting me, imagining it
+as inevitable for a girl who was "out" to dance and have
+a good time as for a bird to fly once its wings were spread.
+If there were men to dance with, what more was needed?&mdash;it
+never having entered into my silly head that it was
+the girl's sad fate to have to wait for the man to ask her,
+and that sometimes the brute didn't.</p>
+
+<p>I had to go no further than the dressing-room at the
+Natatorium, where the Dancing Class then met, to learn
+that society was not so simple as I thought. I have since
+been to many strange lands among many strange people,
+but never have I felt so much of a stranger as when I, a
+Philadelphian born, doing conscientiously what Philadelphia
+expected of me, was suddenly dropped down into
+the midst of a lot of Philadelphia girls engaged in the
+same duty. There was a freemasonry among them I could
+not help feeling right away&mdash;the freemasonry that went
+deeper than the chance of birth and the companionship of
+duty&mdash;the freemasonry that came from their all having
+grown up together since their perambulator days in Rittenhouse<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+Square, having <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+to dance together, gone to
+children's parties together, studied at Miss Irwin's school
+together, spent the summer by the sea and in the mountains
+together, in a word, from their having done everything
+together until they were united by close bonds, the
+closer for being undefinable, that I, Convent bred, with not
+an idea, not a habit, not a point of view, in common with
+them, could not break through. I never have got quite
+over the feeling, though time has modified it. There is no
+loneliness like the loneliness in a crowd, doubly so if all the
+others in the crowd know each other. In the dressing-room
+that first evening it was so overwhelming to discover myself
+entirely out of it where I should have been entirely in,
+that, without the stay and support of my friend, of old the
+Prince of Denmark to my Ghost of Hamlet's Father, and
+her sister, who had come out under more favourable conditions,
+I do not think I could have gone a step further
+in the great social adventure.</p>
+
+<p>As it was, with my heart in my boots, my hand trembling
+on my Brother's arm, to the music of Hassler's band,
+I entered the big bare hall of the Natatorium, and was out
+with no more fuss and with nobody particularly excited
+about it save myself.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/gs028.jpg" width="306" height="400" alt="THE PHILADELPHIA CLUB, THIRTEENTH AND WALNUT STREETS" title="" /><br />
+<span class="caption">THE PHILADELPHIA CLUB<br />
+<span style="font-size: smaller;">THIRTEENTH AND WALNUT STREETS</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Things were a little better once away from the dressing-room.
+My Brother was gay, had been out for two or
+three years, knew everybody. If he could not introduce
+me to the women he could introduce the men to me, and
+the freemasonry existing among them from their all having<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+gone to the Episcopal Academy and the University of
+Pennsylvania together, from their all having played cricket
+and baseball and
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'football' and 'foot-ball' were used in this text. This was retained.">football</ins>,
+or gone hunting together, from
+their all belonging to the same clubs, was not the kind from
+which I need suffer. Besides, those were the days when it
+was easy for the Philadelphia girl to get to know men, to
+make friends of them, without the Philadelphia gossip
+pouncing upon her and the Philadelphia father asking
+them their intentions&mdash;they could call upon her as often
+as they liked and the Philadelphia father would retreat
+from the front and back parlours, she could go out alone
+with them and the Philadelphia father would not interfere,
+knowing they had been brought up to see in themselves
+her protectors, especially appointed to look out for her.
+Some signs of change I might have discerned had I been
+observant. More than the five o'clock tea affectation was
+to come of the new coquetting with English fashions.
+Enough had already come for me to know that if my
+Brother now and then asked me to go to the theatre, it was
+not for the pleasure of my company, but because a girl
+he wanted to take would not accept if he did not provide a
+companion for the sake of the proprieties. I am sure the
+old Philadelphia way was the most sensible. Certainly
+it was the most helpful if you happened to be a girl coming
+out with next to no friends among the women in what
+ought to have been your own set, with no chaperon to see
+that you made them, and, at the Dancing Class, with no
+hostess to keep a protecting eye on you but, instead,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+patronesses too absorbed in their triumphs to notice the
+less fortunate straggling far behind.</p>
+
+<p>Well, anyway, if honesty forbids me to call myself a
+success, it is a satisfaction to remember that I did not have
+to play the wall-flower, which I would have thought the
+most terrible disaster that could befall me. To have to
+sit out the German alone would have been to sink to such
+depths of shame that I never afterwards could have held
+up my head. It was astonishing what mountains of despair
+we made of these social molehills! I can still see the
+sad faces of the girls in a row against the wall, with their
+air of announcing to all whom it might concern: "Here
+we are, at your service, come and rescue us!" But there
+was another dreadful custom that did give me away only
+too often. When a man asked a girl beforehand to dance
+the German, Philadelphia expected him to send her a bunch
+of roses: always the same roses&mdash;Boston buds, weren't they
+called?&mdash;and from Pennock's on Chestnut Street if he
+knew what was what. To take your place roseless was to
+proclaim that you had not been asked until the eleventh
+hour. It was not pleasant. However, if I went sometimes
+without the roses, I always had the partner. I had even
+moments of triumph as when, one dizzy evening before the
+assembled Dancing Class, I danced with Willie White.</p>
+
+<p>It is not indiscreet to mention so great a person by
+name and, in doing so, not presuming to use it so familiarly&mdash;he
+was the Dancing Class, as far as I know, he had no
+other occupation; and his name was <i>Willie</i>, not <i>William</i>,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+not <i>Mr.</i> White. Willie, as Philadelphians said it, was
+a title of honour, like the C&oelig;ur de Lion or the Petit
+Caporal bestowed upon other great men&mdash;the measure
+of the estimate in which social Philadelphia held him.
+Bean Nash in the Pump Room at Bath was no mightier
+power than Willie White in the Dancing Class at the
+Natatorium. He ruled it, and ruled it magnificently: an
+autocrat, a tyrant, under whose yoke social Philadelphia
+was eager to thrust its neck. What he said was law, whom
+he approved could enter, whom he objected to was without
+redress, his recognition of the Philadelphian's claims to
+admission was a social passport. He saw to everything,
+he led the German, and I do not suppose there was a girl
+who, at her first Dancing Class her first winter, did not,
+at her first chance, take him out in the German as her
+solemn initiation. That is how I came to enjoy my
+triumph, and I do not remember repeating it for he never
+condescended to take me out in return. But still, I can
+say that once I danced with Willie White at the Dancing
+Class&mdash;And did I once see Shelley plain?</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>There were other powers, as I was made quickly to
+understand&mdash;not only the powers that all Biddles, Cadwalladers,
+Rushes, Ingersolls, Whartons, in a word all
+members of approved Philadelphia families were by Philadelphia
+right, but a few who had risen even higher than
+that splendid throng and were accepted as their leaders.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
+It was not one of the most brilliant periods in the social
+history of Philadelphia. Mrs. Rush had had no successor,
+no woman presided over what could have been given the
+name of Salon as she had. Even the Wistar parties, exclusively
+for men, discontinued during the upheaval of
+the Civil War, had not yet been revived. But, notwithstanding
+the comparative quiet and depression, there were
+a few shining social lights.</p>
+
+<p>Had I been asked in the year of my coming out who
+was the greatest woman in the world, I should have
+answered, without hesitation, Mrs. Bowie. She, too, may be
+mentioned by name without indiscretion for she, too, has
+become historical. She was far from beautiful at the date
+to which I refer, she was no longer in her first youth, was
+inclined to stoutness and I fear had not
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+how to fight
+it as women who would be in the fashion must learn to-day.
+She was not rich and the fact is worth recording, so characteristic
+is it of Philadelphia. The names of leaders
+of society in near New York usually had millions attached
+to them, those there allowed to lead paid a solid price for
+it in their entertaining. But Mrs. Bowie's power depended
+upon her personal fascination&mdash;with family of course to
+back it&mdash;which was said to be irresistible. And yet not to
+know her was to be unknown. Intimacy with her was to
+have arrived. At least a bowing acquaintance, an occasional
+invitation to her house, was essential to success or
+its dawning. She entertained modestly as far as I could
+gather from my experience,&mdash;as far as I can now depend<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>
+on my memory&mdash;gave no balls, no big dinners; if there
+were select little dinners, I was too young and insignificant
+to hear of them. I never got farther than the afternoon
+tea to which everybody was invited once every
+winter, a comfortless crush in her small house, with
+next to nothing to eat and drink as things to eat and drink
+go according to the lavish Philadelphia standard. But that
+did not matter. Nothing mattered except to be there, to
+be seen there. I was tremendously pleased with myself
+the first time the distinction was mine, though of my
+presence in her house Mrs. Bowie was no doubt amiably
+unconscious. I never knew her to recognize me out of it,
+though I sometimes met her when she came informally to
+see one of my Aunts who was her friend, or to give me the
+smile at the Dancing Class that would have raised my
+drooping spirits. The only notice she ever spared me
+there was to express to my Brother&mdash;who naturally,
+brother-like, made me uncomfortable by reporting it to
+me&mdash;her opinion of my poor, unpretentious, home-made,
+Second Street silk as an example of the absurdity of a
+long train to dance in, which shows how completely she
+had forgotten who I was.</p>
+
+<p>Her chief rival, if so exalted a personage could have a
+rival, was Mrs. Connor, from whom also a smile, a recognition,
+was equivalent to social promotion. Her fascination
+did not have to be explained. She was an unqualified
+beauty, though the vision I have retained is of beauty in
+high-necked blue velvet and chinchilla, which I could not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+have enjoyed at the Dancing Class or any evening party.
+I <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realise</ins>
+as I write that in the details of Philadelphia's
+social history I would come out badly from too rigid an
+examination.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>To Mrs. Connor's I was never asked with or without
+the crowd. But other houses were opened to me, other
+invitations came, for, if I had not friends, my family had.
+My white tarlatan and my Second Street silk had grown
+shabby before the winter was half over. At many parties
+I got to know what a delightful thing a Philadelphia party
+was, and if I had gone to one instead of many I should
+have known as well. Philadelphia had a standard for its
+parties as for everything, and to deviate from this
+standard, to attempt originality, to invent the "freak"
+entertainments of New York, would have been excessively
+bad form. The same card printed by Dreka requested the
+pleasure of your company to the same Philadelphia house&mdash;the
+Philadelphia hostess would not have stooped to invite
+you to the Continental or the Girard, the LaPierre House
+or the Colonnade, which were the Bellevue and the Ritz
+of my day&mdash;where you danced in the same spacious front
+and back parlours, with the same crash on the floor, to the
+same music by Hassler's band: where you ate the same
+Terrapin, Croquettes, Chicken Salad, Oysters, Boned
+Turkey, Ice cream, little round Cakes with white icing on
+top, and drank the same Fish-House Punch provided by
+the same Augustine; where the same Cotillon began at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>
+the same hour with the same figures and the same favours
+and the same partners; where there was the same dressing-room
+in the second story front and the same Philadelphia
+girls who froze me on my arrival and on my departure.
+There was no getting away from the same people in Philadelphia.
+That was the worst of it. The town was big
+enough for a chance to meet different people in different
+houses every evening in the week, but by that arbitrary
+boundary of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine," it
+has made itself socially into a village with the pettiness and
+limitations of village life. I have never wondered that
+Philadelphians are as cordial to strangers as everybody
+who ever came to Philadelphia knows them to be&mdash;that
+Philadelphia doors are as hospitable as Thackeray once described
+them. Philadelphians have reason to rejoice and
+make the most of it when occasionally they see a face they
+have not been seeing regularly at every party they have
+been to, and hear talk they have not listened to all their
+lives.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/gs029.jpg" width="313" height="400" alt="THE NEW RITZ-CARLTON; THE FINISHING TOUCHES; THE
+WALNUT STREET ADDITION HAS SINCE BEEN MADE" title="" /><br />
+<span class="caption">THE NEW RITZ-CARLTON; THE FINISHING TOUCHES<br />
+<span style="font-size: smaller;">THE WALNUT STREET ADDITION HAS SINCE BEEN MADE</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Sometimes it was to the afternoon reception the card
+engraved by Dreka invited me, and then again it was to
+meet the same people and&mdash;in the barbarous mode of the
+day&mdash;to eat the same Croquettes, Chicken Salad, Terrapin,
+Boned Turkey, Ice-cream, and little round Cakes
+with white icing on top, and to drink the same Punch from
+Augustine's at five o'clock in the afternoon, and at least
+risk digestion in a good cause. But rarely did the card
+engraved by Dreka invite me to dinner, and I could not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+have been invited to anything I liked better. I have
+always thought dinner the most civilized form of entertainment.
+It may have been an entertainment Philadelphia
+preferred to reserve for my elders, and, if I
+am not mistaken, the most formal dinners, or dinners
+with any pretence to being public, were then usually men's
+affairs, just as the Saturday Club, and the Wistar parties
+had been, and the Clover Club, and the Fish-House Club
+were: from them women being as religiously excluded as
+from the dinners of the City Companies in London, or
+from certain monasteries in Italy and the
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Fast'">East</ins>. Indeed,
+as I look back, it seems to me that woman's social presence
+was correct only in private houses and at private gatherings.
+Nothing took away my breath so completely on
+going back to Philadelphia after my long absence as the
+Country Clubs where men and women now meet and share
+their amusements, if it was not the concession of a dining-room
+to women by a Club like the Union League that, of
+old, was in my esteem as essentially masculine as the Philadelphia
+Lady thought the sauces at Blossom's Hotel in
+Chester.</p>
+
+<p>But there were plenty of other things to do which I did
+with less rather than more thoroughness. I paid midday
+visits, wondering why duty should have set me so irksome
+a task. I received with friends on New Year's Day&mdash;an
+amazing day when men paid off their social debts and
+made, at some houses, their one call of the year, joining
+together by twos and threes and fours to charter a carriage,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+or they would never have got through their round,
+armed with all their courage either to refuse positively or
+to accept everywhere the glass of Madeira or Punch and
+the usual masterpiece from Augustine's. It was another
+barbarous custom, but an old Philadelphia custom, and
+Philadelphia has lost so many old customs that I could
+have wished this one spared. I went to the concerts of
+the Orpheus Club. I went to the Opera and the Theatre
+when I was asked, which was not often. I passed with the
+proper degree of self-consciousness the Philadelphia Club
+at Thirteenth and Walnut, the same row of faces always
+looking out over newspapers and magazines from the
+same row of windows. And I did a great many things
+that were pleasant and a great many more that were unpleasant,
+conscientiously rejecting nothing social I was
+told to do when the opportunity to do it came my way.
+But it all counted for nothing weighed in the balance with
+the one thing I did not do&mdash;I never went to the Assembly.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII: THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE: THE ASSEMBLY</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>I am too good a Philadelphian to begin to talk about
+the Assembly in the middle of a chapter. It holds
+a place apart in the social life of Philadelphia of
+which annually it is the supreme moment, and in my record
+of my experiences of this life, however imperfect, I can
+treat it with no less consideration. It must have a chapter
+apart.</p>
+
+<p>To go to the Assembly was the one thing of all others
+I wanted to do, not only on the general principle that the
+thing one wants most is the thing one cannot have, but
+because to go to the Assembly was the thing of all others
+I ought to have done. There could be no question of that.
+You were not really out in Philadelphia if you did not
+go; only the Friends could afford not to. And Americans
+from other towns felt much the same way about
+it, they felt they were not anybody if they were not invited,
+and they moved heaven and earth for an invitation,
+and prized it, when received, as highly as a pedigree. A
+few honoured guests were always at the Assembly.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 323px;">
+<img src="images/gs030.jpg" width="323" height="400" alt="THE HALL, STENTON" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE HALL, STENTON</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Philadelphians who are not on the Assembly list may
+pretend to laugh at it, to despise it, to sneer at the snobbishness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>
+of people who endeavour to draw a social line
+in a country where everybody is as good as everybody else
+and where those on the right side may look down but those
+on the wrong will not be induced to look up. And not one
+among those who laugh and sneer would not jump at the
+chance to get in, were it given them, at the risk of being
+transformed into snobs themselves. For the Assembly
+places the Philadelphian as nothing else can. It gives him
+what the German gets from his quarterings or the Briton
+from an invitation to Court. The Dancing Class had its
+high social standard, it required grandfathers as credentials
+before admission could be granted, the archives
+of the Historical Society of
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Pensylvania'">Pennsylvania</ins>
+supplied no more
+authoritative assurance of Philadelphia respectability than
+its subscription list, but the Dancing Class was lax in
+its standard compared to the Assembly. I am not sure
+what was the number, what the quality, of ancestors the
+Assembly exacted, but I know that it was as inexorable in
+its exactions as the Council of Ten. It would have been
+easier for troops of camels to pass through the eye of a
+needle than for one Philadelphian north of Market Street
+to get through the Assembly door. I am told that matters
+are worse to-day when Philadelphia society has increased
+in numbers until new limits must be set to the Assembly
+lest it perish of its own unwieldiness. The applicants must
+produce not only
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'forefathers' and 'fore-fathers' were used in this text. This was retained.">forefathers</ins>
+but fathers and mothers on
+the list, and the Philadelphian whose name was there more
+than a century and a half ago cannot make good his rights<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+if his parents neglected to establish theirs. And to be refused
+is not merely humiliation, but humiliation with Philadelphia
+for witness, and the misery and shame that are the
+burden of the humiliated.</p>
+
+<p>It is foolish, I admit, society is too light a matter to
+suffer for; it is cruel, for the social wound goes deep. But
+were it ten times more foolish, ten times more cruel, I
+would not have it otherwise. Philadelphians preserve their
+State House, their Colonial mansions and churches; why
+should they not be as careful of their Assembly, since it
+has as historic a background and as fine Colonial and
+Revolutionary traditions? They are proud of having their
+names among those who signed the Declaration of Independence;
+why should they not take equal&mdash;or greater&mdash;pride
+in figuring among the McCalls and Willings and
+Shippens and Sims and any number of others on the first
+Assembly lists, since these are earlier in date? Besides,
+to such an extremity have the changes of the last quarter
+of a century driven the Philadelphian that he must make
+a good fight for survival in his own town. When I think
+of how mere wealth is taking possession of "Chestnut,
+Walnut, Spruce and Pine," how
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'uptown' and 'up-town' were used in this text. This was retained.">uptown</ins>
+is marrying into
+it, how the Jew and the alien are forcing their way in, I
+see in loyalty to the traditions of the Assembly of Philadelphian's
+strongest defence of the social rights which are
+his by inheritance. Should he let go, what would there be
+for him to catch on to again?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 304px;">
+<img src="images/gs031.jpg" width="304" height="400" alt="&quot;PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF&quot;</span>
+</div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It would be different if what Philadelphia was getting
+in exchange were finer, or as fine. But it is not. The
+old exclusiveness, with its follies, was better, more amusing,
+than the new tendency to do away with everything
+that gave Philadelphia society its character. It was the
+charm and the strength of Philadelphia society that it had
+a character of its own and was not just like Boston or New
+York or Baltimore society. Nobody, however remote was
+their mission from social matters, could visit Philadelphia
+without being impressed by this difference, whether it was
+to discover, with John Adams, that Philadelphians had
+their particular way of being a happy, elegant, tranquil,
+polite people, or, with so unlikely an observer as Matthew
+Arnold, that "the leading families in Philadelphia were
+much thought of," and that Philadelphia names saying
+nothing to an Englishman said everything to every American.
+Who you were counted in Philadelphia, as what
+you knew in Boston, or what you were worth in New
+York, and there was not an American of old who did not
+accept the fact and respect it. Philadelphia society clung
+to the Philadelphia surface of tranquillity, of untroubled
+repose whatever might be going on beneath it, and in my
+time I would not like to say how disturbing and agitating
+were the scandals and intrigues that were said to be going
+on. They were rarely made public. It was not in Philadelphia
+as in London where next to everybody you meet
+has been or is about to be divorced, though it might be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+that next to everybody you met was not making it a
+practice to keep to the straight and narrow path, to be
+as innocent as everybody looked. Logan Square could
+have told tales, if the Divorce Court could not.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs032.jpg" width="400" height="318" alt="BED ROOM, STENTON, THE HOME OF JAMES LOGAN" title="" />
+<span class="caption">BED ROOM, STENTON, THE HOME OF JAMES LOGAN</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But now Philadelphia has strayed from its characteristic
+exclusiveness; gone far to get rid of even the air of tranquillity.
+With the modern "Peggy Shippen" and "Sally
+Wister" alert to give away its affairs in the columns of the
+daily paper, it could not keep its secrets to itself if it
+wanted to. And it does not seem to want to&mdash;that is the
+saddest part of the whole sad transformation. It rather
+likes the world outside to know what it is doing and, worse,
+it takes that world as its model. Its aim apparently is to
+show that it can be as like every other town as two peas,
+so that, drinking tea to music at the Bellevue, dancing at
+the Ritz, lunching and dining and playing golf and polo
+at the Country Clubs, the visitor can comfortably forget
+he is not at home but in Philadelphia. The youth
+of Philadelphia have become eager to desert the Episcopal
+Academy and the University for Groton or St. Paul's,
+Harvard or Yale, in order that they may be trained to be
+not Philadelphians but, as they imagine, men of the world,
+forgetting the distinction there has hitherto been in being
+plain Philadelphians. At the moment when in far older
+towns of Europe people are striving to recover their
+character by reviving local costumes, language, and customs,
+Philadelphians are deliberately throwing theirs away
+with their old traditions. The Assembly is one of their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+few rare possessions left, and strict as they are with it in
+one way, in another they are playing fast and loose with
+it, holding it, as if it were a mere modern dance, at a
+fashionable hotel.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>If I now regret, as I do, never having gone to the
+Assembly, it is because of all that it represents, all that
+makes it a classic. But at the time, my regret, though as
+keen, was because of more personal reasons. I could have
+borne the historic side of my loss with equanimity, it was
+the social side of it that broke my heart. I have had many
+bad quarters of an hour in my life, but few as poignant as
+that which followed the appearance at our front door of
+the <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'colored' and 'coloured' were used in this text. This was retained.">coloured</ins>
+man who distributed the cards for the Assembly&mdash;far
+too precious to be trusted to the post&mdash;and
+who came to leave one for my Brother. It was an injustice
+that oppressed me with a sense of my wrongs as a woman
+and might have set me window-smashing had window-smashing
+as a protest been invented. Why should the
+Assembly be so much easier for men? My Brother had
+but to put on the dress suit he had worn it did not matter
+how many years, and as he was, like every other American
+young man, at work and an independent person altogether&mdash;a
+millionaire I saw in him&mdash;the price of the card in an
+annual subscription was his affair and nobody else's. But,
+in my case the price was not my affair. I had not a cent
+to call my own, I was not at work, I was denied the right<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>
+to work, and, the Assembly coming fairly late in the season,
+my white tarlatan and Second Street silk showed wear
+and tear that unfitted them for the most important social
+function of the winter. Philadelphia women dressed
+simply, it is true; that used to be one of the ways the
+Quaker influence showed itself; they boasted then that
+their restraint in dress distinguished them from other
+American women. But simplicity does not mean cheapness
+or indifference. The Friends took infinite pains with
+their soft brown and silvery grey silks, with their delicate
+fichus and Canton shawls. The well-dressed Philadelphia
+woman knows what she has to pay for the elegance
+of her simplicity. And the Assembly has always called for
+the finest she could achieve, from the day when Franklin
+was made to feel the cost to him if his daughter was to have
+what she needed to go out "in decency" with the Washingtons
+in Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs033.jpg" width="400" height="304" alt="THE TUNNEL IN THE PARK" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE TUNNEL IN THE PARK</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I had the common sense to understand my position and
+not to be misled by the poverty-stricken, but irresistible
+Nancies and Dollies who were enjoying a vogue in the
+novels of the day and who encircled empty bank accounts
+and big families with the halo of romance. To read about
+the struggles with poverty of the irresistible young heroine
+might be amusing, but I had no special use for them as a
+personal experience. It would have been preposterous for
+me to think for a moment that, without a decent gown,
+I could go to the Assembly and, to do myself justice, I did
+not think it. But by this time I knew what coming out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+and being out meant and, therefore, I appreciated the
+social drawback it must be for me not to be able to go. It
+explained, as nothing hitherto had, how far I was from
+being caught up in the whirl, and it is only the whirl that
+keeps one going in society&mdash;that makes society a delightful
+profession, and I think I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>d
+this truth better than the
+people so extravagantly in the Philadelphia whirl as to have
+no time to think about it. All that winter I never got
+to the point of being less concerned as to where the next
+invitation was to come from than as to how I was to accept
+all that did come. There is no use denying that I was disappointed
+and suffered from the disappointment. One
+pays a heavier price for the first foolish illusion lost than
+for all the others put together, no matter how serious they
+are.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>When the season was over, I had as little hope of keeping
+up in other essential ways. If society then adjourned
+from Philadelphia because the heat made it impossible to
+stay at home, it was only to start a new Philadelphia on
+the porch of Howland's Hotel at Long Branch or, as it
+was just then beginning to do, at Bar Harbor and in the
+camps of the Adirondacks, or, above all, at Narragansett.
+"It may be accepted as an incontrovertible truth,"
+Janvier says in one of his Philadelphia stories, "that a
+Philadelphian of a certain class who missed coming to the
+Pier for August would refuse to believe, for that year at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+least, in the alternation of the four seasons; while an enforced
+absence from that damply delightful watering-place
+for two successive summers very probably would
+lead to a rejection of the entire Copernican system." If
+Philadelphians went abroad, which was much more exceptional
+then than now, it was to meet each other. I know
+hotels in London to-day where, if you go in the afternoon,
+it is just like an afternoon reception in
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Philadephia'">Philadelphia</ins>, and
+hotels in Paris where at certain seasons you find nobody
+but Philadelphians talking Philadelphia, though the Philadelphian
+has not disappeared who does not want to travel
+because he finds Philadelphia good enough for him. And
+it has always been like that.</p>
+
+<p>But I could not follow Philadelphia society in the
+summer time any more than I could go with it to the
+Assembly in the winter. I had reason to consider myself
+fortunate if I travelled as far as Mount Airy or Chestnut
+Hill out of the red brick oven Philadelphia used to be&mdash;is
+now and ever shall be!&mdash;from June to September. It was
+an event if I got off with the crowd&mdash;the linen-dustered,
+wilting-collared crowds; surely we are not so demoralized
+by the heat
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'nowadays' and 'now-a-days' were used in this text. This was retained.">nowadays</ins>?&mdash;to
+Cape May or Atlantic City, to
+enjoy the land breeze blowing, from over the Jersey
+swamps, clouds of mosquitoes before it so that nobody
+could stir out of doors without gloves and a veil. These,
+however, were not the summer joys society demanded of
+me. The further I went into the social game, the less I
+got from it, and I had decided that for the poor it was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+worth the candle at the end of the first year, or was it the
+second? That I should be uncertain shows how little my
+heart was in the business of going out.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs034.jpg" width="400" height="301" alt="THE BOAT HOUSES ON THE SCHUYLKILL" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE BOAT HOUSES ON THE SCHUYLKILL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I did not necessarily give up every amusement because
+I did not go out. In fact, I cannot recall a dance that
+amused me as much as many a boating party on the Schuylkill
+in the gold of the June afternoon, or many a walking
+party through the Park in the starlit summer night. There
+also remained, had I chosen, the staid entertainment of the
+women who, for one reason or other, had retired from the
+gayer round, and whose amusements consisted of more
+intimate receptions, teas, without number, sewing societies.
+And it was the period when Philadelphia was waking up
+to the charms of the higher education for women,&mdash;to the
+dissipations of "culture." I had friends who filled their
+time by studying for the examinations Harvard had at last
+condescended to allow them to pass, or try to pass; others
+found their sober recreation by qualifying themselves as
+teachers and teaching in a large society formed to impart
+learning by correspondence: all these women keeping their
+occupation to themselves as much as possible, not wishing
+to make a public scandal in Philadelphia which had not
+accustomed itself to the spectacle of women working unless
+compelled to;&mdash;all this quite outside of the University
+set, which must have existed, if I did not know it, as the
+Bryn Mawr set exists to-day, but which, as far as my
+experience went, was then never heard of except by the
+fortunate and privileged few who belonged to it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But this new amusement required effort, and experience
+had not made me in love with the amusement that had
+to be striven for, that had to be paid for by exertion of any
+kind. There was an interval when Philadelphia would
+have been searched in vain for another idler as confirmed
+as I. Having found nothing to do, I proceeded to do it
+with all my might. I stood in no need of the poet's command
+to lean and loaf at my ease, though I am afraid
+I leaned and loafed so well as to neglect the other half
+of his precept and to forget to invite my soul. To those
+years I now look back as to so much good time lost in a
+working life all
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'to'">too</ins>
+short at the best.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII: A QUESTION OF CREED</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>I may not have understood at the time, but I must
+have been vaguely conscious that if so often I felt
+myself a stranger in my native town, it was not only
+because of the long years I had been shut up in boarding-school,
+but because that boarding-school happened to be a
+Convent.</p>
+
+<p>There were schools in Philadelphia and schools out of
+it as useful as Rittenhouse Square in laying the foundation
+for profitable friendships. Miss Irwin's furnished
+almost as good social credentials as a Colonial Governor in
+the family. But a Philadelphia Convent did the other
+thing as successfully. It was not the Convent as a Convent
+that was objected to. In Paris, it could lend distinction:
+the fact that, at the mature age of six, I spent a year
+at Conflans, might have served me as a social asset. In
+Louisiana, or Maryland, a Philadelphia girl could see its
+door close upon her, and not despair of social salvation.
+Everything depended upon where the Convent was. In
+some places, it had a social standing, in others it had none,
+and Philadelphia was one of the others. In France, in
+Louisiana, in Maryland, to be a Catholic was to be at the
+top of the social scale, approved by society; in Pennsylvania,
+it was to be at the bottom, despised by society.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This was another Philadelphia fact I accepted on faith.
+It was not until I began to think about Philadelphia that
+I saw how consistent Philadelphians were in their inconsistency.
+Their position in the matter was what their past
+had made it, and the inconsistency is in their greater liberality
+to-day. For Pennsylvania has never been Catholic,
+has never had an aristocratic Catholic tradition like England:
+to the Friends there, all the aristocracy of the traditional
+kind belongs. The people&mdash;the World's People&mdash;who
+rushed to Pennsylvania to secure for themselves the
+religious liberty William Penn offered indiscriminately to
+everybody, found they could not enjoy it if Catholics were
+to profit by it with them. They had not been there any time
+when, as one of the early Friends had the wit to see and to
+say, they "were surfeited with liberty," and the Friends,
+who refused to all sects alike the privilege of expressing
+their religious fervour in wood piles for witches and prison
+cells for heretics, could not succeed in depriving them of
+their healthy religious prejudice which, they might not
+have been able to explain why, concentrated itself upon the
+Catholic. Episcopalians approved of a doctrine of freedom
+that meant they could build their own churches where
+they would. Presbyterians and Baptists objected so little
+to each other that, for a while, they could share the same
+pulpit. Moravians put up their monasteries where it
+suited them best. Mennonites took possession of Germantown.
+German mystics were allowed to search in peace
+for the Woman in White and wait hopefully for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+Millennium on the banks of the Wissahickon. Later on
+Whitefield set the whole town of Philadelphia to singing
+psalms, and Philadelphia refrained from interfering with
+what must have been an intolerable nuisance. Even Jews
+were welcome&mdash;their names are among early legislators
+and on early Assembly lists. Catholics, alone, they all
+agreed, had no right to any portion of Penn's gift, and
+popular opinion is often stronger than the law. Whatever
+ill will they had to spare from the Catholics, they reserved
+for the Friends to whom they owed everything&mdash;if Pennsylvania
+was "a dear Pennsylvania" to Penn, a good part
+of the blame lay with the "drunken crew of priests" and
+the "turbulent churchmen" whom he denounced in one
+of those letters to Logan, which are among the saddest
+ever written and published to the world.</p>
+
+<p>After religious passions had run their course, the
+religious prejudice against the Catholic was handed down
+as social prejudice, which was all it was in my day when
+Philadelphians, who would question the social standing of
+a Catholic in Philadelphia simply because he was a Catholic,
+could accept him without question in the Catholic town
+of Baltimore or New Orleans simply because he was one.
+The Catholic continued to pay a heavy price socially for his
+religion in Philadelphia where it was not the thing to be a
+Catholic, where it never had been the thing, where it got to
+be less the thing as successive Irish emigrations crowded
+the Catholic churches. I fancy at the period of which I
+am writing Philadelphians, if asked, would have said that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+Catholicism was for Irish servants&mdash;for the illiterate. I
+remember a book called <i>Kate Vincent</i> I used to read at a
+Protestant Uncle's, where it may purposely have been
+placed in my way. Does anybody else remember it?&mdash;a
+story of school life with a heroine of a school girl who, in
+the serene confidence of her sixteen or seventeen summers,
+refuted all the learned Doctors of the Church by convicting
+a poor little Irish slavey of ignorance for praying to the
+Blessed Virgin and the Saints. I think I must have forgotten
+it with many foolish books for children read in my
+childhood had not Kate Vincent been so like Philadelphians
+in her calm superiority, though, fortunately, Philadelphians
+did not share her proselytising fervour. They
+went to the other extreme of lofty indifference and for
+them the Catholic churches in their town did not exist any
+more than the streets of little two-story houses south of
+Pine, a region into which they would not have thought of
+penetrating except to look up somebody who worked for
+them.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>I might have
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+as much during my holidays at
+my Grandfather's had I been given to reflection during my
+early years. My Father was a convert with the convert's
+proverbial ardour. He had been
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'baptised' and 'baptized' were used in this text. This was retained.">baptised</ins>
+in the Convent
+chapel with my Sister and myself&mdash;I was eight years old
+at the time&mdash;and many who were present declared it the
+most touching ceremony they had ever seen. However, to
+the family, who had not seen it, it was anything but touching.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+They were all good members of the Episcopal
+Church and had been since they landed in Virginia; moreover,
+one of my Father's brothers was an Episcopal clergyman
+and Head Master of the Episcopal Academy, Philadelphia's
+bed-rock of religious respectability. The baptism
+was only conditional, for the Catholic Church baptizes
+conditionally those who have been
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'baptised' and 'baptized' were used in this text. This was retained.">baptized</ins>
+in any church
+before, but even so it must have been trying to them as a
+precaution insolently superfluous. I do not remember that
+anything was ever said, or suggested, or hinted. But there
+was an undercurrent of disapproval that, child as I was, I
+felt, though I could not have put it into words. One thing
+plain was that when we children went off to our church
+with my Father, we were going where nobody else in my
+Grandfather's house went, except the servants, and that,
+for some incomprehensible reason, it was rather an odd
+sort of thing for us to do, making us different from most
+people we knew in Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 310px;">
+<img src="images/gs035.jpg" width="310" height="400" alt="THE PULPIT, ST. PETER&#39;S" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE PULPIT, ST. PETER&#39;S</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Nor had I the chance to lose sight of this difference
+at the Convent. The education I was getting there, when
+not devoted to launching my soul into Paradise, was preparing
+me for the struggle against the temptations of the
+world which, from all I heard about it, I pictured as a
+horrible gulf of evil yawning at the Convent gate, ready
+to swallow me up the minute that gate shut behind me.
+To face it was an ordeal so alarming in anticipation that
+there was an interval when I convinced myself it would be
+infinitely safer, by becoming a nun, not to face it at all.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>
+If I stopped to give the world a name, it was bound to
+be Philadelphia, the place in which I was destined to live
+upon leaving the Convent. I knew that it was Protestant,
+as we often prayed for the conversion of its people, I the
+harder because they included my relations who if not converted
+could, my catechism taught me, be saved only so
+as by the invincible ignorance with which I hardly felt it
+polite to credit them. To what other conclusion could I
+come, arguing logically, than that Philadelphia was the
+horrible gulf of evil yawning for me, and that in this gulf
+Protestants swarmed, scattering temptation along the path
+of the Catholic who walked alone among them?&mdash;an idea
+of Philadelphia that probably would have surprised nobody
+more than the nuns who were training me for my
+life of struggle in it.</p>
+
+<p>The gulf of the world did not seem so evil once it
+swallowed me up, but that socially the Catholic walked in
+it alone, there could be no mistake. When eventually I
+left school and began going out on my modest scale, I
+could not fail to see that the people I met in church were
+not, as a rule, the people I met at the Dancing Class, or
+at parties, or at receptions, or on that abominable round of
+morning calls, and this was the more surprising because
+Philadelphians of the "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and
+Pine" set were accustomed to meeting each other wherever
+they went. Except for the small group of those
+Philadelphia families of French descent with French
+names who were not descendants of the Huguenots, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+here and there a convert like my Father, and an occasional
+native Philadelphian who, unaccountably, had always been
+a Catholic, the congregation, whether I went to the
+Cathedral or St. John's, to St. Joseph's or St. Patrick's,
+was chiefly Irish, as also were the priests when they were
+not Italians.</p>
+
+<p>Fashion sent the Philadelphian to the Episcopal
+Church. It could not have been otherwise in a town as
+true to tradition as Philadelphia had not ceased to be in
+my young days. No sooner had Episcopalians settled in
+Philadelphia than, by their greater grandeur of dress and
+manner, they showed the greater social aspirations they
+had brought with them from the other side&mdash;the Englishman's
+confidence in the social superiority of the Church of
+England to all religion outside of it. Presbyterians are
+said to have had a pretty fancy in matters of wigs and
+powdered and frizzled hair, which may also have been
+symbolic, for they followed a close fashionable second.
+Baptists and Methodists, on the contrary, affected to
+despise dress and, while I cannot say if the one fact has
+anything to do with the other, I knew fewer Baptists and
+Methodists than Catholics. By my time the belief that no
+one could be "a gentleman" outside the Church of England,
+or its American offshoot, was stronger than ever, and
+fashion required a pew at St. Mark's or Holy Trinity or
+St. James's, if ancient lineage did not claim one at St.
+Peter's or Christ Church; though old-fashioned people
+like my Grandfather and Grandmother might cling blamelessly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+to St. Andrew's which was highly respectable, if not
+fashionable, and new-fashioned people might brave criticism
+with the Ritualists at St. Clement's. As for Catholics,
+a pew down at St. Joseph's in Willing's Alley or, worse
+still, up town at the Cathedral in Logan Square, put them
+out of the reckoning, at a hopeless disadvantage socially,
+however better off they might be for it spiritually. That
+the Cathedral was in Logan Square was in itself a social
+offence of a kind that society could not tolerate. At the
+correct churches every function, every meeting, every
+Sunday-school, every pious
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'reunion' and 're-union' were used in this text. This was retained.">re-union</ins>,
+as well as every service,
+became a fashionable duty; and at the church door
+after service on Sunday, a man with whom one had danced
+the night before might be picked up to walk on Walnut
+Street with, which was a social observance only less indispensable
+than attendance at the Assembly and the Dancing
+Class.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 311px;">
+<img src="images/gs036.jpg" width="311" height="400" alt="THE CATHEDRAL, LOGAN SQUARE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE CATHEDRAL, LOGAN SQUARE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I recall the excitement of girls of my age, their feeling
+that they had got to the top of everything, the first time
+they took this sacramental walk, if not with a man which
+was the crowning glory, at least with a woman who was
+prominent, or successful, in society. But I believe I could
+count the times I joined in the Walnut Street procession
+on Sunday morning. As long as I lived in Third Street,
+my usual choice of a church lay between St. Joseph's, the
+Jesuit church in Willing's Alley with its air of retirement,
+and St. Mary's on Fourth Street, where the orphans used
+to come from Seventh and Spruce and sometimes sing an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+anthem that, for any save musical reasons, I delighted in,
+and where we had a pew. After we moved from Third
+Street, our pew was at the Cathedral, more distinguished
+from the clerical standpoint, for there we sat under the
+Bishop. No matter which our church, High Mass was
+long: I could not have got to the appointed part of Walnut
+Street in time, had I found at the door the companion to
+go there with me. There was nothing to do but to walk
+home alone or sedately at my Father's side, and one's
+Father, however correct he might be under other circumstances,
+was not the right person for these occasions. On
+Sundays I could not conceal from myself that I was
+socially at a discount. The reflection that this was where
+I, as a Catholic, scored, should have consoled me, for if the
+Episcopalian was performing a social duty when he went
+to church, I, as a Catholic, was making a social sacrifice,
+and sacrifice of some sort is of the essence of religion.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>If I could but have taken the trouble to be interested,
+it must also have occurred to me to wonder why St. Joseph's,
+where I went so often, was hidden in an obscure
+alley. In Philadelphia, the town of straight streets
+crossing each other at right angles, it is not easy for a
+building of the kind to keep out of sight. But not one man
+in a hundred, not one in a thousand, who, passing along
+Third Street, looked up Willing's Alley,
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'dreamt' and 'dreamed' were used in this text. This was retained.">dreamt</ins> for a
+minute that somewhere in that alley, embedded in a network<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+of brokers' and railroad offices, carefully concealing
+every trace of itself, was a church with a large congregation.
+Most churches in Philadelphia, as everywhere, like
+to display themselves prominently with an elaborate
+fa&ccedil;ade, or a lofty steeple, or a green enclosure, or a graveyard
+full of monuments. St. Peter's, close by, fills a
+whole block. Christ Church stands flush with the pavement.
+The simplest Meeting-House, by the beautiful
+trees that overshadow it or the high walls that enclose it
+or the bit of green at its door, will not let the passer-by
+forget it. But St. Joseph's, evidently, did not want to be
+seen, did not want to be remembered; evidently hesitated to
+show that its doors were wide and hospitably open to all
+the world in the beautiful fashion of the Catholic Church.
+There was something furtive about it, an air of mystery,
+it was almost as if one were keeping a clandestine appointment
+with religion when one turned from the street into
+the humble alley, and from the alley into the silence of the
+sanctuary.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 302px;">
+<img src="images/gs037.jpg" width="302" height="400" alt="CHRIST CHURCH, FROM SECOND STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">CHRIST CHURCH, FROM SECOND STREET</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Perhaps I thought less about this mysterious aloofness
+because, once in the church, I felt so much at home. I do
+not mind owning now, though I would not have owned it
+then for a good deal, that after my return from the Convent,
+I had the uncomfortable feeling of being a stranger
+not only in my town, but in my family. I had been in the
+Convent eleven years and until this day when I look back
+to my childhood, it is the Convent I remember as home.
+St. Joseph's seemed a part of the Convent, therefore of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+home, that had strayed into the town by mistake. In some
+ways it was not like the Convent, greatly to my discomfort.
+The chapel there was dainty in detail, exquisitely kept,
+the altars fresh with flowers from the Convent garden, and
+for congregation the nuns and the girls modestly and demurely
+veiled. But nothing was dainty about St. Joseph's,&mdash;men
+are as untidy in running a church as in keeping a
+house&mdash;it was not well kept, the flowers were artificial and
+tawdry, and the congregation was largely made up of
+shabby old Irishwomen. The priests&mdash;Jesuits&mdash;were
+mostly Italian, with those unpleasant habits of Italian
+priests that are a shock to the convent-bred American when
+she first goes to Italy. They had, however, the virtue of
+old friends, their faces were familiar, I had known them
+for years at the Convent which they had frequently visited
+and where, by special grace, they had refrained from some
+of the unpleasant habits that offended me at St. Joseph's.</p>
+
+<p>There was Father de Maria, tall, thin, with a wonderful
+shock of white hair, a fine ascetic face and a kindly
+smile, not adapted to shine in children's society&mdash;too much
+of a scholar I fancied though I may have been wrong&mdash;and
+with an effect of severity which I do not think he
+meant, but which had kept me at a safe distance when he
+came to see us at Torresdale. But he had come, I could
+not remember the time when I had not known him, and
+that was in his favour.</p>
+
+<p>There was Father Ardea, a small, shrinking, dark
+man, from whom also it was more comfortable to keep at a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+safe distance, so little had he to say and such a trick of
+looking at you with an "Eh? Eh?" of expectation, as if
+he relied upon you to supply the talk he had not at his own
+command. But I could have forgiven him worse, so
+pleasant a duty did he make of confession. His penances
+were light and his only comment was "Eh? Eh? my
+child? But you didn't mean it! You didn't mean it!"
+until I longed to accuse myself of the Seven Deadly Sins
+with the Unpardonable Sin thrown in, just to see if he
+would still assure me that I didn't mean it.</p>
+
+<p>There was Father Bobbelin&mdash;our corruption I fancy of
+Barbelin&mdash;a Frenchman, short and fat, sandy-haired, with
+a round smiling face: the most welcome of all. He was
+always very snuffy, and always ready to hand round his
+snuff-box if talk languished when he went out to walk
+with us, which I liked better than Father Ardea's embarrassing
+"Eh? Eh?" It was to Father Bobbelin an
+inexhaustible joke, and the only other I knew him to
+venture upon resulted in so unheard-of a breach of discipline
+that ever after we saw less of him and his snuff-box.
+He was walking with us down Mulberry Avenue
+one afternoon, the little girls clustered about him as they
+were always sure to be, and the nun in charge a little
+behind with the bigger, more sedate girls. When we got
+to the end of the Avenue, the carriage gate leading straight
+out into the World was open as it had never been before,
+as it never was again. Father Bobbelin's fat shoulders
+shook with laughter. He opened the gate wider. "Now,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+children," he said, "here's your chance. Run for it!"
+And we did, we ran as if for our lives, though no children
+could have loved their school better or wanted less to get
+away from it. One or two ran as far as the railroad, the
+most adventurous crossed it, and were making full tilt
+for the river before all were caught and brought back and
+sent to bed in disgrace. After that Father Bobbelin
+visited us only in our class-room.</p>
+
+<p>And there were other priests whose names escape me,
+but not their home-like faces. Now and then Jesuits who
+gave Missions and who had conducted the retreats at the
+Convent, appeared at St. Joseph's,&mdash;Father Smarius, the
+huge Dutchman, so enormous they used to tell us at the
+Convent that he had never seen his feet for twenty years,
+who had <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'baptised' and 'baptized' were used in this text. This was retained.">baptized</ins>
+my Father and his family in the Convent
+chapel; and Father Boudreau, the silent, shy little
+Louisianian, whom I remember so well coming with Father
+Smarius one June day to bless, and sprinkle Holy Water
+over that big yellow and white house close to the Convent
+which my Father had taken for the summer; and Father
+Glackmeyer, and Father Coghlan, and with them others
+whose presence helped the more to fill St. Joseph's with the
+intimate convent atmosphere.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>These old friends and old associations took away from
+the uneasiness it might otherwise have given me to find the
+church, for which I had exchanged the Convent chapel,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>
+hidden up an alley as if its existence were a sin. But overlook
+it as I might, this was the one important fact about
+St. Joseph's which, otherwise, had no particular interest.
+It did not count as architecture, it boasted of no beauty of
+decoration: an inconspicuous, commonplace building from
+every point of view, of which I consequently retain but the
+vaguest memory. As I write, I can see, as if it were before
+me, the Convent chapel, its every nook and corner,
+almost its every stone, this altar here, that picture there,
+the confessional in the screened-off space where visitors sat,
+the dark step close to the altar railing where I carried my
+wrongs and my sorrows. But try as I may, I cannot see
+St. Joseph's as it was, cannot see any detail, nothing save
+the general shabbiness and untidiness that shocked my
+convent-bred eyes. Could it have appealed by its beauty,
+like the old Cathedrals of Europe, or, for that matter, like
+the old churches of Philadelphia, no doubt I should be able
+to recall it as vividly as the Convent chapel. Because I
+cannot, because it impressed me so superficially, I regret
+the more that I had not the sense to appreciate the interest
+it borrowed from the romance of history and the beauty
+of suffering&mdash;the history of the Catholic religion in Philadelphia
+which I might have read in this careful hiding of
+its temple; the suffering of the scapegoat among churches,
+obliged to keep out of sight, atoning for their intolerance
+in a desert of secrecy, letting no man know where its
+prayers were said or its services held. Catholics had to
+practise their religion like criminals skulking from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+law. Members of a Protestant church might dispute
+among themselves to the point of blows, but they never
+thought of interfering with the members of any other
+church, except the Catholic, against which they could all
+cheerfully join. There were times when the Friends, most
+tolerant of men, were influenced by this general hostility,
+and I rather think the worst moment in Penn's life was
+when he was forced to protest against the scandal of the
+Mass in his town of Brotherly Love.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs038.jpg" width="400" height="313" alt="FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SEVENTH STREET AND WASHINGTON SQUARE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SEVENTH STREET AND WASHINGTON SQUARE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The marvel is that Catholics ventured out of their
+hiding-places as soon as they did. They had emerged so
+successfully by Revolutionary times that the stranger in
+Philadelphia could find his way to "the Romish chapel"
+and enjoy the luxury of knowing that he was not as these
+poor wretches who fingered their beads and chanted Latin
+not a word of which they understood. The Jesuits have
+the wisdom of their reputation. When they built their
+church the Colonies had for some years been the United
+States, and hatred was less outspoken, and persecution
+was more intermittent, but they believed discretion to be
+the better part of valour and the truest security in not
+challenging attack. That is why they built St. Joseph's
+in Willing's Alley where the visitor with a dramatic sense
+must be as thrilled by it as by the secret chapels and underground
+passages in old Elizabethan mansions and Scott's
+novels. Philadelphia gave the Jesuits a proof of their
+wisdom when, within a quarter of a century, Young<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+America, in a playful moment, burnt down as much as it
+could of St. Michael's and St. Augustine's; churches which
+had been built bravely and hopefully in open places.
+Young America believed in a healthy reminder to Catholics,
+that, if they had not been disturbed for some time, it
+was not because they did not deserve to be.</p>
+
+<p>Philadelphia had got beyond the exciting stage of intolerance
+before I was born. There were no delicious
+tremors to be had when I heard Mass at St. Joseph's or
+went to Vespers at St. Mary's. There was no ear alert
+for a warning of the approach of the enemy, no eye
+strained for the first wisp of smoke or burst of flame. With
+churches and convents everywhere&mdash;convents intruding
+even upon Walnut Street and Rittenhouse Square&mdash;with a
+big Cathedral in town and a big Seminary at Villanova,
+Catholics were in a fair way to forget it had ever been as
+dangerous for them as for the early Christians to venture
+from their catacombs. Their religion had become a tame
+affair, holding out no prospect of the martyr's crown. Only
+the social prejudice survived, but it was the more bitter to
+fight because, whether the end was victory or defeat, it
+appeared so inglorious a struggle to be engaged in.</p>
+
+<p>One good result there was of this social ostracism. I
+leave myself out of the argument. Religion, I have often
+heard it said, is a matter of temperament. As this story
+of my relations to Philadelphia seems to be resolving itself
+into a general confession, I must at least confess my certainty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+that I have not and never had the necessary temperament,
+that, moreover, the necessary temperament is not to
+be had by any effort of will power, depending rather upon
+"the influence of the unknown powers." But I am not
+totally blind, nor was I in the old days when, many as were
+the things I did not see, my eyes were still open to the
+effect of social opposition on Catholics with the temperament.
+It made them more devout, at times more defiant.
+I know churches that are in themselves alone a reward for
+faith and fidelity&mdash;who would not be a Catholic in the dim
+religious light of Chartres Cathedral, or in the sombre
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'splendor' and 'splendour' were used in this text. This was retained.">splendours</ins>
+of Seville and Barcelona? But St. Joseph's
+and St. Mary's, St. Patrick's and St. John's gave no such
+reward, nor did the Cathedral in its far-away imitation of
+the Jesuit churches of Italy and France. In these arid,
+unemotional interiors, emotion could not kindle piety
+which, if not fed by more spiritual stuff, was bound to
+flicker and go out. This is why the Philadelphian who,
+in those unattractive churches and in spite of the social
+price paid, remained faithful, was the most devout Catholic
+I have ever met at home or in my wanderings.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>For his spiritual welfare, it might have been better had
+the conditions remained as I knew them. But even at
+that period, the signs of weakening in the social barrier
+must have jumped to my eyes had I had eyes for the fine<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+shades. Catholics among themselves had begun to put up
+social barriers, so much further had Philadelphia travelled
+on the road to liberty.</p>
+
+<p>Religiously, one of their churches was as good as another,
+but not socially. St. Mark's, from its superior
+Episcopal heights, might look down equally upon St.
+Patrick's and St. John's, but the Catholic with a pew at
+St. John's did not at all look upon the Catholic with a seat
+at St. Patrick's as on the same social level as himself. St.
+Patrick's name alone was sufficient to attract an Irish
+congregation, and the Irish who then flocked to Philadelphia
+were not the flower of Ireland's aristocracy. St.
+John's, by some unnamed right, claimed the Catholics of
+social pretensions&mdash;the excellence of its music may have
+strengthened its claim. I know that my Father, who was a
+religious man, did not object to having the comfort of
+religion strengthened by the charms of Gounod's Mass
+well sung, and, at the last, he drifted from the Cathedral
+to St. John's.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 306px;">
+<img src="images/gs039.jpg" width="306" height="400" alt="OLD SWEDES&#39; CHURCH" title="" />
+<span class="caption">OLD SWEDES&#39; CHURCH</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Cathedral necessarily was above such distinctions,
+as a Cathedral should be, and it harboured an overflow
+from St. Patrick's and St. John's both. But it was the
+Cathedral, rather than St. John's, that did most to weaken
+the foundations of the social prejudice against the Catholic.
+The Bishop there was Bishop Wood, and Bishop Wood,
+like my Father a convert, was no Irish emigrant, no Italian
+missionary, but came from the same old family of Philadelphia<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
+Friends as J. Some people think that
+Quakerism and Catholicism are more in sympathy with
+each other than with other creeds because neither recognizes
+any half way, each going to a logical extreme.
+Whether Bishop Wood thought so, I am far from sure,
+but he had himself gone from one extreme to the other
+when he became a Catholic, and the religious step had its
+social bearing. With his splendid presence and splendid
+voice, he must have added dignity to every service at the
+Cathedral, but he did more than that: in Philadelphia eyes
+he gave it the sanction of Philadelphia respectability. The
+Catholic was no longer quite without Philadelphia's social
+pale.</p>
+
+<p>I had no opportunity, because of my long absence, to
+watch the gradual breakdown, but I saw that the barrier
+had fallen when I got back to Philadelphia. Never again
+will Philadelphia children think they are doing an odd
+thing when they go to Mass, never again need the Philadelphia
+girl fresh from the Convent fancy herself alone
+in the yawning gulf of evil that opens at the Convent gate.
+I should not be surprised if an eligible man from the Dancing
+Class or Assembly list can to-day be picked up at the
+door of more than one Catholic church for the Sunday
+Walk on Walnut Street. St. John's has risen, new and
+resplendent, if ugly, from its ashes; St. Patrick's has
+blossomed forth from its architectural insignificance into
+an imposing Romanesque structure. The Cathedral has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+been new swept and garnished&mdash;not so large perhaps as I
+once saw it, for I have been to St. Paul's and St. Peter's
+and many a Jesuit church in the meanwhile, but more
+ornate, with altars and decorations that I knew not, and
+with Mr. Henry Thouron's design on one wall as a promise
+of further beauty to come. The difference confronted me
+at every step&mdash;and saddened me, though I could not deny
+that it meant improvement. But the change, as change,
+displeased me in a Philadelphia that ceases to be my Philadelphia
+when it ceases to preserve its old standards and
+prejudices as jealously as its old monuments. For the
+sake of the character I loved, I could wish Philadelphia
+as far as ever from hope of salvation by anything save its
+own invincible ignorance.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX: THE FIRST AWAKENING</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>I had been out, I do not remember how long, but
+long enough to confirm my belief in the Philadelphia
+way of doing things as the only way, when I
+found that Philadelphia was involved in an enterprise
+for which its history might give the reason but could
+furnish no precedent. To Philadelphians who were older
+than I, or who had been in Philadelphia while I was getting
+through the business of education at the Convent, the
+Centennial Exposition probably did not come as so great
+a surprise. Having since had experience of how these
+matters are ordered, I can understand that there must have
+been some years of leading up to it. But I seem to have
+heard of it first within no time of its opening, and just as
+I had got used to the idea that Philadelphia must go on
+for ever doing things as it always had done them, because
+to do them otherwise would not be right or proper.</p>
+
+<p>The result was that, at the moment, I saw in the Centennial
+chiefly a violent upheaval shaking the universe to
+the foundations, with Philadelphia emerging, changed,
+transformed, unrecognizable, plunging head-foremost into
+new-fangled amusements, adding new duties to the Philadelphian's
+once all-sufficing duty of being a Philadelphian,
+inventing new attractions to draw to its drowsy streets<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+people from the four quarters of the globe, and, more
+astounding, giving itself up to these innovations with zest.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/gs040.jpg" width="307" height="400" alt="INDEPENDENCE HALL: THE ORIGINAL DESK ON WHICH THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE WAS SIGNED
+AND THE CHAIR USED BY THE PRESIDENT OF CONGRESS, JOHN HANCOCK, IN 1776
+(BOTH ON PLATFORM)" title="" /><br />
+<span class="caption">INDEPENDENCE HALL: THE ORIGINAL DESK ON WHICH THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE WAS SIGNED
+AND THE CHAIR USED BY THE PRESIDENT OF CONGRESS, JOHN HANCOCK, IN 1776<br />
+<span style="font-size: smaller;">(BOTH ON PLATFORM)</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I looked on at the preparations,&mdash;as at most things, to
+my infinite boredom,&mdash;from outside: a perspective from
+which they appeared to me little more than a new form of
+social diversion. For they kept my gayer friends, who
+were well on the inside, busy going to Centennial balls at
+the Academy of Music in the Colonial dress which was as
+essential for admission as a Colonial name or a Colonial
+family tree, while I stayed at home and, seeing what lovely
+creatures powder and patches and paniers made of Philadelphia
+girls with no more pretence to good looks than I,
+felt a little as I did when the
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'colored' and 'coloured' were used in this text. This was retained.">coloured</ins>
+dignitary rang at
+our front door with the Assembly card that was not for
+me. And between the balls, the same friends were immersed
+in Centennial Societies and Centennial Committees
+and Centennial Meetings and Centennial Subscriptions
+and Centennial Petitions, Philadelphia women for the first
+time admitted, and pining for admission, into public
+affairs; while I was so far apart from it all that I remember
+but one incident in connection with the Centennial
+orgy of work, and this as trivial as could be. When we
+moved into the Third Street house we had found in possession
+a cat who left us in no doubt of her disapproval of our
+intrusion, but who tolerated us because of the convenience
+of the ground floor windows from which to watch for her
+enemies among the dogs of the
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'neighborhood' and 'neighbourhood' were used in this text. This was retained.">neighbourhood</ins>,
+and for the
+comfort of certain cupboards upstairs during the infancy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+of her kittens. She kept us at a respectful distance and
+we never ventured upon any liberties with her. Those of
+our friends who did, heedless of her growls, were sure to
+regret it. Our family doctor carried the marks of her
+teeth on his hand for many a day. It happened that once,
+when two Centennial canvassers called, she was the first
+to greet them and was unfavourably impressed by the
+voluminous furs in which they were wrapped. When I
+came downstairs she was holding the hall, her eyes flaming,
+her tail five times its natural size, and I understood
+the prudence of non-interference. The canvassers had retreated
+to the vestibule between the two front doors and,
+as I opened the inner door, another glance at the flaming
+eyes and indignant tail completed their defeat and they
+fled without explaining the object of their visit. I must
+indeed have been removed from the Centennial delirium
+and turmoil to have retained this absurd encounter as one
+of my most vivid memories.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Upon the Centennial itself I looked at closer quarters.
+I was as removed from it officially, but not quite so penniless
+less and friendless as never to have the chance to visit it.
+Inexperienced and untravelled as I was, it opened for me
+vistas hitherto undreamed of and stirred my interest as
+nothing in Philadelphia had until then. As I recall it,
+that long summer is, as it was at the time, a bewildering
+jumble of first impressions and revelations&mdash;Philadelphia<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
+all chaos and confusion, functions and formalities, spectacles
+and sensations&mdash;buildings Philadelphia could not
+have conceived of in its sanity covering acres of its beautiful
+Park, a whole shanty town of huge hotels and cheap
+restaurants and side-shows sprung up on its outskirts&mdash;marvels
+in the buildings, amazing, foreign, unbelievable
+marvels, the Arabian Nights rolled into one&mdash;interminable
+drives in horribly crowded street-cars to reach them&mdash;lunches
+of Vienna rolls and Vienna coffee in Vienna caf&eacute;s,
+as unlike Jones's on Eleventh Street or Burns's on Fifteenth
+as I could imagine&mdash;dinners in French restaurants
+that, after Belmont and Strawberry Mansion, struck me
+as typically Parisian though I do not suppose they were
+Parisian in the least&mdash;the flaring and glaring of millions
+of gas lamps under Philadelphia's tranquil skies&mdash;a delightful
+feeling of triumph that Philadelphia was the first
+American town to do what London had done, what Paris
+had done, and to do it so splendidly&mdash;burning heat, Philadelphia
+apparently bent on proving to the unhappy visitor
+what the native knew too well, that, when it has a mind to,
+it can be the most intolerably hot place in the world&mdash;sweltering,
+demoralized crowds&mdash;unexpected descents
+upon a household as quiet as ours of friends not seen for
+years and relations never heard of&mdash;brilliant autumn days&mdash;an
+atmosphere of activity, excitement and exultation
+that made it good to be alive and in the midst of Centennial
+celebrations without bothering to seek in them a more
+serious end than a season's amusement.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs041.jpg" width="400" height="313" alt="PHILADELPHIA FROM BELMONT" title="" />
+<span class="caption">PHILADELPHIA FROM BELMONT</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>But, without bothering, I could not escape a dim perception
+that Philadelphia had not turned itself topsy-turvy
+to amuse me and the world. Things were in the air I
+could not get away from. The very words Centennial and
+Colonial were too new in my vocabulary not to start me
+thinking, little given as I was to thinking when I could
+save myself the trouble. And however lightly I might be
+inclined to take the whole affair, the rest of Philadelphia
+was so far from underestimating it that probably the
+younger generation, used to big International Expositions
+and having seen the wonders of the Centennial eclipsed in
+Paris and Chicago and St. Louis and its pleasures rivalled
+in an ordinary summer playground like Coney Island or
+Willow Grove, must wonder at the innocence of Philadelphia
+in making such a fuss over such an
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'everyday' and 'every-day' were used in this text. This was retained.">everyday</ins>
+affair. But in the Eighteen-Seventies the big International
+Exposition was not an
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'everyday' and 'every-day' were used in this text. This was retained.">everyday</ins> affair. Europe
+had held only one or two, America had held none, Philadelphia
+had to find out the way for itself, with the whole
+country watching, ready to jeer at the sleepy old town
+if it went wrong. As I look back, though I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins> that
+the Centennial buildings were not architectural masterpieces&mdash;how
+could I help <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realis</ins>ing
+it with Memorial Hall
+still out there in the Park as reminder?&mdash;though I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realise</ins>
+that Philadelphia prosperity did not date from the Centennial,
+that Philadelphians had not lived in a slough of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+inertia and ignorance until the Centennial pulled them
+out of it: all the same, I can see how fine an achievement
+it was, and how successful in jerking Philadelphians from
+their comfortable rut of indifference to everything going
+on outside of Philadelphia, or to whether there was an outside
+for things to go on in.</p>
+
+<p>I know that I was conscious of the jerk in my little
+corner of the rut. The Centennial, for one thing, gave me
+my first object lesson in patriotism. There was no special
+training for the patriot when I was young&mdash;no school
+drilling, with flags, to national music. An American was
+an American, not a Russian Jew, a Slovak, or a Pole, and
+patriotism was supposed to follow as a matter of course.
+It did, but I fancy with many, as with me, after a passive,
+unintelligent sort of fashion. I knew about the Declaration
+of Independence, but had anybody asked for my
+opinion of it, I doubtless should have dismissed it as a dull
+page in a dull history book, a difficult passage to get by
+heart. But I could not go on thinking of it in that way
+when so remote an occasion as its hundredth birthday was
+sending Philadelphia off its head in this mad carnival
+of excitement. In little, as in big, matters I was constantly
+brought up against the fact that things did not
+exist simply because they were, but because something
+had been. An old time-worn story that amused the Philadelphian
+in its day is of the American from another town,
+who, after listening to much Philadelphia talk, interrupted
+to ask: "But what is a Biddle?" I am afraid I should<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>
+have been puzzled to answer. For a Biddle was a Biddle,
+just as Spruce Street was Spruce Street, just as Philadelphia
+was Philadelphia. That had been enough in all
+conscience for the Philadelphian, but the Centennial would
+not let it be enough for me any longer.</p>
+
+<p>My first hint that Philadelphia and Spruce Street and
+a Biddle needed a past to justify the esteem in which we
+held them, came from the spectacle of Mrs. Gillespie
+towering supreme above Philadelphians with far more
+familiar names than hers at every Centennial ball and in
+every Centennial Society, the central figure in the Centennial
+preparations and in the Centennial itself. I did
+not know her personally, but that made no difference.
+There was no blotting out her powerful presence, she
+pervaded the Centennial atmosphere. She remains in the
+foreground of my Centennial memories, a tall, gaunt
+woman, not especially gracious, apparently without a
+doubt of her right to her conspicuous position, ready to
+resent the effrontery of the sceptic who challenged it had
+there been a sceptic so daring, anything but popular, and
+yet her rule accepted unquestioningly for no better reason
+than because she was the descendant of Benjamin Franklin,
+and I could not help knowing that she was his descendant,
+for nobody could mention her without dragging
+in his name. It revolutionized my ideas of school and
+school books, no less than of Philadelphia. I had
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+the story of Benjamin Franklin and the kite, just as I had
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+the story of George Washington and the cherry<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+tree, and of General Marion and the sweet potatoes, and
+other anecdotes of heroes invented to torment the young.
+And now here was Franklin turning out to be not merely
+the hero of an anecdote that bored every right-minded
+school-girl to death, but a person of such consequence
+that his descendant in the third or fourth generation had
+the right to lord it over Philadelphia. There was no
+getting away from that any more than there was from
+Mrs. Gillespie herself and, incidentally, it suggested a
+new reason for Biddles and Cadwalladers and Whartons
+and Morrises and Norrises and Logans and Philadelphia
+families with their names on the Assembly list. That they
+were the resplendent creatures Philadelphia thought them
+was not so elementary a fact as the shining of the sun in
+the heavens; they owed it to their ancestors just as Mrs.
+Gillespie owed her
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'splendor' and 'splendour' were used in this text. This was retained.">splendour</ins>
+to Franklin; and an ancestor
+immediately became the first necessity in Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs042.jpg" width="400" height="314" alt="THE DINING ROOM, STENTON" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE DINING ROOM, STENTON</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The man who is preoccupied with his ancestors has a
+terrible faculty of becoming a snob, and Philadelphians for
+a while concerned themselves with little else. They devoted
+every hour of leisure to the study of genealogy, they
+besieged the Historical Society in search of inconsiderate
+ancestors who had neglected to make conspicuous figures
+of themselves and so had to be hunted up, they left no
+stone unturned to prove their Colonial descent. It must
+have been this period that my Brother, Grant Robins, irritated
+with our <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'forefathers' and 'fore-fathers' were used in this text. This was retained.">forefathers</ins>
+for their mistake in settling in
+Virginia half a century before there was a Philadelphia<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+to settle in and then making a
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'halfway' and 'half-way' were used in this text. This was retained.">half-way</ins>
+halt in Maryland,
+hurried down to the Eastern Shore to get together what
+material he could to keep us in countenance in the town
+of my Grandfather's adoption. It was soothing to find
+more than one Robins among the earliest settlers of Virginia
+and mixed up with Virginia affairs at an agreeably
+early date. But what wouldn't I have given to see our
+name in a little square on one of the early maps of the
+City of Philadelphia as I have since seen J.'s? And the
+interest in ancestors spread, and no Englishman could ever
+have been so eager to prove that he came over with the
+Conqueror as every American was to show that he dated
+back to William Penn, or the first Virginia Company, or
+the Dutch, or the Mayflower; no Order of Merit or Legion
+of Honour could have conferred more glory on an American
+than a Colonial Governor in the family; no aristocracy
+was more exclusive than the American founded on the new
+societies of Colonial Dames and Sons and Daughters of
+Pennsylvania and of every other State.</p>
+
+<p>It was preposterous, I grant, in a country whose first
+article of faith is that all men are born equal, but Americans
+could have stood a more severe attack of snobbishness
+in those days, the prevailing attitude of Americans at
+home being not much less irreverent than that of the Innocents
+Abroad. In Philadelphia it was not so much irreverence
+as indifference. The habit of Philadelphians to
+depreciate their town and themselves, inordinate as,
+actually, was their pride in both, had not been thrown off.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>
+Why they ever got into the habit remains to me and to
+every Philadelphian a problem. Some think it was because
+the rest of the country depreciated them; some
+attribute it to Quaker influence, though how and why
+they cannot say; and some see in it the result of the Philadelphia
+exclusiveness that reduces the social life of Philadelphia
+to one small group in one small section of the
+town so that it is as small as village life, and has the village
+love of scandal, the village preoccupation with petty
+gossip, the little things at the front door blotting out the
+big things beyond. A more plausible reason is that Philadelphians
+were so innately sure of themselves&mdash;so sure that
+Philadelphia was <i>the</i> town and Philadelphians <i>the</i> aristocracy
+of the world&mdash;that they could afford to be indifferent.
+But whatever the cause, this indifference, this depreciation,
+was worse than a blunder, it was a loss in a town with
+a past so well worth looking into and being proud of and
+taking care of.</p>
+
+<p>A few Philadelphians had interested themselves in
+their past, otherwise the Historical Society would not have
+existed, but they were distressingly few. I can honestly
+say that up to the time of the Centennial it had never
+entered into my mind that the past in Philadelphia had a
+value for every Philadelphian and that it was every Philadelphian's
+duty to help preserve any record that might
+survive of it&mdash;that the State House, the old churches, the
+old streets where I took my daily walks were a possession
+Philadelphia should do its best not to part with&mdash;and I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+was such a mere re-echo of Philadelphia ideas and prejudices
+that I know most Philadelphians were as ignorant
+and as heedless. But almost the first effort of the new
+Dames and Sons and Daughters was to protect the old
+architecture, the outward sign and symbol of age and the
+aristocracy of age, and they made so much noise in doing
+so that even I heard it, even I became conscious of a research
+as keen for a past, or a genealogy in the familiar
+streets and the familiar buildings as in the archives of Historical
+Societies.</p>
+
+<p>If the Centennial had done no more for Philadelphia
+than to put Philadelphians to this work, it would have
+done enough. But it did do more. The pride of family,
+dismissed by many as pure snobbishness, awoke the sort
+of patriotism that Philadelphia, with all America, was
+most in need of if the real American was not to be swept
+away before the hordes of aliens beginning then to invade
+his country. In my opinion, the Colonial Dames, for all
+their follies, are doing far more to keep up the right
+American spirit than the flaunting of the stars and stripes
+in the alien's face and the lavishing upon him of the
+Government's paternal attention. The question is how
+long they can avoid the pitfall of exaggeration.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>If there was one thing in those days I knew less of than
+the past in Philadelphia, it was the present outside of it.
+Of my own country my knowledge was limited to an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+occasional trip to New York, an occasional visit to Richmond
+and Annapolis, an occasional summer month in
+Cape May and Atlantic City. Travelling is not for the
+poor. Rich Philadelphians travelled more, but from no
+keen desire to see their native land. The end of the
+journey was usually a social function in Washington or
+Baltimore, in New York or Boston, upon which their
+presence conferred distinction, though they would rather
+have dispensed with it than let it interfere with the always
+more important social functions at home. Or else the heat
+of summer drove them to those seashore and mountain
+resorts where they could count upon being with other
+Philadelphians, and the winter cold sent them in Lent
+to Florida, when it began to be possible to carry all Philadelphia
+there with them.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 312px;">
+<img src="images/gs043.jpg" width="312" height="400" alt="DOWN THE AISLE AT CHRIST CHURCH" title="" />
+<span class="caption">DOWN THE AISLE AT CHRIST CHURCH</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>My knowledge of the rest of the world was more
+limited. I had been in France, but when I was such a
+child that I remembered little of it except the nuns in the
+Convent at Paris where I went to school, and the Garden
+of the Tuileries I looked across to from the Hotel Meurice.
+Nor had going abroad as yet been made a habit in Philadelphia.
+There was nothing against the Philadelphian
+going who chose to and who had the money. It defied no
+social law. On the contrary, it was to his social credit,
+though not indispensable as the Grand Tour was to the
+Englishman in the Eighteenth Century. I remember
+when my Grandfather followed the correct tourist route
+through England, France, and Switzerland, his children<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+considered it an event of sufficient importance to be commemorated
+by printing, for family circulation, an elaborately
+got up volume of the eminently commonplace letters
+he had written home&mdash;a tribute, it is due to him to add,
+that met with his great astonishment and complete disapproval.
+I can recall my admiration for those of my
+friends who made the journey and my regret that I had
+made it when I was too young to get any glory out of it;
+also, my delight in the trumpery little alabaster figures
+from Naples and carved wood from Geneva and filigree
+jewellery from the Rue de Rivoli they brought me back
+from their journey: the wholesale distribution of presents
+on his return being the heavy tax the traveller abroad paid
+for the distinction of having crossed the Atlantic&mdash;a tax,
+I believe, that has sensibly been done away with since the
+Philadelphian's discovery of the German Bath, the London
+season, and the economy of Europe as reasons for
+going abroad every summer.</p>
+
+<p>I was scarcely more familiar with the foreigner than
+with his country. Philadelphia had Irish in plenty, as
+many Germans as beer saloons, or so I gathered from the
+names over the saloon doors, and enough Italians to sell
+it fruit and black its boots at street corners. But otherwise,
+beyond a rare Chinaman with a pigtail and a rarer
+Englishman on tour, the foreigner was seldom seen in
+Philadelphia streets or in Philadelphia parlours. In early
+days Philadelphia had been the first place the distinguished
+foreigner in the country made for. It was the most important<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>
+town and, for a time, the capital. But after Washington
+claimed the diplomat and New York strode ahead
+in commerce and size and shipping, Philadelphia was too
+near each for the traveller to stop on his way between
+them, unless he was an actor, a lecturer, or somebody who
+could make money out of Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>I feel sorry for the sophisticated young Philadelphian
+of to-day who cannot know the emotion that was mine when,
+of a sudden, the Centennial dumped down "abroad" right
+into Philadelphia, and the foreigner was rampant. The
+modern youth saunters into a World's Fair as casually
+as into a Market Street or Sixth Avenue Department
+Store, but never had the monotony of my life been
+broken by an experience so extraordinary as when the
+easy-going street-car carried me out of my world of red
+brick into the heart of England, and France, and Germany,
+and Italy, and Spain, and China, and Japan, where
+I rubbed elbows with yellow Orientals in brilliant silks,
+and with soldiers in amazing uniforms&mdash;I who had seen
+our sober United States soldiers only on parade&mdash;and with
+people who, if they wore ordinary clothes, spoke all the
+languages under the sun. It was extraordinary even to
+meet so many Americans who were not Philadelphians,
+all talking American with to me a foreign accent, extraordinary
+to see such familiar things as china, glass, silks,
+stuffs, furniture, carpets, transformed into the unfamiliar,
+unlike anything I had ever seen in Chestnut Street windows<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
+or on Chestnut Street counters, so extraordinary that
+the most insignificant details magnified themselves into
+miracles, to the mere froth on top of the cup of Vienna
+coffee, to the fatuous song of a little Frenchman in a
+side-show, so that to this day, if I could turn a tune, I
+could still sing the "Ah! Ah! Nicolas!" of its foolish
+refrain.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>Travelling, I should have seen all the Centennial had
+to show and a thousand times more, but slowly and by
+degrees, losing the sense of the miraculous with each new
+marvel. The Centennial came as one comprehensive
+revelation&mdash;overwhelming evidence that the Philadelphia
+way was not the only way. And this I think was a good
+thing for me, just as for Philadelphia it was a healthy
+stimulus. But the Centennial did not give me a new belief
+in exchange for the old; it did nothing to alter my life,
+nothing to turn my sluggish ambition into active channels.
+And big as it was, it was not as big as Philadelphia
+thought. I do believe that Philadelphians who had helped
+to make it the splendid success it proved, looked upon it
+as no less epoch-making than the Declaration of Independence
+which it commemorated. But epoch-making as
+it unquestionably was, it was not so epoch-making as all
+that. For some years Philadelphians had a way of saying
+"before" and "after" the Centennial, much as Southerners
+used to talk of "before" and "after" the War:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+with the difference that for Philadelphians all the good
+dated from "after." But manufacturing and commerce
+had been heard of "before." Cramp's shipyard did not
+wait for its first commission until the Centennial, neither
+did Baldwin's Locomotive Works, nor the factories in
+Kensington; Philadelphia was not so dead commercially
+that it was out of mere compliment important railroads
+made it the chief centre on their route. All large International
+Expositions are bound to do good by the increased
+knowledge that comes with them of what the world is producing
+and by the incentive this knowledge is to competition,
+and as the Centennial was the first held in America
+it probably accomplished more for the country than those
+that followed. But I do not have to be an authority on
+manufacture and commerce to see that they flourished
+before the Centennial; I have
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+enough about art
+since to know that its existence was not first revealed
+to Philadelphia by the Centennial. The Exhibition had
+an influence on art which I am far from undervaluing. Its
+galleries of paintings and prints, drawings and sculptures,
+were an aid in innumerable ways to artists and students
+who previously had had no facilities for seeing a representative
+collection. It threw light on the arts of design
+for the manufacturer. But we knew a thing or two about
+beauty down in Philadelphia before 1876, though beauty
+was a subject to which we had ceased to pay much attention,
+and from the Centennial we borrowed too many
+tastes and standards that did not belong to us. It set<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
+Philadelphia talking an appalling lot of rubbish about art,
+and the new affectation of interest was more deplorable
+than the old frank indifference.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 312px;">
+<img src="images/gs044.jpg" width="312" height="400" alt="THE BRIDGE ACROSS MARKET STREET FROM BROAD STREET STATION" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE BRIDGE ACROSS MARKET STREET FROM BROAD STREET STATION</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I was as ignorant of art as the child unborn, but not
+more ignorant than the average Philadelphian. The old
+obligatory visits to the Academy had made but a fleeting
+impression and I never repeated them when the obligation
+rested solely with me. I had never met an artist, never
+been in a studio. The result was that the Art Galleries
+at the Centennial left me as blank and bewildered as the
+Hall of Machinery. Of all the paintings, the one I remembered
+was Luke Fildes's picture of a milkmaid which
+I could not forget because, in a glaring, plush-framed
+chromo-lithograph, it reappeared promptly in Philadelphia
+dining-and bedrooms, the most popular picture of
+the Centennial&mdash;a popularity in which I can discern no
+signs of grace. Nor can I discern them in the Eastlake
+craze, in the sacrifice of reps and rosewood to Morris and
+of Berlin work to crewels, in the outbreak of spinning-wheels
+and milking-stools and cat's tails and Japanese
+fans in the old simple, dignified Philadelphia parlour; in
+the nightmare of wall-papers with dadoes going
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'halfway' and 'half-way' were used in this text. This was retained.">half-way</ins>
+up the wall and friezes coming
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'halfway' and 'half-way' were used in this text. This was retained.">halfway</ins> down, and
+every square inch crammed full of pattern; in the pretence
+and excess of decoration that made the early Victorian
+ornament, we had all begun to abuse, a delight to the eye
+in its innocent unpretentiousness. And if to the Centennial
+we owe the multiplication of our art schools, how<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+many more artists have come out of them, how much more
+work that counts?</p>
+
+<p>However, the good done by the Centennial is not to be
+sought in the solid profits and losses that can be weighed
+in a practical balance. It went deeper. Philadelphia
+was the better for being impressed with the reason of its
+own importance which it had taken on faith, and for being
+reminded that the world outside of Philadelphia was not
+a howling wilderness. I, individually, gained by the
+widening of my horizon and the stirring of my interest.
+But the Centennial did not teach me how to think about,
+or use, what I had
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+from it. When it was at an end,
+I returned placidly to my occupation of doing nothing.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER X: THE MIRACLE OF WORK</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>In the story of my life in Philadelphia, and my love
+for the town which grew with my knowledge of it, my
+beginning to work was more than an awakening:
+it was an important crisis. For work first made me know
+Philadelphia as it is under the surface of calm and the
+beauty of age, first made me
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>
+how much it offers besides the social adventure.</p>
+
+<p>Personally, the Centennial had left me where it found
+me. It had amused me vastly, but it had inspired me with
+no desire to make active use of the information and hints
+of which it had been so prodigal. My interest had been
+stimulated, awakened, but I did not know Philadelphia
+any the better for it, I did not love Philadelphia any the
+better. I had got no further than I was in my scheme
+of existence, into which work, or research, or interest, on
+my part had not yet entered, but I had reached a point
+where that aimless scheme was an insufferable bore. From
+the moment I began to work, I began to see everything
+from the standpoint of work, and it is wonderful what a
+fresh and invigorating standpoint it is. I began to see that
+everything was not all of course and matter of fact, that
+everything was worth thinking about. Work is sometimes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
+said to help people to put things out of their minds, but it
+helps them more when it puts things into their minds, and
+this is what it did for me. Through work I discovered
+Philadelphia and myself together.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>It strikes me as one of the little ironies of life that for
+the first inducement to work, and therefore the first incentive
+to my knowledge and love of Philadelphia, I should
+have been indebted to my Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland,
+who, in 1880, when the Centennial excitement was subsiding,
+settled again in Philadelphia after ten years abroad,
+chiefly in England. Philadelphia welcomed him with its
+usual serenity, betrayed into no expression of emotion by
+the home-coming of one of its most distinguished citizens
+who, in London, had been received with the open arms
+London, in expansive moments, extends to the lion from
+America. The contrast, no doubt, was annoying, and my
+Uncle, of whom patience could not be said to be the predominating
+virtue, was accordingly annoyed and, on his
+side, betrayed into anything but a serene expression of
+his annoyance. Many smaller slights irritated him further
+until he worked himself up into the belief that he detested
+Philadelphia, and he was apt to be so outspoken in criticism
+that he succeeded in convincing me, anyway, that he
+did. Later, when I read his <i>Memoirs</i>, I found in them
+passages that suggest the charm of Philadelphia as it has
+not been suggested by any other writer I know of, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+that he could not have written had he not felt for the town
+an affection strong enough to withstand that town's easy
+indifference. But during the few years he spent in Philadelphia
+after his return he was uncommonly successful in
+hiding his affection, a fact which did not add to his
+popularity.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 305px;">
+<img src="images/gs045.jpg" width="305" height="400" alt="STATE HOUSE YARD" title="" />
+<span class="caption">STATE HOUSE YARD</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>From his talk, I might have been expected to borrow
+nothing save dislike for Philadelphia. But his influence
+did not begin and end with his talk. There never was a
+man&mdash;except J.&mdash;who had such a contempt for idleness
+and such a talent for work. He could not endure
+people about him who did not work and, as I was anxious
+to enjoy as much of his company as I could, for I had
+found nobody in Philadelphia so entertaining, and as by
+work I might earn the money to pay for the independence
+I wanted above all things, I found myself working before
+I knew it.</p>
+
+<p>I had my doubts when he set me to drawing but, my
+time being wholly my own and frequently hanging drearily
+on my hands, my ineffectual attempts to make spirals and
+curves with a pencil on a piece of paper, attempts that
+could not by the wildest stretch of imagination be supposed
+to have either an artistic or a financial value, did not strike
+me as a disproportionate price for the pleasure and
+stimulus of his companionship. Besides, he held the comfortable
+belief that anybody who willed to do it, could do
+anything&mdash;accomplishment, talent, genius reduced by him
+to a question of will. His will and mine combined, however,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+could not make a decorative artist of me, but he was
+so kind as not to throw me over for ruthlessly shattering
+his favourite theory. He insisted that I should write if I
+could not draw.</p>
+
+<p>I had my doubts about writing too. I have confessed
+that I was not given to thinking and therefore I had nothing
+in particular to say, nor were words to say it in at my
+ready disposal, for, there being one or two masters of talk
+in the immediate home circle, I had cultivated to the utmost
+my natural gift of silence. Nor could I forget two
+literary ventures made immediately upon my leaving the
+Convent, before the blatant conceit of the prize scholar
+had been knocked out of me&mdash;one, an essay on Fran&ccedil;ois
+Villon, my choice of a maiden theme giving the measure
+of my intelligence, the second a short story re-echoing the
+last love tale I had read&mdash;both MSS., neatly tied with
+brown ribbon to vouch for a masculine mind above feminine
+pinks and blues, confidently sent to <i>Harper's</i> and as confidently
+sent back with the Editor's thanks and no delay.
+But my Uncle would not let me off. I must stick at my
+task of writing or cease to be his companion, and so relapse
+into my old Desert of Sahara, thrown back into the colourless
+life of a Philadelphia girl who did not go out and who
+had waited to marry longer than her parents thought considerate
+or correct. Of all my sins, of none was I more
+guiltily conscious than my failure to oblige my family in
+this respect, for of none was I more frequently and uncomfortably
+reminded by my family. I scarcely ever went<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>
+to see my Grandmother at this period that from her
+favourite perch on the landing outside the dining-room,
+she did not look at me anxiously and reproachfully and
+ask, "Any news for me, my dear?" and she did not have
+to tell me there was but one piece of news she cared to
+hear.</p>
+
+<p>Luckily, writing, my substitute for marriage, was an
+occupation I was free to take up if I chose, as the work it
+involved met with no objection from my Father. It was
+only when work took a girl where the world could not help
+seeing her at it, that the Philadelphia father objected. To
+write in the privacy of a third-story front bedroom, or of a
+back parlour, seemed a ladylike way of wasting hours that
+might more profitably have been spent in paying calls and
+going to receptions. If this waste met with financial
+return, it could be hushed up and the world be none the
+wiser. The way in which my friends used to greet me
+after I was fairly launched is characteristic of the Philadelphia
+attitude in the matter&mdash;"always scribbling away,
+I suppose?" they would say with amiable condescension.</p>
+
+<p>I could not dismiss my scribbling so jauntily. The
+record of my struggles day by day might help to keep out
+of the profession of journalism and book-making many a
+young aspirant as ardent as I was, and with as little to
+say and as few words to say it in. Experience has taught
+me to feel, much as Gissing felt, about the "heavy-laden
+who sit down to the cursed travail of the pen," but nobody
+could have made me feel that way then, and I am not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+sure I should care to have missed my struggles, exhausting
+and heart-rending as they were. During my apprenticeship
+when nothing, not so much as a newspaper paragraph,
+came from my mountain of labour, the Philadelphia surface
+of calm told gloomily on my nerves. Ready to lay
+the blame anywhere save on my sluggish brain, and moved
+by my Uncle's vehement denunciations, I vowed to myself
+a hundred times that a sleepy place, a dead place, like
+Philadelphia did not give anybody the chance to do anything.
+I changed my point of view when at last my
+"scribbling away" got into print.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>My first appearance was with a chapter out of a larger
+work upon which I had been engaged for months. My
+Uncle, whose ideas were big, had insisted that I must begin
+straight off with a book, something monumental, a
+<i>magnum opus</i>; no writer was known who had not written a
+book; and to be known was half the battle. I was in the
+state of mind when I would have agreed to publish a
+masterpiece in hieroglyphics had he suggested it, and I
+arranged with him to set to work upon my book then and
+there, though I was decidedly puzzled to know with what
+it was to deal. I think he was too, my literary resources
+and tendencies not being of the kind that revealed themselves
+at a glance. But he declared that there was not
+a subject upon which a book could not be written if one
+only went about it in the right way, and in a moment of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>
+inspiration, seeking the particular subject suitable to my
+particular needs, he suddenly, and to me to this day altogether
+incomprehensibly, hit upon Mischief. There, now,
+was a subject to make one's reputation on, none could be
+more original, no author had touched it&mdash;what did I think
+of Mischief?</p>
+
+<p>What did I think? Had I been truthful, I should have
+said that I thought Mischief was the special attribute of
+the naughty child who was spanked well for it if he got his
+deserts. But I was not truthful. I said it was the subject
+of subjects, as I inclined to believe it was before I was
+done with it, by which time I had persuaded myself to see
+in it the one force that made the world go round&mdash;the incentive
+to evolution, the root of the philosophies of the
+ages, the clue to the mystery of life.</p>
+
+<p>My days were devoted to the study of Mischief and,
+for the purpose, more carefully divided up and regulated
+than they ever had been at the Convent. Hours were set
+aside for research&mdash;I see myself and my sympathetic
+Uncle overhauling dusty dictionaries and
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'encyclop&aelig;dia' and 'encyclopedia' were used in this text. This was retained.">encyclop&aelig;dias</ins>
+at the long table in the balcony of the dusty Mercantile
+Library where nobody
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'dreamt' and 'dreamed' were used in this text. This was retained.">dreamed</ins>
+of disturbing us; I see
+him at my side during shorter visits to the Philadelphia
+Library where we were forever running up against people
+we knew who did disturb us most unconscionably; I see
+him tramping with me down South Broad Street to the
+Ridgway Library, that fine mausoleum of the great collections
+of James Logan and Dr. Rush, where our coming<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+awoke the attendants and exposed their awkwardness in
+waiting upon unexpected readers, and brought Mr. Lloyd
+Smith out of his private room, excited and delighted
+actually to see somebody in the huge and well-appointed
+building besides himself and his staff. Hours were reserved
+for reading at home, for it turned out that I could
+not possibly arrive at the definition of Mischief without
+a stupendous amount of reading in a stupendous variety
+of books of any and all kinds from Mother Goose to the
+Vedas and the Koran, from Darwin to Eliphas Levi.
+Hours, and they were the longest, were consecrated to my
+writing-table, putting the results of research and reading
+into words, defining Mischief in its all-embracing, universe-covering
+aspect, hewing the phrases from my unwilling
+brain as the blocks of marble are hewn out of the quarry.
+As I write, my old MSS. rises before me like a ghost, a disorderly
+ghost, erased, rewritten, pieces added in, pieces
+cut out, every scratched and blotted line bearing testimony
+to the toil that produced it. I can see now that I would
+have done better to begin with a more obvious theme, coming
+more within my limited knowledge and vocabulary.
+My task was too laborious for the fine frenzy, or the inspired
+flights, reputed to be the reward of the literary life.
+It was all downright hard labour, and so
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'colored' and 'coloured' were used in this text. This was retained.">coloured</ins> my
+whole idea of the business of writing, that I have never
+yet managed to sit down to my day's work without the
+feeling which I imagine must be the navvy's as he starts
+out for his day's digging in the streets.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the course of time order grew out of the chaos. A
+chapter of my monumental work on Mischief was finished.
+It was made ready in a neat copy with hardly an erasure
+and, having an air of completeness in itself, was sent as a
+separate article to <i>Lippincott's Magazine</i>, for I decided
+magnanimously that, as I was a Philadelphian, Philadelphia
+should have the first chance. I had no doubts of it as
+a prophetic utterance, as a world-convulsing message, but
+the Editor of <i>Lippincott's</i> had. He refused it.</p>
+
+<p>How it hurt, that prompt refusal! All my literary
+hopes came toppling over and I saw myself condemned to
+the old idleness and dependence. But our spirits when we
+are young go up as quickly as they go down. I recalled
+stories I had heard of great men hawking about their MSS.
+from publisher to publisher. Carlyle, I said to myself, had
+suffered and almost every writer of note&mdash;it was a sign of
+genius to be refused. Therefore,&mdash;the logic of it was
+clear and convincing&mdash;the refusal proved me a genius!
+A more substantial reassurance was the publication of the
+same article, done over and patched up and with the fine
+title of <i>Mischief in the Middle Ages</i>, in the <i>Atlantic
+Monthly</i> a very few months later. And when, on top of
+this, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the Editor of the <i>Atlantic</i>,
+wrote and told me he would be pleased to have further
+articles from me; when, in answer to a letter my Uncle
+had insisted on my writing. Oliver Wendell Holmes
+promised me his interest in Mischief as I proposed to define
+it. I saw the world at my feet where, to my sorrow,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
+I have never seen it since that first fine moment of elation.</p>
+
+<p>The spectacle of myself in print set Philadelphia dancing
+before my eyes and turned the world a bit unsteady.
+But it did not relieve the labour of writing. Within the
+next year or two seven or eight chapters did get done and
+were published as articles in the <i>Atlantic</i>, but the world is
+still the poorer for the <i>magnum opus</i> that was to bring me
+fame. The fact was that in the making, it brought me
+mighty little money. My first cheque only whetted my
+appetite, but, in fairness to myself I must explain, through
+no more sordid motive than my desire to become my own
+bread-winner. The newspapers offered a wider scope at
+less expense of time and labour, and my Uncle not only
+relaxed so far as to allow me intervals from the bigger
+undertaking for simpler tasks, but gave me the benefit of
+his experience as a newspaper man. In the old days,
+before he had gone to live in London, he had had the run
+of almost every newspaper office in town, and he opened
+their doors for me. Thanks to his introduction, Philadelphia,
+at this stage of my progress, conspired to put work
+into my hands, and writing for Philadelphia papers taught
+me in a winter more about Philadelphia than I had
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+in all the years I had already spent there. I marvelled that
+I could have thought it dead when it was so alive. I seemed
+to feel it quiver under my feet at every step, shaking me
+into speed, and filling me with pity for the sedate pace at
+which my Father and the Philadelphians of his generation
+walked through its pulsating streets.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>My first newspaper commissions came from the <i>Press</i>
+and adventure accompanied them&mdash;the adventure of business
+letters in my morning's mail, of proofs, of visits to the
+office&mdash;adventures that far too soon became the commonplaces
+of my busy days as journalist. But my outlook
+upon life in Philadelphia had, up till then, been bounded by
+the brick walls of a Spruce Street house, and the editorial
+office, that holds no surprise for me now, held nothing save
+surprise when I was first summoned to it. I was bewildered
+by the disorder, stunned by the noise&mdash;boys coming
+and going, letters and telegrams pouring in, piles of
+proofs mounting up on the desk, baskets overflowing with
+MSS., floors strewn with papers, machinery throbbing
+close by, a heavy smell of tobacco over everything, and in
+the midst of the confusion&mdash;lounging, working, answering
+questions, tearing open letters and telegrams, correcting
+proof, and yet managing to talk with me,&mdash;Moses P.
+Handy, the editor, a red man in my memory of him, red
+hair, red beard, red cheeks, whose cordiality I could not
+flatter myself was due to his eagerness for my contributions,
+so engrossed was he in talking of the Eastern Shore
+of Maryland from which he came and in which my family
+had made their prolonged stay on the way from Virginia
+to Philadelphia. The Eastern Shore may be a good place
+to come away from, but the native never forgets that he
+did come from it and he never fails to hail his fellow exile
+as brother.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>My next commission I owed to the <i>Evening Telegraph</i>,
+for which I made a remarkable journey to Atlantic
+City: a voyage of discovery, though the report of it did not
+paralyse the Philadelphia public. I was deeply impressed
+by my exercise of my faculty of observation thus tested
+on familiar ground, but I am afraid it left the Editor indifferent,
+and, as in his case the Eastern Shore was not a
+friendly link between us, he expressed no desire for a
+second article or for a second visit. I have regretted it
+since, the Editor being Clarke Davis, whom not to know
+was, I believe, not to have arrived so far in Philadelphia
+journalism as I liked to think I had.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs046.jpg" width="400" height="304" alt="THE PENITENTIARY" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE PENITENTIARY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>A more remarkable journey followed to New York
+for I wish I could remember what paper; or perhaps it is
+just as well I cannot, the adventure adding to the reputation
+neither of the paper nor of myself. The object was to
+attend the press view of an important exhibition of paintings,
+and at that stage of my education I doubt if I could
+have told a Rembrandt from a Rubens, much less a Kenyon
+Cox from a Church, a Chase from a Blum, which was
+more immediately to the point. I had my punishment on
+the spot, for my hours in the Gallery may be counted the
+most humiliating of my life. My ignorance would not let
+me lose sight of it for one little second. J. had gone with
+me&mdash;how I came to know him I mean to tell further on&mdash;but
+he had no press ticket, a stern man at the door refused
+to admit him without one, and I was alone in my incompetency<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+to wrestle with it as I could. Had he not returned
+with me to Philadelphia in the afternoon and devoted
+the interval in the train to throwing light upon my obscure
+and agonised notes, my copy could not have been delivered
+that evening as agreed. I know now that the paper would
+have come out all the same the next morning, but in my
+misery it did not seem possible that it could, and besides
+I was from the first, as through my many years of journalism,
+scrupulous to be on time with my copy and to keep to
+my agreements. That was my first experience in art
+criticism. I have tried to atone for it by years of conscientious
+work, but few Philadelphia papers can say as
+much for themselves. In those I see from time to time, the
+art criticism usually reads as if Philadelphia editors had
+lost nothing of their old amiability in handing it over to
+young ladies to get their journalistic training on.</p>
+
+<p>I was given also my chance in two newspaper ventures
+Philadelphia made in the early Eighteen-Eighties. One
+was the <i>American</i>, a weekly on the lines of the New York
+<i>Nation</i>. Mr. Howard Jenkins, the editor, sent me books
+for review, and not the first baby, not the first baby's first
+tooth, could be as extraordinary a phenomenon as the first
+book sent for the purpose from the editorial office. Mine,
+as I have never forgotten, as I never could forget, was
+Howard Pyle's <i>Robin Hood</i>, and when Mr. Jenkins wrote
+me that "Mr. Pyle's folks" were pleased with what I had
+written, I thought I had got to the very top of the tree<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>
+of journalism. That I had got no further than a step from
+the bottom, and upon that had none too secure a foothold,
+I was reminded when the second book for review lay open
+before me.</p>
+
+<p>The other venture was <i>Our Continent</i>, also a weekly,
+but illustrated, edited by Judge Tourgee. Of my contributions,
+I remember chiefly an article on Shop Windows,
+which suggests that I was busy with what I might
+call a more pretentious kind of reporting. My subjects
+and my manner of treating them may have been what
+they were,&mdash;of no special value to anybody but myself.
+But to myself I cannot exaggerate their value. I was
+learning from them all the time.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs047.jpg" width="400" height="301" alt="ON THE READING AT SIXTEENTH STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ON THE READING AT SIXTEENTH STREET</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was an education just to learn what a newspaper
+was. Heretofore I had accepted it as a thing that came
+of itself, arriving in the morning with the milk and the
+rolls for breakfast. I knew as little of its origin as the
+town boy knew of where the milk comes from in the <i>Punch</i>
+story that I do not doubt was old when <i>Punch</i> was young.
+Milk he had always seen poured from a can, our newspaper
+we had always had from the nearest news-agent. It was
+very simple. A newspaper appeared on the breakfast-table
+of a well-regulated Philadelphia house just as the
+water ran when the tap was turned on in the bath-room, or
+the gas burned when lit by a match. But after one article,
+after one visit to a newspaper office, after one journey to
+Atlantic City or New York, the newspaper did not seem
+so simple. I began to understand that it would not have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>
+got as far as Spruce Street had it not been for an army
+of people writing, printing, correcting proof, tearing from
+one end of the town&mdash;of the world&mdash;to the other; without
+colossal machinery throbbing night and day, without an
+immeasurable consumption of tobacco. I began to understand
+the organization required to bring the army of
+people and the colossal machines into such perfect harmony
+that the daily miracle of the newspaper on the breakfast-table
+might be worked&mdash;to understand too that the
+miracle-working organization had not been created in a
+day, that behind the daily paper was not merely the toiling
+of its staff and its machines but a long history of striving,
+experiment, development.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot say I went profoundly into the history, I was
+too engrossed in contributing my delightful share to the
+newspaper as it was, but to go superficially sufficed to show
+me in Philadelphia a spirit of enterprise altogether new
+to me. I had discovered only shortly before Philadelphia
+as the scene of the first Colonial Congress, and the Declaration
+of Independence, and the first big International
+Exposition in America, and now I added to these other
+discoveries the fact that Philadelphia had been the first
+American town to publish a daily paper, the last discovery
+bringing me face to face with Benjamin Franklin who, it
+appeared, besides flying that tiresome kite and being the
+ancestor of Mrs. Gillespie, was the first printer and publisher
+of the paper that set an example for all America.
+Tranquil the Philadelphian was by repute, but he rolled<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>
+up his sleeves and pitched in when the moment came.
+Philadelphia's famous calm was but skin deep over its
+seething mass of workers, its energy, its toiling, its
+triumph. When I reflected on what was going on at night
+in every newspaper office in town, it seemed to me as unbelievable
+that, on the verge of this volcano of work, Philadelphians
+could keep on dancing at parties, at the Dancing
+Class, at the Assembly, as that men and women should
+have danced at Brussels on the eve of Waterloo. And
+newspaper-making was one only of Philadelphia's innumerable
+industries. That thought gave me the scale of
+the labour that goes to keep the machinery of life running.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>Of some of the other industries I got to know a little.
+My Uncle who, as I have said, was a man of ideas and
+who had his fair proportion of Philadelphia energy, included
+among his many interests the subject of education.
+He deplored existing systems and methods. My belief
+is that the systems and methods might be of the best and
+education would still be a mistake, vulgarizing the multitude
+to whom it does not belong and encouraging in them
+a prejudice against honest work. My Uncle did not think
+as I do,&mdash;that I do not think now as he did frightens me as
+a disloyalty to his memory. But he could not overlook the
+distaste for manual work that had grown out of too much
+attention to books and as he never let his theories exhaust<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>
+themselves in words, he lost no time in persuading the
+Board of Education to put this particular one to a practical
+test. Doubts of their methods had assailed the Board,
+but no way out of the difficulty had been suggested until
+he came and said, "Set your children, your boys and girls,
+who are forgetting how to use their hands, to work at the
+Minor Arts." It struck them as a suggestion that
+warranted the experiment anyway, especially as the cost
+would be comparatively small. My Uncle had been back
+in Philadelphia not much more than a year when classes
+were put in his charge and a schoolroom&mdash;the school-house
+at Broad and Locust&mdash;at his disposal, and he
+inaugurated the study of the Arts and Crafts in Philadelphia
+with the Industrial Art School, as he had in London
+with the Home Arts. His sole payment was the pleasure
+of the experiment, a pleasure which few theorists succeed
+in securing. I, however, was paid by the City in solid
+dollars and cents for the fine amateurish inefficiency with
+which I helped him to manage the classes, recommended
+by him, whose consideration was as practical for my
+pockets which the <i>Atlantic</i>, backed by newspapers, had not
+filled to repletion.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 305px;">
+<img src="images/gs048.jpg" width="305" height="400" alt="LOCUST STREET EAST FROM BROAD STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">LOCUST STREET EAST FROM BROAD STREET</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is not the place for the history of his experiment.
+It is known. The school has passed from the experimental
+stage into a permanent institution, though in the passing
+my Uncle has been virtually forgotten,&mdash;often the fate of
+the man who sets a ball of reform rolling. Of all this I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+have elsewhere made the record. I am at present concerned
+with the influence the school had upon me and the
+unexpected extent to which it widened my knowledge of
+Philadelphia and Philadelphia activities.</p>
+
+<p>How Philadelphia was educated was not a question
+that had kept me awake at nights. The Philadelphia girl
+of my acquaintance, if a day scholar, went naturally to
+Miss Irwin's or to Miss Annabel's in town; if a boarder
+perhaps to Miss Chapman's at Holmesburg or Mrs. Comegys
+at Chestnut Hill; unless her parents were converts or
+Catholics by birth when she went instead to the Convent of
+the Sacred Heart at Torresdale or in Walnut Street. The
+Philadelphia boy began with the Episcopal Academy and
+finished with the University of Pennsylvania. Friends
+went to the Friends' School in Germantown, and to
+Swarthmore and Haverford. What others did, did not
+matter. I had heard there were public or free schools
+where children could go for nothing, but nobody to my
+knowledge went to them. With what insolence we each of
+us, in our own little fraction of the world, think everybody
+outside of it nobody! But up in the top story rooms of
+the school-house at Broad and Locust, where my work took
+me two afternoons in the week, I found myself the centre
+of a vast network of schools! High Schools, Grammar
+Schools, Primary Schools, Scholarships, more divisions and
+subdivisions than I could count; with teachers&mdash;for there
+was a class for teachers&mdash;and pupils coming from every
+ward and suburb, every street and alley of the town; a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>
+School Board keeping a watchful eye upon schools and
+teachers, not leaving me out; and all about me a vast
+population without one idea or interest except the education
+of Philadelphia. And this implied, like the newspaper,
+a perfect organization of its own to keep the whole
+thing going&mdash;an organization that never could have been
+born in a day. The education of Philadelphia had
+absorbed a vast population since Philadelphia was: the
+first Philadelphia children hardly escaping from their cave
+dwellings before they were hurried into school to have
+their poor little minds trained and disciplined. Really,
+in my first days of work, life was a succession of startling
+discoveries about Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>I could not get paid for my afternoons at the school,
+which I ought to have paid for considering the education
+they were to me, without making another discovery. The
+pay came monthly from the City in the form of a warrant,
+or so I believe it is called. As I have explained that I had
+never been possessed of money of my own, some allowance
+will be made for my stupidity in thinking it necessary to
+cash the warrant in person. It never occurred to me to
+open a bank account or to ask my Father to exchange the
+warrant for money. I went myself to the office in the big,
+new, unfinished City Hall&mdash;how well I remember, when
+I was kept waiting which was always, my conscientiousness
+in jotting down elaborate notes of windows and doors and
+upholstery and decoration: Zola in France and Howells
+at home having made Realism the literary fashion, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>
+Realism, I gathered, being achieved only by way of jotting
+down endless notes in every situation in which I found
+myself; especially as J. had brought back from Italy exemplary
+and inspiring tales of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget)
+and Mary Robinson (Mme. Duclaux), with whom he had
+worked and travelled, filling blank books with memoranda
+collected from the windows of every train they took and
+every hotel in which they stayed.</p>
+
+<p>I am glad I was stupid, such a good thing for me was
+this going in person, such a suggestive lesson in City
+Government which I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+was as little of an automatic
+arrangement as education and the newspaper, and not
+necessarily something that all decent people should be
+ashamed of being mixed up with, the way my Father and
+the old-fashioned Philadelphian of his type looked upon it
+and every other variety of Government. It was just another
+huge, busy, striving, toiling organization, so huge
+as to fit with difficulty into the enormous ugly new buildings,
+then recently set down for it in Penn Square with
+complete indifference to Penn's plan for his green country
+town, or to get its work done in the maze of courts and
+passages and offices by the hordes of big and little officials
+no less preoccupied in City Government than journalists
+in their newspaper, or teachers in their school, or&mdash;outrageous
+as it may sound&mdash;society in the Assembly and
+Dancing Class and the things which I had been brought
+up to believe the beginning and end of existence on this
+earth.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 310px;">
+<img src="images/gs049.jpg" width="310" height="400" alt="BROAD STREET, LOOKING SOUTH FROM ABOVE ARCH STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">BROAD STREET, LOOKING SOUTH FROM ABOVE ARCH STREET</span>
+</div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>My new knowledge of Philadelphia was widened in
+various other directions as time went on. My Uncle's
+experiment, when it took practical shape, attracted attention
+and he was asked to lecture on it in places like the
+Franklin Institute&mdash;there was no keeping away very
+long from Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia once I got
+to know anything about Philadelphia&mdash;and to visit institutions
+like Moyamensing Prison or Kirkbride's Insane
+Asylum that he might consider the advisability of introducing
+his scheme of manual work for the benefit of the
+insane and the criminal. I usually accompanied him on
+these occasions, and before he had got through his rounds
+I had seen a number of different phases of Philadelphia
+activity and enterprise and power of organization. I had
+been given some idea of the armies of doctors and nurses
+and scientists who had made Kirkbride's a model throughout
+the land, while Dr. Albert Smith had helped me to
+an additional insight into the hospitals that set as excellent
+an example. I had been given an idea of the armies
+of judges and juries and police and governors and warders
+and visiting inspectors,&mdash;of whom my Father was one,
+with a special tenderness for murderers whom he used to
+take his family to visit&mdash;at Moyamensing. And from the
+combination of all my new experiences I had gained
+further knowledge of the energies at work beyond the
+limits of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine" to make
+Philadelphia what it was.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>I ought to have needed no guide to the knowledge and
+appreciation of these things, it may be said. I admit it.
+But the happy mortals who are born observant do not
+picture to themselves the tortures gone through by those
+who must have observation thrust upon them before they
+begin to use their eyes. I had not been born to observe,
+I had not been trained to observe, and to become observant
+I had to go through the sort of practical course Mr.
+Squeers set to his boys. His method, denounce it as you
+will, has its merits. The students of Dotheboys Hall
+could never have forgotten what a window is or what it
+means to clean it. I had grown up to accept life as a
+pageant for me to look on at, with no part to play in it.
+After my initiation into work, I could never forget, in the
+quietest, emptiest sections of the town, not even in placid
+little backwaters like Clinton Street and
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'Delancey' and 'De Lancey' were used in this text. This was retained.">De Lancey</ins>
+Place, the machinery forever crashing and grinding and
+roaring to produce the pageant, to weave for Philadelphia
+the beautiful serenity it wore like a garment. I could
+never forget that, insignificant as my share in the machinery
+might be, all the same I was contributing something
+to make it go. I could never be sure that everybody
+I met, however calm in appearance, might not be as mixed
+up in the great machine of work as I was beginning to be.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 314px;">
+<img src="images/gs050.jpg" width="314" height="400" alt="CLINTON STREET, WITH THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL AT ITS END" title="" />
+<span class="caption">CLINTON STREET, WITH THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL AT ITS END</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I had to work to learn that Philadelphia had worked,
+and still worked, and worked so well as to be the first to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>
+have given America much that is best and most vital in the
+country&mdash;the first to show the right way with its schools
+and hospitals and libraries and newspapers and galleries
+and museums, the leader in the fight for liberty of conscience,
+the scene of the first Colonial Congress and the
+signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Centennial
+Exposition to commemorate it, a pioneer in science
+and industry and manufacture&mdash;a town upon which all the
+others in the land could not do better than model themselves&mdash;while
+all the time it maintained its fine air of calm
+that perplexes the stranger and misleads the native. But
+I had found it out, found out its greatness, before age had
+dimmed my perceptions and dulled my power of appreciation;
+and to find Philadelphia out is to love it.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XI: THE ROMANCE OF WORK</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>I was still in the stage of wonder and joy at seeing
+myself in print, when work and Philadelphia joined
+in the most unlooked for manner to help me tell my
+Grandmother that "something" she was so anxiously
+waiting to hear. An article on Philadelphia which an intelligent
+Editor asked me to write was my introduction to
+J. The town that we both love first brought us together,
+as it now brings us back to it together after the
+many years that have passed since it laid the foundation
+of our long partnership.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 307px;">
+<img src="images/gs051.jpg" width="307" height="400" alt="THE CHERRY STREET STAIRS NEAR THE RIVER" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE CHERRY STREET STAIRS NEAR THE RIVER</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I would say nothing about the article at this late date
+had it not added so materially to my life and to my knowledge
+of Philadelphia. I am not proud of it as a piece of
+literary work. But it seems, as I recall the days of my
+apprenticeship, to mark the turning of the ways, to point
+to the new road I was destined to take. I got it out the
+other day, the first time in over a quarter of a century,
+proposing to reprint it, thinking the contrast between my
+impressions of Philadelphia thirty years ago and my impressions
+of Philadelphia to-day might be amusing. In
+memory, it had remained a brilliant performance, one any
+editor would be pleased to jump at, and I was astonished to
+find it youthful and crude, inarticulate, inadequate not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+only to the subject itself but to my appreciation of the
+subject which at the time was unbounded. I do not know
+whether to be more amazed at my failure in it to say what
+I wanted to say, or at the Editor's amiability in publishing
+it. The article may not have lost all its eloquence for
+me, since between the halting lines I can read the story
+I did not know how to tell, but for others it would prove
+a dull affair and it is best left where it is, forgotten in the
+old files of a popular magazine.</p>
+
+<p>The story I read is one of a series of discoveries with
+a romance in each. The way the article came about was
+that J. had made etchings of Philadelphia, and the
+Editor, who had wisely arranged to use them, thought they
+could not be published without accompanying text. When
+he asked me, as a young Philadelphian just beginning to
+write, to supply this text, he advised me to consult with
+J., whom I did not know and whose studio address he
+gave me.</p>
+
+<p>I was thrilled by the prospect, never having been in a
+studio nor met an artist, and when it turned out not half so
+simple as it looked on paper, when the first catching my
+artist was attended with endless delays and difficulties, it
+did not lessen the thrill or take away from the sense of
+adventure.</p>
+
+<p>J.'s studio, which he shared with Mr. Harry Poore,
+was at the top of what was then the Presbyterian Building
+on Chestnut Street above Thirteenth, quite new and
+of tremendous height at a time when the sky-scraper<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>
+had not been invented nor the elevator become a necessity
+of Philadelphia life. Day after day, varying the hour
+with each attempt, now in the morning, now at noon, now
+toward evening, I toiled up those long flights of stairs,
+marvelling at the strange, unaccountable disclosures
+through half-opened studio doors, for it was a building of
+studios; glad of the support of my Uncle who was seeing
+me through this, as he saw me through all my earliest
+literary enterprises; arriving at the top, breathless and
+panting, only to be informed by a notice, written on paper
+and pinned on the tight-locked door, that J. was out and
+would be back in half an hour. My Uncle and I were
+inclined to interpret this literally, once or twice waiting
+trustingly on the dark landing some little while beyond the
+appointed time. On one occasion I believe the door was
+opened, when we knocked, by Mr. Poore who was not sure
+of the length of a half hour as J. reckoned it, but had an
+idea it might vary according to circumstances, especially
+now that J. was out of town. I went away not annoyed as
+I should be to-day, but more stirred than ever by the
+novelty of the adventure.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 304px;">
+<img src="images/gs052.jpg" width="304" height="400" alt="THE MORRIS HOUSE ON EIGHTH STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE MORRIS HOUSE ON EIGHTH STREET</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>At last I tied J. down by an appointment, as I should
+have done at the start, and he, having returned to town,
+kept it to the minute. I think from first to last of this
+astonishing business I had no greater shock of astonishment
+than when I followed him into his studio. We were
+in the Eighteen-Eighties then, when American magazines
+and newspapers were making sensational copy out of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>
+princely <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'splendor' and 'splendour' were used in this text. This was retained.">splendour</ins>
+of the London studios, above all of
+Tadema's, Leighton's, Millais': palatial interiors, hung
+with priceless tapestries, carpeted with rare Oriental rugs,
+shining with old brass and pottery and armour, opening
+upon Moorish courts, reached by golden stairs, fragrant
+with flowers, filled with soft couches and luxurious
+cushions&mdash;flamboyant, exotic interiors that would not have
+disgraced Ouida's godlike young Guardsmen but that
+scarcely seemed to belong to men who made their living
+by the work of their hands. Indeed, it was their
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'splendor' and 'splendour' were used in this text. This was retained.">splendour</ins>
+that misled so many incompetent young men and women
+of the later Victorian age into the belief that art was the
+easiest and most luxurious short cut to wealth. But there
+was nothing splendid or princely about J.'s studio. It
+was frankly a workshop, big and empty, a few unframed
+drawings and life studies stuck up on the bare walls, the
+floors carpetless, for furniture an easel or two and a few
+odd rickety chairs&mdash;a room nobody would have
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'dreamt' and 'dreamed' were used in this text. This was retained.">dreamed</ins>
+of going into except for work. But then, my first impression
+of J. was of a man who did not want to do anything
+except work.</p>
+
+<p>My experience had been that people&mdash;if I leave out my
+Uncle&mdash;worked, not because they wanted to but because
+they had to and that, sceptical as they might be on every
+other Scriptural point, they were not to be shaken out of
+their belief in work as a curse inherited from Adam. J.,
+evidently, would have found the curse in not being allowed
+to work. And as new to me was the enthusiasm with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+which, while he showed me his prints and drawings, he
+began to talk about Philadelphia and its beauty. It was
+unusual for Philadelphians to talk about their town at all;
+if they did, it was more unusual for them to talk with
+enthusiasm; and the interest in it forced upon them by
+the Centennial had been for every quality rather than its
+beauty. Even my Uncle&mdash;though later, in his <i>Memoirs</i>,
+he wrote charmingly of the charm of Philadelphia&mdash;at
+that time affected to admire nothing in it except the unsightly
+arches of the Pennsylvania Railroad, bridging
+the streets between the Schuylkill and the Station, and
+if he made the exception in their favour, it was because
+they reminded him of London. Thanks to the Centennial
+and the stimulus of hard work, I was not as ignorant of
+Philadelphia as I had been, but I was not rid of the old
+popular fallacy that the American in search of beauty
+must cross the Atlantic and go to Europe. And here was
+J., in five minutes telling me more about Philadelphia
+than I had
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+in a lifetime, revealing to me in his
+drawings the beauty of streets and houses I had not had
+the wit to find out for myself, firing me with sudden
+enthusiasm in my turn, convincing me that nothing in the
+world counted but Philadelphia, opening my eyes to its
+unsuspected resources, so that after this I could walk
+nowhere without visions of romance where all before had
+been <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'everyday' and 'every-day' were used in this text. This was retained.">everyday</ins>
+commonplace, leaving me eager and impatient
+to start on my next journey of discovery which
+was to be in his company.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>To illustrate our article&mdash;for <i>ours</i> it had become&mdash;J.
+passed over the obvious picturesqueness of Philadelphia&mdash;the
+venerable Pennsylvania Hospital, the beautiful State
+House, Christ Church, the Old Swedes, St. Peter's&mdash;buildings
+for which Philadelphia, after years of indifference,
+had at last been exalted by the Centennial into historic
+monuments, the show places of the town, labelled and
+catalogued&mdash;buildings of which J. had already made
+records, having begun his work by drawing them, his plate
+of the State House among the first he ever etched. He
+now went in preference to the obscure by-ways, to the
+unpretending survivals of the past, so merged, so
+swallowed up in the present, that it needed keen eyes to
+detect them: old buildings stamped with age, but too
+humble in origin for the Centennial to have resurrected;
+busy docks, grimy river banks, crazy old rookeries
+abandoned to the business and poverty that claimed them:
+to the strange, neglected, never-visited corners of a great
+town where beauty springs from the rich soil of labour
+and chance, neglect and decay.</p>
+
+<p>How little I had known of Philadelphia up till then!
+One of the very first places to which he took me was the old
+Second Street Market that, when I lived within a stone's
+throw of it, I had never set my eyes on&mdash;the old market
+that, south of Pine, forces Second Street to widen and
+make space for it and that turns the gable of the little old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+Court House directly north, breaking the long vista of the
+street as St. Clement's and St. Mary's in London break
+the vista of the Strand&mdash;the old market that I believe the
+city proposes to pull down, very likely will have pulled
+down before these lines are in print, though there is not a
+Philadelphian who would not go into ecstasies over as
+shabby and down-at-the-heel Eighteenth Century building
+if stumbled upon in an English country town. And as
+close to his old family home and mine J. led me into inn
+yards that might have come straight from the Borough
+on the Surrey side of the Thames, and in and out of dark
+mysterious courts which he declared as "good" as the
+exploited French and Italian courts every etcher has at one
+time or another made a plate of&mdash;curious nooks and by-ways
+I had never stopped to look at during my Third
+Street days and would have seen nothing in if I had.</p>
+
+<p>And I remember going with him along Front Street,
+where I should have thought myself contaminated at a
+time when it might have varied the dull round of my
+daily walks, so unlike was it to the spick and span streets
+I knew,&mdash;glimpses at every crossing of the Delaware,
+Philadelphia's river of commerce that Philadelphians
+never went near unless to take the boat for Torresdale or,
+in summers of economy, the steamer for Liverpool; for
+several blocks, groups of seafaring men mending sails on
+the side-walk, Mariners' Boarding-Houses, a Mariners'
+Church, and Philadelphia here the seaport town it is and
+always has been; and then, successive odours of the barnyard,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+fish, spice, coffee, Philadelphia smelling as strong
+of the romance of trade as any Eastern bazaar.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 315px;">
+<img src="images/gs053.jpg" width="315" height="400" alt="THE OLD COACHING-INN YARD" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE OLD COACHING-INN YARD</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And I remember J. and I crossing the forbidden line
+into "up town" to find beauty, interest, picturesqueness
+in "Market, Arch, Race and Vine"&mdash;old houses everywhere,
+the old Meeting-House, Betsy Ross' house, Provost
+Smith's, the Christ Church Burial Ground at Fifth and
+Arch where Franklin is buried, narrow rambling alleys,
+red and black brick, and there, up on a house at the corner
+of Front, where it is to this day, a sign going back to the
+years when Race was still Sassafras Street, and so part of
+the original scheme of Philadelphia, to which, with Philadelphia
+docility, I had all my life believed South of Market
+alone could claim the right.</p>
+
+<p>And I remember our wandering to the Schuylkill, not
+by the neat and well-kept roads and paths of the Park,
+but where tumbled-down houses faced it near Callowhill
+Street Bridge and works of one kind or another rose from
+its banks near Gray's Ferry, and Philadelphia was a town
+of industry, of machines, of railroads connecting it with all
+parts of the world,&mdash;for already to J. "the Wonder of
+Work" had made its irresistible appeal. And I remember
+our wandering farther, north and south, east and west&mdash;interest,
+beauty, picturesqueness never failing us&mdash;in the
+end Philadelphia transformed into a vast Wonderland,
+where in one little section people might spend their lives
+dancing, paying calls at noon, eating chicken salad and
+croquettes from Augustine's, but where in every other they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>
+were striving, struggling, toiling, to carry on Penn's traditions
+and to give to his town the greatness, power and
+beauty he planned for it.</p>
+
+<p>In these walks I had followed J. into streets and
+quarters of the town I had not known. But I would be
+leaving out half the story if I did not say how much he
+showed me in the streets and quarters I did know. It is
+with a town, I suppose, as with life out of which, philosophers
+say, we get just as much, or as little, as we bring to
+it. I had brought no curiosity, no interest, no sympathy,
+to Philadelphia, and Philadelphia therefore had given me
+nothing save a monotony of red brick and green shade.
+But now I came keen with curiosity, full of interest, aflame
+with sympathy, and Philadelphia overwhelmed me with its
+gifts. Oh, the difference when, having eyes, one sees! I
+was as surprised to learn that I had been living in the midst
+of beauty all my life as M. Jourdain was to find he had
+been talking prose.</p>
+
+<p>Down in lower Spruce and all the neighbouring streets,
+where I had walked in loneliness longing for something
+to happen, something happened at every step&mdash;beautiful
+Colonial houses, stately doorways, decorative ironwork,
+dormer windows, great gables facing each other at street
+corners, harmonious proportions&mdash;not merely a bit here
+and a bit there, but the old Colonial town almost intact,
+preserved by Philadelphia through many generations only
+to be abandoned now to the Russian Jew and the squalor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>
+and the dirt that the Russian Jew takes with him wherever
+he goes. In not another American town had the old streets
+then changed so little since Colonial days, in not another
+were they so well worth keeping unchanged. I had not to
+dive into musty archives to unearth the self-evident fact
+that the early Friends, when they left England, packed
+up with their liberty of conscience the love of beauty in
+architecture and, what was more practical, the money to
+pay for it; that, in a fine period of English architecture,
+they got good English architects,&mdash;Wren said to have been
+of the number&mdash;to design not merely their public buildings,
+but their private houses; that, their Founder setting
+the example, they carried over in their personal baggage
+panelling, carvings, ironwork, red and black brick, furniture,
+and the various details they were not likely to procure
+in Philadelphia until Philadelphians had moved from their
+caves and the primeval forest had been cut down; that
+when Philadelphia could contribute its share of the work,
+they modified the design to suit climate, circumstances, and
+material, and bequeathed to us a Philadelphia with so much
+local character that it never could be mistaken for an
+English town.</p>
+
+<p>This used to strike the intelligent foreigner as long as
+Philadelphia was content to have a character of its own
+and did not bother to be in architectural or any other
+movements. "Not a distressingly new-looking city, for
+the Queen Anne style in vogue when its prosperity began<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>
+is in the main adhered to with Quaker-like precision; good
+red brick; numerous rather narrow windows with white
+outside shutters, a block cornice along the top of the
+fa&ccedil;ades and the added American feature of marble steps
+and entry,"&mdash;this, in a letter to William Michael Rossetti,
+was Mrs. Gilchrist's description of Philadelphia in the late
+Eighteen-Seventies, and it is an appreciative description
+though most authorities would probably describe Philadelphia
+as Georgian rather than Queen Anne. Philadelphia
+did more to let the old character go to rack and ruin during
+the years I was away from it than during the two centuries
+before, and is to-day repenting in miles upon miles of sham
+Colonial. But repentance cannot wipe away the traces
+of sin&mdash;cannot bring back the old Philadelphia I knew.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 307px;">
+<img src="images/gs054.jpg" width="307" height="400" alt="FRANKLIN&#39;S GRAVE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">FRANKLIN&#39;S GRAVE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I do not want to attribute too much to my new and
+only partially developed power of observing. Had the
+measuring worm not retreated before the sparrow, I might
+perhaps have been less prepared during my walks with J.
+to admit the beauty of the trees lining every street, as well
+as of the houses they shaded. But what is the use of
+troubling about the might-have-been? The important
+thing is that, with him I did for the first time see how
+beautiful are our green, well-shaded streets. With him
+too I first saw how beautiful is their symmetry as they run
+in their long straight lines and cross each other at right
+angles. It was a symmetry I had confused with monotony,
+with which most Philadelphians, foolishly misled, still confuse
+it. They would rather, for the sake of variety, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>
+Penn had left the building and growth of Philadelphia to
+chance as the founders of other American towns did&mdash;they
+would rather boast with New York or Boston of the disorderly
+picturesqueness of streets that follow old cow
+tracks made before the town was. But Penn understood
+the value of order in architecture as in conduct. It is
+true that Ruskin, the accepted prophet of my young days,
+did not include order among his Seven Lamps, but there
+was a good deal Ruskin did not know about architecture,
+and a town like Paris in its respect for arrangement&mdash;for
+order&mdash;for a thought-out plan&mdash;will teach more at a glance
+than all his rhapsodies. Philadelphia has not the noble
+perspectives of the French capital nor the splendid buildings
+to complete them, but its despised regularity gives it
+the repose, the serenity, which is an essential of great art,
+whether the art of the painter or the engraver, the sculptor
+or the architect. And it gives, too, a suggestiveness, a
+mystery we are more apt to seek in architectural disorder
+and caprice. I know nobody who has pointed out this
+beauty in Penn's design except Mrs. Gilchrist in the description
+from which I have already borrowed, and she
+merely hints at the truth, not grasping it. Philadelphia to
+her was more picturesque and more foreign-looking than
+she expected, and her explanation is in the "long straight
+streets at right angles to each other, long enough and
+broad enough to present that always pleasing effect of
+vista-converging lines that stretch out indefinitely and
+look as if they must certainly lead somewhere very pleasant,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>
+the streets that are to the town what "the open
+road" is to the country,&mdash;the long, white, straight road
+beckoning who can say where?</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>It was without the slightest intention on my part that
+the vista-converging lines of the streets led me direct to
+William Penn. But I defy anybody to do a little thinking
+while walking through the streets of Philadelphia and not
+be led to him, so for eternity has he stamped them with his
+vivid personality&mdash;not William Penn, the shadowy prig
+of the school history, but William Penn, the man with a
+level head, big ideas, and the will to carry them out&mdash;three
+things that make for genius. To the weakling of to-day
+the fight for liberty of conscience would loom up so
+gigantic a task as to fill to overflowing his little span here
+below. But in the fight as Penn fought it, the material
+details could be overlooked as little as the spiritual, the
+comfort of the bodies of his people no more neglected than
+the freedom of their souls. He did not stop to preach
+about town-planning and garden cities, and improved
+housing for the workman, like the would-be reformer of to-day.
+With no sentimental pose as saviour of the people,
+no drivel about reforming and elevating and sweetening
+the lives of humanity, no aspiration towards "world-betterment,"
+Penn made sure that Philadelphia should be
+the green town he thought it ought to be and that men and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>
+women, whatever their appointed task, should have decent
+houses to live in. He had the common-sense to understand
+that his colonists would be the sturdier and the
+better equipped for the work they had to do if they
+lived like men and not like beasts, and that a town
+as far south as Philadelphia called for many gardens and
+much green shade. The most beautiful architecture is
+that which grows logically out of the needs of the people.
+That is why Penn's city as he designed it was and is a
+beautiful city, to which English and German town reformers
+should come for the hints Philadelphians are so
+misguided as to seek from them.</p>
+
+<p>I could not meet Penn in his pleasant streets and miss
+the succession of Friends who took over the responsibility
+of ensuring life and reality to his design, not allowing it,
+like Wren's in London, to lapse into a half-forgotten
+archaeological curiosity. Personally. I knew nothing of
+the Friends and envied J. who did because he was one of
+them, as I never could be, as nobody, not born to it, can.
+I had seen them, as alas! they are seen no longer: quiet,
+dignified men in broad-brimmed hats, sweet-faced women
+in delicate greys and browns, filling our streets in the
+spring at the time of Yearly Meeting. Once or twice I
+had seen them at home, the women in white caps and fichus,
+quiet and composed, sitting peacefully in their old-time
+parlours simple and bare but filled with priceless Sheraton
+or Chippendale. They looked, both in the open streets and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>
+at their own firesides, so placid, so detached from the
+world's cares, it had not occurred to me that they could
+be the makers of the town's beauty and the sinews of its
+strength. But in my new mood I could nowhere get far
+from them.</p>
+
+<p>Ghosts of the early Friends haunted the old streets
+and the old houses and, mingling with them, were ghosts
+of the World's People who had lost no time in coming to
+share their town and ungraciously abuse the privilege.
+The air was thick with association. J. and I walked in
+an atmosphere of the past, delightfully conscious of it but
+never troubling to reduce it to dry facts. We could not
+have been as young as we were and not scorn any approach
+to pedantry, not as lief do without ghosts as to grub them
+up out of the Philadelphia Library or the Historical Society.
+We left it to the antiquary to say just where the first
+Friends landed and the corner-stone of their first building
+was laid, just in which Third Street house Washington
+once danced, in which Front Street house Bishop White
+once lived. It was for the belated Boswell, not for us, to
+follow step by step the walks abroad of Penn, or Franklin,
+or any of our town's great men. It was no more necessary
+to be historians in order to feel the charm of the past than
+to be architects in order to feel the charm of the houses,
+and for no amount of exact knowledge would we have
+exchanged the romance which enveloped us.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs055.jpg" width="400" height="308" alt="ARCH STREET MEETING" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ARCH STREET MEETING</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Could I have put into words some of the emotion I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>
+felt in gathering together my material, what an article
+I would have made! But my words came with difficulty,
+and indeed I have never had the "ready pen" of the
+journalist, always I have been shy in expressing emotion
+of any kind. No reader could have guessed from my
+article my enthusiasm as I wrote it. But at least it did
+get written and my pleasure in it was not disturbed by
+doubt. I was too enthralled by what I had to say to
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>
+that I had not managed to say it at all.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>With the publication of the article our task was at an
+end, but not our walks together. J. and I had got into the
+habit of them, it was a pleasant habit, we saw no reason
+to give it up.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes we walked with new work as an object.
+There were articles about Philadelphia for <i>Our Continent</i>.
+We called it work&mdash;learning Romany&mdash;when we both
+walked with my Uncle up Broad Street to Oakdale Park,
+and through Camden and beyond to the Reservoir, where
+the Gypsies camped, and made Camden in my eyes, not
+the refuge of all in doubt, debt, or despair as its traditions
+have described it, but a rival in romance of Bagdad or
+Samarcand. When we walked still further, taking the
+train to help us out, to near country towns for the autumn
+fairs, never missing a side show, we called this the search
+for local colour, and I filled note-books with notes. Sometimes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span>
+we walked for no more practical purpose than
+pleasure in Philadelphia. And we could walk for days, we
+could walk for miles, and exhaust neither the pleasure
+nor the town that I once fancied I knew by heart if I
+walked from Market to Pine and from the Delaware to
+the Schuylkill.</p>
+
+<p>I remember as a remarkable incident my discovery of
+the suburbs. With the prejudice borrowed from my
+Father, I had cultivated for all suburbs something of the
+large sweeping contempt which, in the Eighteen-Nineties,
+Henley and the <i>National Observer</i>, carrying on the tradition
+of Thackeray, made it the fashion to profess for the
+suburbs of London. West Philadelphia and Germantown
+were no less terms of opprobrium in my mouth than Clapham
+and Brixton in Henley's. But Henley, though it was
+a mistake to insist upon Clapham with its beautiful Common
+and old houses and dignified air, was expressing his
+splendid scorn of the second-rate, the provincial, in art and
+in letters. I was only expressing, parrot-like, a pose that
+did not belong to me, but to my Father in whose outlook
+upon life and things there was a whimsical touch, and who
+carried off' his prejudices with humour.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs056.jpg" width="400" height="308" alt="CLIVEDEN, THE CHEW HOUSE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">CLIVEDEN, THE CHEW HOUSE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I was the more foolish in this because few towns, if
+any, have lovelier suburbs than Philadelphia. Their loveliness
+is another part of our inheritance from William Penn
+who set no limits to his dream of a green country town, and
+from the old Friends who, in deference to his desire, lined
+not only their streets but their roads with trees. This is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>
+only as it should be, I thought when, reading the letters
+of John Adams, I came upon his description of the road
+to Kensington and beyond, "straight as the streets of
+Philadelphia, on each side ... beautiful rows of trees,
+button-woods, oaks, walnuts, cherries, and willows." In
+our time, scarcely a road out of Philadelphia is without
+the same beautiful rows, if not the same variety in the
+trees, and while much of the open country it ran through
+in John Adams' day has been built up with town and
+suburban houses, the trees still line it on each side. Everybody
+knows the beauty of the leafy roads of the Main
+Line, quite a correct thing to know, the Main Line being
+the refuge of the Philadelphian pushed out of "Chestnut,
+Walnut, Spruce and Pine" by business and the Russian
+Jew combined. But the Main Line has not the monopoly
+of suburban beauty, though it may of suburban fashion.
+The Main Street in Germantown, with its peaceful old
+grey stone houses and great overshadowing trees, has no
+rival at home or abroad, and I have seen as commonplace a
+street as Walnut in West Philadelphia, its uninteresting
+houses screened behind the two long lines of trees, become
+in the golden light of a summer afternoon as stately an
+avenue as any at Versailles or St. Germain.</p>
+
+<p>Not only the trees, but the past went with us to
+Germantown. Has any other American suburb so many
+old houses to boast? Stenton, the Chew House, the Johnson
+House, the Morris House, the Wistar House, Wyck&mdash;are
+there any other Colonial houses with nobler interiors,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+statelier furniture, sweeter gardens? I recall the pillared
+hall of Chew House, the finely proportioned entrance and
+stairway of Stenton, the garden of Wyck as I last saw it&mdash;rather
+overgrown, heavy with the perfume of roses and
+syringa, the June sun low behind the tall trees that stand
+close to the wall along Walnut Lane;&mdash;I recall the memories
+clustering about those old historic homes, about every
+lane and road and path, and I wonder that Germantown
+is not one of the show places of the world. But the
+foreigner, to whom Philadelphia is a station between New
+York and Washington or New York and Chicago, has
+never heard of it, nor has the rest of America to whom
+Philadelphia is the junction for Atlantic City. With the
+exception of Stenton, the old Germantown houses are for
+use, not for show, still lived in by the families who have
+lived in them from the beginning, and I love them too well
+to want to see them overtaken by the fate of sights starred
+in Baedeker, even while I wonder why they have escaped.</p>
+
+<p>At times J. and I walked in the green valley of the
+Wissahickon, along the well-kept road past the old white
+taverns, with wide galleries and suppers of cat-fish and
+waffles, which had not lost their pleasant primitiveness to
+pass themselves off as rural Rumpelmeyers where ladies
+stop for afternoon tea. Can the spring be fairer anywhere
+than in and around Philadelphia when wistaria
+blossoms on every wall and the country is white with dogwood?
+Often we wandered in the Wissahickon woods, by
+narrow footpaths up the low hillsides, so often that, wherever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>
+I may be, certain effects of brilliant sunshine filtering
+through the pale green of early spring foliage will send me
+straight back to the Wissahickon and to the days when I
+could not walk in Philadelphia or its suburbs and not
+strike gold at every step. And the Wissahickon was but
+one small section of the Park, of which the corrupt government
+Philadelphia loves to rail at made the largest and
+fairest, at once the wildest and most wisely laid-out playground,
+in America. Will a reform Government, with
+all its boasting, do as much for Philadelphia? I had
+skimmed the surface only on those boating parties up the
+river and those walking parties in the starlit or moonlit
+shade. Wide undiscovered stretches lay off the beaten
+track, and the mansions of the Park&mdash;Strawberry, Belmont,
+Mount Pleasant&mdash;were well stocked, not only with
+lemonade and cake and peanuts, with croquettes and
+chicken salad, but with beauty and associations for those
+who knew how to give the order. And, greater marvel,
+beauty&mdash;classic beauty&mdash;was to be had even in the Fairmount
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: 'Waterworks,' 'Water Works,' and 'Water-Works' were used in this text. This was retained.">Water Works</ins>
+that, after I left school, I had looked
+down upon as a childish entertainment provided for the
+holidays, beneath the consideration of my maturer years.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>Of all our walks, none was better than the walk to
+Bartram's on the banks of the Schuylkill beyond Gray's
+Ferry. It seemed very far then, before the trolley passed
+by its gate, and before the rows of little two-story houses<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>
+had begun to extend towards it like the greedy tentacles
+of the great town. The City Government had not taken it
+over, it was not so well looked after. The old grey stone
+house, with the stone tablet on its walls bearing witness
+that his Lord was adored by John Bartram, had not yet
+been turned into a museum. I am not sure whether the
+trees around it&mdash;the trees collected from far and near&mdash;were
+learnedly labelled as they are now. The garden had
+grown wild, the thicket below was a wilderness. It is right
+that the place should be cared for. The city could not
+afford to lose the beauty one of its most famous citizens,
+who was one of the most famous botanists of his day,
+built up, and his family preserved, for it, and when I
+returned I welcomed the sign this new care gave of Philadelphia's
+interest, so long in the awakening. But Bartram's
+was more beautiful in its neglect, as an old church
+is more beautiful before the restorer pulls down the ivy
+and scrapes and polishes the stone. Many were the Sunday
+afternoons J. and I spent there, and many the hours
+we sat talking on the little bench at the lower end of the
+wilderness, where we looked out on the river and planned
+new articles.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs057.jpg" width="400" height="309" alt="BARTRAM&#39;S" title="" />
+<span class="caption">BARTRAM&#39;S</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>When our walks together had become too strong a
+habit to be broken and we decided to make the habit one
+for life, we went back again and again to Bartram's and
+on that same little bench, looking out upon the river, we
+planned work for the long years we hoped were ahead of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>
+us: perhaps seeing the future in the more glowing colours
+for the contrast with the past about us, the ashes of the
+life and beauty from which our ph&oelig;nix was to soar. The
+work then planned carried and kept us thousands of miles
+away, but it belongs none the less to the old scenes, where
+it was inspired, and I like to think that, though the chances
+of this work have made us exiles for years, the memory of
+our life as we have lived it is inseparable from the memory
+of Bartram's or, indeed, of Philadelphia which, through
+work, I <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+to see and to love.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XII: PHILADELPHIA AND LITERATURE</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>On the principle that nothing interests a man&mdash;or a
+woman&mdash;so much as shop, I had no sooner
+begun to write than I saw Philadelphia divided
+not between the people who could and could not go to the
+Assembly and the Dancing Class, but between the people
+who could and could not write; and, after I began to write
+for illustration, between the people who could and could
+not paint and draw. It had never before occurred to me
+to look for art and literature in Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs058.jpg" width="400" height="298" alt="CARPENTER&#39;S HALL INTERIOR" title="" />
+<span class="caption">CARPENTER&#39;S HALL INTERIOR</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>At that time, you had, literally, to look for the literature
+to find it. Philadelphia, with its usual reticence and
+conscientiousness in preventing any Philadelphian from
+becoming a prophet in Philadelphia, had hidden its literary,
+with its innumerable other, lights under a bushel,
+content itself to know they were there, if nobody else did.
+As towns, like men, are apt to be accepted at their own
+valuation, most Americans would then have thought it
+about as useful to look for snakes in Ireland as for literature
+in Philadelphia. I am not sure that the Philadelphian
+did not agree with them. Recently, I have heard him, in
+his new zeal for Philadelphia, talk as if it were the biggest
+literary thing on earth, the headquarters of letters in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+United States, a boast which I am told Indianapolis also
+makes and, as far as I am concerned, can keep on making
+undisputed, for I do not believe in measuring literature
+like so much sheet iron or calico. But no matter what we
+have come to in Philadelphia, in the old days the Philadelphian
+seldom gave his lions a chance to roar at home or
+paid the least attention to them if they tried to. I rather
+think he would have affected to share the Western Congressman's
+opinion of "them literary fellers" when the
+literary fellers came from his native town.</p>
+
+<p>But the Philadelphian must have done a great deal of
+reading to judge by the number of public libraries in the
+town,&mdash;the Philadelphia Library, the Ridgway, the Mercantile,
+the Free Public Library, the University Library,
+the Bryn Mawr College Library, the Friends' Germantown
+Library, the Library of the Historical Society, and
+no doubt dozens I know nothing about&mdash;and there were
+always collectors from the days of Logan and Dr. Rush
+to those of Mr. Widener, George C. Thomas and Governor
+Pennypacker. But the Philadelphia reading man never
+talked books and the Philadelphia collector never vaunted
+and advertised his treasures, as he does now that collecting
+is correct. The average man kept his books out of sight. I
+remember few in my Grandfather's house, and not a bookcase
+from top to bottom&mdash;few in any other house except
+my Father's. But I know that many people had books and
+a library set apart to read them in, and I have been astonished
+since to see the large collections in houses where<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+of old I had never noticed or suspected their presence. The
+Philadelphian was as reticent about his books and his
+pleasure in them as about everything else, with the result
+that he got the credit for neither, even at home. This had
+probably something to do with the fact that though, as far
+back as I can remember, I had had a fancy for books and
+for reading, I grew up with the idea that for literature, as
+for beauty, the Atlantic had to be crossed, that it was not in
+the nature of things for Philadelphia to have had a literary
+past, to claim a literary present, or to hope for a literary
+future. But as I had discovered my mistake about the
+beauty during those walks with J., so in my modest stall in
+the literary shop, I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+how far out I had been about
+the literature. It was the same story over again. I had
+only to get interested, and there was everything in the
+world to interest me.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>There was the past, for Philadelphia had had a literary
+past, and not at all an empty past, but one full of the romance
+of effort and pride of achievement. Because Philadelphians
+did not begin to write the minute they landed
+on the banks of the Delaware, some wise people argue that
+Friends were then, as now, unliterary. But what of William
+Penn, whose writings have become classics? What
+of Thomas Elwood, the friend of Milton? What of
+George Fox who, if unlettered, was a born writer no less
+than Bunyan? Friends did not write and publish books<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+right off in Philadelphia for the same excellent reason that
+other Colonists did not in other Colonial towns. Living
+was an absorbing business that left them no time for writing,
+and printing presses and publishers' offices and book
+stores did not strike them as immediate necessities in the
+wilderness. It was not out of consideration that the early
+Philadelphia Friends bequeathed nothing to the now sadly
+overladen shelves of the British Museum and the Library
+of Congress.</p>
+
+<p>When leisure came Philadelphians were readier to
+devote it to science. According to Mr. Sydney Fisher,
+Pennsylvania has done more for science than any other
+State: a subject upon which my profound ignorance bids
+me be silent. But science did not keep them altogether
+from letters. No people ever had a greater itch for writing.
+Look at the length of their correspondence, the minuteness
+of their diaries. And they broke into poetry on the
+slightest provocation. Authorities say that no real poem
+appeared in America before 1800, but the blame lies not
+alone with Philadelphia. It did what it could. Boston
+may boast of Anne Bradstreet who was rhyming before
+most New Englanders had time for reading, but so could
+Philadelphia brag of Deborah Logan&mdash;if Philadelphia
+ever bragged of anything Philadelphian&mdash;and I am willing
+to believe there is no great difference between the two
+poetesses without labouring through their verses to prove
+myself wrong. And the Philadelphian was as prolific as
+any other Colonial in horrible doggerel to his mistress's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+hoops and bows, to her tears and canary birds. And as
+far as I know, only a Philadelphian among Colonial poets
+is immortalized in the Dunciad, though possibly Ralph,
+Franklin's friend to whom the honour fell, would rather
+have been forgotten than remembered solely because his
+howls to Cynthia made night hideous for Pope. And
+where else did the young men so soon form themselves into
+little groups to discourse seriously upon literature and
+kindred matters, as they walked sedately in the woods
+along the Schuylkill? Where else was there so soon a
+society&mdash;a junto&mdash;devoted to learning?</p>
+
+<p>In innumerable ways I could see, once I could see
+anything, how Philadelphia was preparing itself all along
+for literary pursuits and accomplishment. Let me brag a
+little, if Philadelphia won't. Wasn't it in Germantown
+that the first paper mill of the Colonies was set up? Wasn't
+it there that the New Testament was printed in German&mdash;and
+went into seven editions&mdash;before any other Colony
+had the enterprise to print it in English, so that Saur's
+Testament is now a treasure for the collector? Isn't it
+maintained by some authorities, if others dispute it, that
+the first Bible in English was published in Philadelphia by
+Robert Aitken, at "Pope's Head above the Coffee House,
+in Market Street"? And Philadelphia issued the first
+American daily paper, the most important of the first
+American reviews, the most memorable Almanac of
+Colonial days&mdash;can any other compete with Poor Richard's?
+And Philadelphia opened the first Circulating<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>
+Library&mdash;the Philadelphia Library is no benevolent upstart
+of to-day. And Philadelphia publishers were for
+years the most go-ahead and responsible&mdash;who did not
+know the names of Cary, Lea, Blanchard, Griggs,
+Lippincott, knew nothing of the publishing trade. And
+Philadelphia book stores, with Lippincott's leading,
+were the best patronized. And Philadelphia had the
+monopoly of the English book trade, with Thomas Wardle
+to direct it. And Philadelphia held its own views on copyright
+and stuck to them in the face of opposition for
+years&mdash;whether right or wrong does not matter, the thing
+is that it cared enough to have views. There is a record
+for you! Why the literary man had only to appear, and
+Philadelphia was all swept and garnished for his comfort
+and convenience.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs059.jpg" width="400" height="310" alt="MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN" title="" />
+<span class="caption">MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And the literary man did appear, with amazing
+promptness under the circumstances. When the demand
+was for political writers, Philadelphia supplied Franklin,
+Dickinson, and a whole host of others, until it is all the
+Historical Society of
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Pensylvania'">Pennsylvania</ins>
+can do to cope with
+their pamphlets. When the demand was for native fiction,
+Philadelphia produced the first American novelist, Charles
+Brockden Brown, and if Philadelphians do not read him
+in our day, Shelley did in his, which ought to be as much
+fame as any pioneer could ask for. When the need was for
+an American Cookery Book, Philadelphia presented Miss
+Leslie to the public who received her with such appreciation
+that, in the First Edition, she is harder to find than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>
+Mrs. Glasse. When, with the years, the past rose in
+value, Philadelphia gave to America an antiquary, and
+John Watson, with his Annals, set a fashion in Philadelphia
+that had to wait a good half century for followers.
+And when the writer was multiplied all over the country
+and the reader with him, Philadelphia provided the periodical,
+the annual, the parlour-table book, that the one wrote
+for and the other subscribed to&mdash;an endless succession of
+them: <i>The Casket</i>, <i>The Gift</i>, <i>The Souvenir</i>, which I have
+no desire to disturb on their obscure shelves; the <i>Philadelphia
+Saturday Museum</i>, and <i>Burton's Gentleman's Magazine</i>,
+to me the emptiest of empty names; <i>Sartain's Union
+Magazine</i>, which I might as well be honest and say I have
+never seen; <i>Graham's</i>, in its prime, unrivalled, unapproached;
+<i>Godey's Lady's Book</i>, offering its pages alike
+to the newest verse and the latest mode, the popular magazine
+that every American saw at his dentist's or his doctor's,
+edited by Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, for a woman,
+then as always, could get where she chose, if she had the
+mind to, without the help of arson and suicide; <i>Peterson's</i>,
+which I recall only in its title; <i>Lippincott's</i>, in my time the
+literary test or standard in Philadelphia and scrupulously
+taken in by the Philadelphia householder. I can see it
+still, lying soberly on the centre table in the back parlour
+of the Eleventh and Spruce Street house, never defaced
+or thumbed, I fancy seldom opened, but like everything
+in the house, like my Grandfather himself, a type, a symbol<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>
+of Philadelphia respectability. It was as much an obligation
+for the respectable Philadelphia citizen to subscribe
+to <i>Lippincott's</i> as to belong to the Historical Society, to
+be a member of the Philadelphia Library, to buy books
+for Christmas presents at Lippincott's or Porter and
+Coates'. The Philadelphian, who had no particular use
+for a book as a book or, if he had, kept the fact to himself,
+was content to parade it as an ornament, and no parlour
+was without its assortment of pretty and expensive
+parlour-table books, received as Christmas presents, and
+as purely ornamental as the pictures on the wall and the
+vases on the mantelpiece. I know one Philadelphian who
+carried this decorative use of books still further and nailed
+them to the ceiling to explain that the room they decorated
+was a library, which nobody would have suspected for a
+moment, as they were the only volumes in it.</p>
+
+<p>For the man who had a living to make out of literature,
+Philadelphia was a good place, not to come away from,
+but to go to, and a number of American men of letters
+did go, though I need hardly add Philadelphia made as
+little of the fact as possible. In Philadelphia Washington
+Irving, sometimes called America's first literary man, published
+his books, but truth compels me to admit that he
+fared better when he handed them over to Putnam in New
+York; though of late years, the Lippincotts have done
+much to atone for the old failure by their successful issues
+of <i>The Alhambra</i> and <i>The Traveller</i>. To Philadelphia<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>
+magazines, N. P. Willis, and there was no more popular
+American writer, pledged himself for months ahead. To
+Philadelphia, Lowell came from Boston to get work.
+Poe deserted Richmond and the South for Philadelphia,
+where he contributed to Philadelphia magazines, edited
+them, planned new ones, while Philadelphia waited until
+he was well out of the world to know that he ever had lived
+there. Altogether, when I came upon the scene, Philadelphia
+had had a highly creditable literary past, and was
+having a highly creditable literary present, and, in pursuance
+of its invariable policy, was making no fuss about it.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>As I look back, the three most conspicuous figures of
+this literary present were Charles Godfrey Leland, George
+Boker and Walt Whitman. All three were past middle
+age, they had done most of their important work, they had
+gained an international reputation. But that of course
+made no difference to Philadelphia. I doubt if it had
+heard of George Boker as a man of letters, though it knew
+him politically and also socially, as he had not lost his
+interest in society and the Philadelphia Club. My Uncle,
+having no use for society in Philadelphia and saying so
+with his accustomed vigour, and not having busied himself
+with politics for many years, was ignored unreservedly.
+Walt Whitman, who probably would not have been considered
+eligible for the Assembly and the Dancing Class<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>
+had he condescended to know of their existence, did not
+exist socially, and it is a question if he would have collected
+round him his ardent worshippers from Philadelphia had
+he not had the advantage of having been born somewhere
+else. If I am not mistaken, this worship had not begun
+in my time, when he was more apt to receive a visitor from
+London or Boston than from Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs060.jpg" width="400" height="308" alt="ARCH STREET MEETING&mdash;INTERIOR" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ARCH STREET MEETING&mdash;INTERIOR</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The fact that it was my good fortune to know these
+three men contributed considerably to my new and pleasant
+feeling of self-importance. When I wrote the life of
+my Uncle a few years ago, I had much to say of him and
+my relations with him at this period, and I do not want to
+repeat myself. But I can no more leave him out of my
+recollections of literary Philadelphia than out of my personal
+reminiscences. When he entered so intimately into
+my life he was nearer sixty than fifty, but he had lost nothing
+of his vigour nor of his physical beauty&mdash;tall, large,
+long-bearded, a fine profile, the eyes of the seer. He was
+fastidious in dress, with a leaning to light greys and
+browns, and a weakness for canes which he preferred thin
+and elegant. I remember his favourite was black and had
+an altogether unfashionable silver, ruby-eyed dragon for
+handle. On occasions to which it was appropriate, he wore
+a silk hat; on others, more informal, he exchanged it for
+a large soft felt&mdash;a modified cowboy hat&mdash;which suited him
+better, though he would not have forgiven me had I had
+the courage to say so to his face, his respect for the conventions,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>
+always great, having been intensified during his
+long residence in England. It seems superfluous to add
+that he could not pass unnoticed in Philadelphia streets,
+which did not run to cowboy hats or dragon-handled canes
+or any deviations from the approved Philadelphia dress.
+Nor did his fancy for peering into shop windows make him
+less conspicuous, and as his daily walk was hardly complete
+if it did not lead to his buying something in the shop,
+were it only a five-cent bit of modern blue-and-white
+Japanese china, this meant that before his purchase was
+handed over to me, as it usually was, his pleasure being
+not in the possession but in the buying, he had parcels to
+carry, a shocking breach of good manners in Philadelphia.
+In his company therefore I became a conspicuous figure
+myself, and I was often his companion in the streets; but
+to this I had no objection, having been inconspicuous far
+too long for my taste.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 310px;">
+<img src="images/gs061.jpg" width="310" height="400" alt="FRONT AND CALLOWHILL" title="" />
+<span class="caption">FRONT AND CALLOWHILL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>He had written his <i>Breitmann Ballads</i> years before
+when the verse of no other American of note&mdash;unless it
+was Longfellow's and Whittier's and Lowell's in the <i>Biglow
+Papers</i>&mdash;had had so wide a circulation. He had also
+published one or two of his Gypsy books, never surpassed
+except by Borrow. And he was engaged in endless new
+tasks&mdash;more Gypsy papers, Art in the Schools, Indian
+Legends, Comic Ballads, Essays on Education, and I did
+not mind what since my excitement was in being admitted
+for the first time into the companionship of a man who devoted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+himself to writing, to whom writing was business,
+who sat down at his desk after breakfast and wrote as my
+Father after breakfast went down to his office and bought
+and sold stocks, who never stopped except for his daily
+walk, who got back to work if there was a free hour before
+dinner and who, after dinner, read until he went to bed.
+Moreover, he had brought with him the aroma, as it were,
+of the literary life in London. He had met many of the
+people who, because they had written books, were my
+heroes. Here would have been literature enough to transfigure
+Philadelphia had I known no other writers.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>But, through him, I did know others. First of all,
+George Boker with whom, however, I could not pretend
+to friendship or more than the barest acquaintance. In
+the streets he was as noticeable a figure as my Uncle,
+though given neither to cowboy hats and dragon-handled
+canes nor to peering into shop windows and carrying
+parcels. Like my Uncle, he was taller than the average
+man, and handsomer, his white hair and white military
+moustache giving him a more distinguished air, I fancy, in
+his old age than was his in his youth. His smile was of the
+kindliest, the characteristic I remember best. He had returned
+from his appointments as Minister to Russia and
+Turkey and had given up active political and diplomatic
+life. He had written most of his poems, if not all, including<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>
+the <i>Francesca da Rimini</i> which Lawrence Barrett was
+shortly afterwards to put on the stage, and he impressed
+me as a man who had had his fill of life and work and
+adventure and was content to settle down to the comforts
+of Philadelphia. He and my Uncle, who had been friends
+from boyhood or babyhood, spent every Sunday afternoon
+together. My Uncle had large spacious rooms on the
+ground floor of a house in South Broad Street where the
+Philadelphia Art Club now is, and there George Boker
+came Sunday after Sunday and there, if I dropped in, I
+saw him. I had the discretion never to stay long, for I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>d
+that their intimate free talk was valued too much
+by both for them to care to have it interrupted. I can
+remember nothing he ever said&mdash;I have an idea he was a
+man who did not talk a great deal, while my Uncle did;
+my memory is of his kindly smile and my sense that here
+was one of the literary friendships I had read of in books.
+So, I thought, might Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith have
+met and talked, or Lamb and Coleridge, and Broad Street
+seemed tinged with the romance that I took for granted
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'colored' and 'coloured' were used in this text. This was retained.">coloured</ins>
+the Temple in London and Gough Square.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>Through my Uncle I also met Walt Whitman, and he
+impressed me still more with the romance of literature.
+He was so unexpected in Philadelphia, for which I claim
+him in his last years, Camden being little more than a
+suburb, whatever Camden itself may think. I could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>
+almost have imagined that it was for the humour of the
+thing he came to settle where his very appearance was an
+offence to the proprieties. George Boker was scrupulously
+correct. My Uncle's hat and dragon-handled cane
+only seemed to emphasize his inborn Philadelphia shrinking
+from eccentricity. But Walt Whitman, from top to
+toe, proclaimed the man who did not bother to think of the
+conventions, much less respect them. You saw it in his
+long white hair and long white beard, in his loose light
+grey clothes, in the soft white shirt unlaundered and open
+at the neck, in the tall, formless grey hat like no hat ever
+worn in Philadelphia. To have been stopped by him on
+Chestnut Street&mdash;a street he loved&mdash;would have filled me
+with confusion and shame in the days before literature had
+become my shop. But once literature blocked my horizon,
+to be stopped by him lifted me up to the seventh heaven.
+If people turned to look, and Philadelphians never grew
+quite accustomed to his presence, my pleasure was the
+greater. I took it for a visible sign that I was known,
+recognized, and accepted in the literary world. And what
+a triumph in streets where, of old, life had appalled me by
+its emptiness of incident!</p>
+
+<p>In one way or another I saw a good deal of Walt
+Whitman, but most frequently by the chance which increased
+the picturesqueness of the meeting. I called on
+him in the Camden house described many times by many
+people: in my memory, a little house, the room where I
+was received simple and bare, the one ornament as unexpected<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>
+there as Walt Whitman himself in Philadelphia,
+for it was an old portrait, dark and dingy, of an ancestor;
+and I wondered if an ancestor so ancient as to grow dark
+and dingy in a frame did not make it easier to play the
+democrat and call every man comrade&mdash;or <i>Camerado</i>, I
+should say, as Walt Whitman said, with his curious fondness
+for foreign words and sounds. But though I saw him
+at home, he is more associated in my memory with the ferry-boat
+for Camden when my Uncle and I were on our
+way to the Gypsy's camping place near the reservoir;
+and with the corner of Front and Market and the bootblack's
+big chair by the Italian's candy and fruit stand
+where he loved to sit, and where I loved to see him,
+though, Philadelphian at heart, I trembled for his audacity;
+and with the Market Street horse-car, where he was
+already settled in his corner before it started and where
+the driver and the conductor, passing through, nodded to
+him and called him "Walt," and where he was as happy
+as the modern poet in his sixty-horse-power car. He was
+happiest when sitting out in front with the driver, and I
+have rarely been as proud as the afternoon he gave up that
+privileged seat to stay with my Uncle and myself inside.
+His greeting was always charming. He would take a hand
+of each of us, hold the two in his for a minute or so beaming
+upon us, never saying very much. I remember his
+leading us once, with our hands still in his, from the fruit-stand
+to the tobacconist's opposite to point out to my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>
+Uncle the wooden figure of an Indian at the door, for
+which he professed a great admiration as an example of the
+art of the people before they were trained in the Minor
+Arts.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs062.jpg" width="400" height="310" alt="THE ELEVATED AT MARKET STREET WHARF" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE ELEVATED AT MARKET STREET WHARF</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>These chance meetings were always the best, and he
+told us that he thought them so, that he loved his accidental
+meetings with friends&mdash;there were many he prized among
+his most valued reminiscences. And I remember his story
+of Longfellow having gone over to Camden purposely to
+call on him, and not finding him at home, and their running
+into each other on the ferry-boat to Market Street,
+and Longfellow saying that he had come from the house
+deeply disappointed, regretting the long quiet talk he had
+hoped for, but deciding that perhaps the strange chance
+of the meeting on the water was better. My Uncle, had he
+been hurrying to catch a train, would still have managed
+to talk philosophy and art education. But I remember
+Walt Whitman also saying that the ferry and the corner
+of Market Street and the Market Street car were hardly
+places for abstract discussion, though the few things said
+there were the less easily forgotten for being snatched
+joyfully by the way.</p>
+
+<p>It was one day in the Market Street car that he and
+my Uncle had the talk which left with me the profoundest
+impression. As a rule I was too engrossed in thinking
+what a great person I was, when in such company, to shine
+as a reporter. But on this occasion the subject was the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>
+School of Industrial Arts in which I was giving my Uncle
+the benefit of my incompetent assistance. He asked Walt
+Whitman to come and see it, telling him a little of its
+aims and methods. Whitman refused, amiably but positively.
+I cannot recall his exact words, but I gathered
+from them that he had no sympathy with schemes savouring
+of benevolence or reform, that he believed in leaving
+people to work out their own salvation, and this, coming
+as it did after I had seen for myself the terms he was on
+with the driver and conductor, expressed more eloquently
+than his verse his definition of democracy. I may be mistaken,
+but I thought then and have ever since that his belief
+in the people carried him to the point of thinking they
+knew better than the philanthropist what they needed and
+did not need. My Uncle was not of accord with him and I,
+who am neither democrat nor philanthropist, would not
+pretend to decide between them. My Uncle did not like
+Walt Whitman's attitude and refusal, convinced as he was
+of the good to the people that was to come of the reform
+he was initiating, though he was constitutionally incapable
+of meeting the people he was reforming on equal terms.
+The twinkle in Walt Whitman's eye when he refused gave
+me the clue to the large redeeming humour with which he
+looked upon a foolish world, seeing each individual in the
+place appointed, right in it, fitting into it, unfit for any
+other he did not make for himself of his own desire and
+courage&mdash;the humour without which the human tragedy
+would not be bearable.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I wish I could have had more talk with Whitman, I
+wish I had been older or more experienced, that I might
+have got nearer to him&mdash;or so I felt in those old days. I
+have now an idea that his silence was more effective than
+his speech, that if he had said more to any of his devoted
+following he might have been less of a prophet. But
+his tranquil presence was in itself sufficient to open a new
+outlook, and it reconciled me to the scheme of the universe
+for good or for ill. His personality impressed me far
+more than his poems. It seemed to me to explain them,
+to interpret them, as nothing else could&mdash;his few words of
+greeting worth pages of the critic's eloquent analysis.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII: PHILADELPHIA AND LITERATURE&mdash;CONTINUED</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>I had glimpses into other literary vistas, but mostly
+from a respectful and highly appreciative distance.
+How I wish I could recapture even as much as the
+shadow of the old rapturous awe with which any man or
+woman who had ever made a book inspired me!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/gs064.jpg" width="310" height="400" alt="DR. FURNESS&#39;S HOUSE, WEST WASHINGTON SQUARE,
+JUST BEFORE IT WAS PULLED DOWN" title="" /><br />
+<span class="caption">DR. FURNESS&#39;S HOUSE, WEST WASHINGTON SQUARE<br />
+<span style="font-size: smaller;">JUST BEFORE IT WAS PULLED DOWN</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>There was reason for awe when the man was Dr.
+Horace Howard Furness, the editor of Shakespeare, and
+if Philadelphia knew its duty better than to draw attention
+to so scholarly a performance by a Philadelphian, scholars
+out of Philadelphia, who were not hampered by Philadelphia
+conventions, hailed it as the best edition of Shakespeare
+there could be. I must always regret that in his
+case I succeeded in having no more than the glimpse.
+Most of my literary introductions came through my Uncle
+who, though he knew Dr. Furness, saw less and less of
+him as time went on, partly I think because of one of those
+small misunderstandings that are more unpardonable than
+the big offences&mdash;certainly they were to my Uncle. Dr.
+Furness' father, old Dr. Furness the Unitarian Minister,
+meeting him in the street one day, asked him gaily, but I
+have no doubt with genuine interest, how his fad, the school,
+was getting on. My Uncle, who could not stand having an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>
+enterprise so serious to him treated lightly by others, retorted
+by asking Dr. Furness how his fad the pulpit was
+getting on. The result was coolness. The chances are that
+Dr. Furness never
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>d
+the enormity of which he had
+been guilty, but my Uncle could neither forget his jest
+nor forgive him and his family for it. And his heart was
+not softened until many years afterwards, when in far
+Florence he heard that Dr. Furness wished for his return
+to Philadelphia that he might vindicate his claim, in danger
+of being overlooked, as the first to have introduced the
+study of the Minor Arts into the Public Schools.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Wister was another Philadelphia literary celebrity
+whose work had made her known to all America
+by name, the only way she was known to me. It was my
+loss, for they say she was more charming than her work.
+But to Philadelphia no charm of personality, no popularity
+of work, could shed lustre upon her name, which was her
+chief glory: literature was honoured when a Wister
+stooped to its practice. On her translations of German
+novels, Philadelphians of my generation were brought up.
+After <i>Faith Gartney's Girlhood</i> and <i>Queechy</i> and <i>The
+Wide, Wide World</i>, no tales were considered so innocuous
+for the young, not yet provided with the mild and exemplary
+adventures of the tedious Elsie. Would the <i>Old
+Mam'selle's Secret</i> survive re-reading, I wonder? The
+favourites of yesterday have a way of turning into the
+bores of to-day. Not long ago I tried re-reading Scott
+whom in my youth I adored, but his once magnificent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span>
+heroes had dwindled into puppets, their brilliant exploits
+into the empty bombast of Drury Lane and Wardour
+Street. If Scott cannot stand the test, what hope for the
+other old loves? I risk no more lost illusions.</p>
+
+<p>From no less a distance I looked to Mrs. Rebecca
+Harding Davis who, with Mrs. Wister, helped to supply
+the country with fiction, in her case original, while her son,
+Richard Harding Davis, was on the sensational brink
+of his career. And again from a distance I looked to
+Frank Stockton, with no idea that he was a Philadelphia
+celebrity&mdash;very likely every other Philadelphian was as
+ignorant, but that is no excuse for me. I had not found
+him out as my fellow citizen when I saw much of him some
+years later in London, nor did I find it out until recently
+when, distrustful of my Philadelphia tendency to look
+the other way if Philadelphians are distinguishing themselves,
+I consulted the authorities to make sure how great
+or how small was my knowledge of Philadelphia literature.
+From all this it will be seen that in those remote days I was
+very much on the literary outside in Philadelphia, but with
+the luck there to run up against some of the giants.</p>
+
+<p>Into the vista of the poets chance gave me one brief
+but more intimate glimpse. In a Germantown house&mdash;I
+am puzzled at this day to say whose&mdash;I was introduced one
+evening to Mrs. Florence Earle Coates and Dr. Francis
+Howard Williams, both already laurel-crowned, at a small
+gathering over which Walt Whitman presided. In his grey
+coat and soft shirt I remember he struck me as more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>
+dressed than the guests in their evening clothes, but I
+remember he also struck me as less at home in the worshipping
+parlour than in the bootblack's corner. The eloquence
+of his presence stands out in my memory vividly, though I
+have forgotten the name of the host or hostess to whom I
+am indebted for enjoying it, and I think it must have been
+then that I began to suspect there was more of a literary
+life in Philadelphia than I had imagined. I had no opportunity
+to get further than my suspicion, for it was very
+shortly after that J. and I undertook to carry out the plans
+we had been making on the old bench by the river in
+Bartram's Garden. Walt Whitman I never saw again,
+and of the group assembled about him nothing for many
+years.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 319px;">
+<img src="images/gs065.jpg" width="319" height="400" alt="THE GERMANTOWN ACADEMY" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE GERMANTOWN ACADEMY</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I came into closer contact with writers to whom literature
+and journalism were not merely a method of expression,
+but a means of livelihood. Philadelphia, with its
+magazines, as with so much else, had shown the way and
+other towns had lost no time in following and getting
+ahead. New York was in the magazine ascendant. <i>The
+Century</i> and <i>Harper's</i> had replaced <i>Graham's</i> and <i>Godey's
+Lady's Book</i> and <i>Peterson's</i>. But <i>Lippincott's</i> remained,
+and though the Editor, after his cruel letter of refusal,
+never deigned to notice me, it was some satisfaction to have
+been in actual correspondence with an author as distinguished
+as John Foster Kirk, the historian of Charles
+the Bold. When <i>Our Continent</i> was labouring to revive the
+old tradition of Philadelphia as a centre of publishers and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>
+periodicals, I got as far as the editorial office&mdash;very far
+indeed in my opinion&mdash;and there once or twice I saw Judge
+Tourgee, who had abandoned his reconstructive mission
+and judicial duties for an editorial post in Philadelphia,
+and who at the moment was more talked about than any
+American author, his <i>Fool's Errand</i> having given him the
+sort of fame that <i>Looking Backward</i> brought to Bellamy:
+ephemeral, but colossal while it lasted. Curiously, I recall
+nothing of the man himself&mdash;not his appearance, his
+manner, his talk. I think it must have been because, for
+me, he was overshadowed by his Art Editor, Miss Emily
+Sartain; my interest in him eclipsed by my admiration for
+her and my envy of a woman, so young and so handsome,
+who had attained to such an influential and responsible
+post. I thought if I ever should reach half way up so
+stupendous a height, I could die content. Louise Stockton,
+Frank Stockton's sister, and Helen Campbell were on the
+staff, in my eyes amazing women with regular weekly tasks
+and regular weekly salaries. I might argue for my comfort
+that there was greater liberty in being a free lance,
+but how wonderful to do work that an editor wanted every
+week, was willing to pay for every week!&mdash;wonderful to
+me, anyway, who had just had my first taste of earning
+an income, but not of earning it regularly and without
+fail. My Uncle wrote more than once for Tourgee; J.
+and I contributed those articles which were further excuses
+for our walks together: Judge Tourgee, to his own loss,
+thinking it a recommendation for a contributor to be a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>
+Philadelphian as he would not have thought had he known
+his Philadelphia better. <i>Our Continent</i> was too Philadelphian
+to be approved in Philadelphia or to be in demand
+out of it. One symbol of literary respectability the town
+had in <i>Lippincott's</i>, and one was as much as it could then
+support. <i>Our Continent</i> came to an end either just before
+or just after J. and I set out on our travels. There were
+other women in journalism who excited my envy. Mrs.
+Lucy Hooper's letters to the <i>Evening Telegraph</i> struck
+me as the last and finest word in foreign correspondence.
+I never, even upon closer acquaintance, lost my awe of
+Mrs. Sarah Hallowell who was intimately associated with
+the <i>Ledger</i>, or of Miss Julia Ewing, though her association
+with the same paper had nothing to do with its literary
+side.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Now and then I was stirred to the depths by my
+glimpse of writers from other parts of the world. It was
+only when a prophet was a home product that Philadelphia
+kept its eyes tight shut; when the prophet came from
+another town it opened them wide, and its arms wider than
+its eyes, and showed him what a strenuous business it was
+to be the victim of Philadelphia hospitality. It was rather
+pleased if the prophet happened to be a lord, or had a
+handle of some kind to his name, but an author would
+answer for want of something better, especially if he came
+from abroad. No Englishman on a lecture tour was
+allowed to pass by Philadelphia.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Immediately on his arrival, the distinguished visitor
+was appropriated by George W. Childs, who had undertaken
+to play in Philadelphia the part of the Lord Mayor
+in the City of London and do the town's official entertaining,
+and who was known far and wide for it&mdash;"he has
+entertained all the English who come over here," Matthew
+Arnold wrote home of him, and visitors of every other
+nationality could have written the same of their own people
+passing through Philadelphia. You would meet him in the
+late afternoon, fresh from the <i>Ledger</i> office, strolling up
+Chestnut Street of which he was another of the conspicuous
+figures&mdash;not because of any personal beauty, but because
+he did not believe in the Philadelphia practice of
+hiding one's light under a bushel, and had managed to
+make himself known by sight to every other man and
+woman in the street; just as old Richard Vaux was; or
+old "Aunt Ad" Thompson, everybody's aunt, in her brilliant
+finery, growing ever more brilliant with years; or
+that distinguished lawyer, Ben Brewster, "Burnt-faced
+Brewster," whose genius for the law made every one forget
+the terrible marks a fire in his childhood had left upon his
+face. Philadelphia would not have been Philadelphia
+without these familiar figures. Childs seldom appeared on
+Chestnut Street without Tony Drexel, straight from
+some big operation on the Stock Exchange, the two representing
+all that was most successful in the newspaper
+and banking world of Philadelphia: their friendship
+now commemorated in that new combination of names<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>
+as familiar to the new and changing generation as
+Cadwallader-Biddle was to the old and changeless. Between
+them it was the exception when there was not an
+emperor, or a prince, or an author, or an actor, or some
+other variety of a distinguished visitor being put through
+his paces and shown life in Philadelphia, on the way to the
+house of one or the other and to the feast prepared in his
+honour. At the feast, if there was speaking to be done, it
+was invariably Wayne MacVeagh who did it. As I
+was not greatly in demand at public functions, I heard
+him but once&mdash;a memorable occasion which did not, however,
+impress me with the brilliance of his oratory.</p>
+
+<p>Matthew Arnold, the latest distinguished visitor, was
+to lecture, and I had been looking forward to the evening
+with an ardour for which alas! I have lost the faculty.
+Literary celebrities were still novelties&mdash;more than that,
+divinities&mdash;in my eyes. Among them, Matthew Arnold
+held particularly high rank, one of the chief heroes of my
+worship, and many of my contemporaries worshipped with
+me. Youth was then, as always, acutely conscious of the
+burden of life, and we made our luxury of his pessimism.
+I could spout whole passages of his poems, whole poems
+when they were short, though now I could not probably
+get further than their titles. There had been a dinner
+first&mdash;there always was a dinner first in Philadelphia&mdash;and
+a Philadelphia dinner being no light matter, he arrived late.
+The delay would have done no harm had not Wayne MacVeagh,
+who presided, introduced him in a speech to which,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span>
+once it was started, there seemed no end. It went on and
+on, the audience growing restless, with Matthew Arnold
+himself an object of pity, so obvious was his embarrassment.
+Few lecturers could have saved the situation, and
+Matthew Arnold would have been a dull one under the
+most favourable circumstances. I went away disillusioned,
+reconciled to meeting my heroes in their books. And I
+could understand when, years later, I read the letters he
+wrote home, why the tulip trees seemed to have as much to
+do as the people in making Philadelphia the most attractive
+city he had seen in America.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs066.jpg" width="400" height="309" alt="THE STATE HOUSE FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE STATE HOUSE FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Another distinguished visitor who lectured about this
+period came off more gaily:&mdash;Oscar Wilde, to whose
+lecture I had looked forward with no particular excitement,
+for I was young enough to feel only impatience with his
+pose. After listening to him, I had to admit that he was
+amusing. His affected dress, his deliberate posturings, his
+flamboyant phrases and slow lingering over them as if loth
+to let them go, made him an exhilarating contrast to
+Matthew Arnold, shocked as I was by a writer to whom
+literature was not always in dead earnest, nor to teach its
+goal, even though it was part of his pose to ape the teacher,
+the voice in the wilderness. And he was so refreshingly enthusiastic
+when off the platform, as I saw him afterwards in
+my Uncle's rooms. He let himself go without reserve as he
+recalled the impressions of his visit to Walt Whitman in
+Camden and his meeting with the cowboy in the West.
+To him, the cowboy was the most picturesque product of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>
+America from whom he borrowed hat and cloak and appeared
+in them, an amazing spectacle. And I find in some
+prim, priggish, distressingly useless little notes I made at
+the time, that it was a perfect, a supreme moment when he
+talked to Walt Whitman who had been to him the master,
+at whose feet he had sat since he was a young lad, and who
+was as pure and earnest and noble and grand as he had
+hoped. That to Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde seemed "a
+great big splendid boy" is now matter of history.</p>
+
+<p>I know that Philadelphia entertained Wilde, and so I
+fancy him staying with George W. Childs, dining with
+Tony Drexel, and being talked to after dinner by Wayne
+MacVeagh, though I cannot be sure, as Philadelphia, with
+singular lack of appreciation, included me in none of the
+entertaining. I saw him only in Horticultural Hall, where
+he lectured, and at my Uncle's. This was seeing him often
+enough to be confirmed in my conviction that literature
+might be a stimulating and emotional adventure.</p>
+
+<p>Many interesting people of many varieties were to be
+met in my Uncle's rooms. I remember the George Lathrops
+who, like Lowell and Poe of old, had come to Philadelphia
+for work: Lathrop rather embittered and disappointed,
+I thought; Mrs. Lathrop&mdash;Rose Hawthorne&mdash;a
+marvellous woman in my estimation, not because of her
+beautiful gold-red hair, nor her work, which I do not believe
+was of special importance, but as the daughter of
+Nathaniel Hawthorne and therefore a link between me in
+my insignificance and the great of Brook Farm and Concord.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>
+I remember editors from New York, impressive
+creatures; and Members of Parliament, hangers-on of the
+literary world of London; and actresses, its lions, when in
+England:&mdash;Janauschek, heavily tragic off as on the stage,
+for whom my Uncle's admiration was less limited than
+mine; and Miss Genevieve Ward, playing in <i>Forget-Me-Not</i>,
+her one big success, for she failed in the popularity to
+repeat it that comes so easily to many less accomplished.
+How timidly I sat and listened, marvelling to find myself
+there, feeling like the humble who shall be exalted in the
+Bible, looking upon my Uncle's rooms as the literary
+threshold from which I was graciously permitted to watch
+the glorious company within.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>I had gone no further than this first, tremulous ardent
+stage in my career when my Uncle deserted his memorable
+rooms never to return, and J. and I started on the journey
+that we thought might last a year&mdash;as long as the money
+held out, we had said, to the discomfort of the family who
+no doubt saw me promptly on their hands again&mdash;and that
+did not bring me back to Philadelphia for over a quarter
+of a century. Of literary events during my absence, somebody
+else must make the record.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 278px;">
+<img src="images/gs067.jpg" width="278" height="400" alt="&quot;THE LITTLE STREET OF CLUBS,&quot; CAMAC STREET ABOVE SPRUCE STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;THE LITTLE STREET OF CLUBS,&quot; CAMAC STREET ABOVE SPRUCE STREET</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>When I did go back after all those years, I was conscious
+that there must have been events for a record to be
+made of, or I could not have accounted for the change.
+Literature was now in the air. Local prophets were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span>
+acknowledged, if not by all Philadelphia, by little groups
+of satellites revolving round them. Literary lights had
+come from under the bushel and were shining in high
+places. Societies had been industriously multiplying for
+the encouragement of literature. All such encouragement
+in my time had devolved upon the Penn Club that patronized
+literature, among its other interests, and wrote about
+books in its monthly journal and invited their authors to
+its meetings. During my absence, not only had the Penn
+Club continued to flourish&mdash;to such good purpose that J.
+and I were honoured by one of these invitations and felt
+that never again could Fame and Fate bring us such a
+triumphant moment, except when the Academy of Fine
+Arts paid us the same honour and so upset our old belief
+that no Philadelphian could ever be a prophet in Philadelphia!&mdash;but
+Philadelphia had broken out into a multitude
+of Clubs and Societies, beginning with the Franklin Inn,
+for Franklin is not to be got away from even in Clubland,
+and his Inn, I am assured, is the most comprehensive
+literary centre to which every author, every artist, every
+editor, every publisher who thinks himself something belongs
+to the number of one hundred&mdash;that there should be
+the chance of one hundred with the right to think themselves
+something in Philadelphia is the wonder!&mdash;and in
+the house in Camac Street, which one Philadelphian I
+know calls "The Little Street of Clubs," the members
+meet for light lunch and much talk and, it may be, other
+rites of which I could speak only from hearsay, my sex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span>
+disqualifying me from getting my knowledge of them
+at first hand. And there is a Business and Professional
+Club and a Poor Richard, bringing one back to Franklin
+again, in the same Little Street. And there are Browning
+Societies, and Shakespeare Societies, and Drama-Reforming
+Societies, and Pegasus Societies, and Societies for
+members to read their own works to each other; and more
+Societies than the parent Society discoursing in the woods
+along the Schuylkill could have
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'dreamt' and 'dreamed' were used in this text. This was retained.">dreamed</ins>
+of: with the
+Contemporary Club to assemble their variously divided
+ends and objects under one head, and to entertain literature
+as George W. Childs had entertained it, and, going
+further, to pay literature for being entertained, if literature
+expresses itself in the form of readings and lectures by
+those who practise it professionally. The change disconcerted
+me more than ever when I, Philadelphia born,
+was assured of a profitable welcome if I would speak to
+the Club on anything. The invitation was tentative and
+unofficial, but the Contemporary Club need be in no
+fear. It may make the invitation official if it will, and
+never a penny the poorer will it be for my presence: I
+am that now rare creature, a shy woman subject to stage
+fright. And I cannot help thinking that, despite the
+amiability to the native, the stranger, simply because he is
+a stranger, continues to have the preference, so many are
+the Englishmen and Englishwomen invited to deliver
+themselves before the Club who never could gather an
+audience at home.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/gs068.jpg" width="301" height="400" alt="DOWN SANSOM STREET FROM EIGHTH STREET.
+THE LOW HOUSES AT SEVENTH STREET HAVE SINCE BEEN TORN DOWN AND THE WESTERN END OF THE CURTIS BUILDING NOW OCCUPIES
+THEIR PLACE" title="" /><br />
+<span class="caption">DOWN SANSOM STREET FROM EIGHTH STREET<br />
+<span style="font-size: smaller;">THE LOW HOUSES AT SEVENTH STREET HAVE SINCE BEEN TORN DOWN AND THE WESTERN END OF THE CURTIS BUILDING NOW OCCUPIES
+THEIR PLACE</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And Philadelphia has recaptured the lead in the
+periodical publication that pays, and I found the Curtis
+Building the biggest sky-scraper in Philadelphia, towering
+above the quiet of Independence Square, a brick
+and marble and pseudo-classical monument to the <i>Ladies'
+Home Journal</i> and the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i>, and if in
+the race literature lags behind, what matter when merit is
+vouched for in solid dollars and cents? What matter,
+when the winds of heaven conspire with bricks and mortar
+to make the passer-by respect it? I am told that on a
+windy day no man can pass the building without a fight
+for it, and no woman without the help of stalwart policemen.
+In her own organ of fashion and feminine sentiment,
+she has raised up a power against which, even with
+the vote to back her, she could not prevail.</p>
+
+<p>And Philadelphia is not content to have produced the
+first daily newspaper but is bent on making it as big as it
+can be made anywhere. If I preserved my morning
+paper for two or three days in my hotel bedroom, I fairly
+waded in newspapers. On Sundays if I carried upstairs
+only the <i>Ledger</i> and the <i>North American</i>, I was
+deep in a flood of Comic Supplements, and Photograph
+Supplements, and Sport Supplements, and every possible
+sort of Supplement that any other American newspaper
+in any other American town can boast of&mdash;all the sad
+stuff that nobody has time to look at but is what the newspaper
+editor is under the delusion that the public wants&mdash;in
+Philadelphia, one genuine Philadelphia touch added<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span>
+in the letters and gossip of "Peggy Shippen" and "Sally
+Wister," names with the double recommendation to Philadelphia
+of venerable age and unquestionable Philadelphia
+respectability.</p>
+
+<p>And I found that the Philadelphia writer has increased
+in numbers and in popularity, whether for better or worse
+I will not say. I have not the courage for the
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'role' and 'r&ocirc;le' were used in this text. This was retained.">r&ocirc;le</ins> of
+critic on my own hearth, knowing the penalty for too much
+honesty at home. Nor is there any reason why I should
+hesitate and bungle and make myself unpleasant enemies
+in doing indifferently what Philadelphia, in its new
+incarnation, does with so much grace. I have now but
+to name the Philadelphian's book in Philadelphia to be
+informed that it is monumental&mdash;but to mention the
+Philadelphia writer of verse to hear that he is a marvel&mdash;but
+to enquire for the Philadelphia writer of prose to be
+assured that he is a genius. There is not the weeest, most
+modest little Philadelphia goose that does not sail along
+valiantly in the Philadelphia procession of swans. The
+new pose is prettier than the old if scarcely more successful
+in preserving a sense of proportion, and it saves me
+from committing myself. I can state the facts that strike
+me, without prejudice, as the lawyers say.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>One is that the last quarter of a century has interested
+the Philadelphia writer in Philadelphia as he had not been
+since the days of John Watson. Most Philadelphians<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span>
+owned a copy of Watson's <i>Annals</i>. I have one on my
+desk before me that belonged to J.'s Father, one must
+have been in my Grandfather's highly correct Philadelphia
+house, though I cannot recall it there, for a
+Philadelphian's duty was to buy Watson just as it was to
+take in <i>Lippincott's</i>, and Philadelphians never shirked
+their obligations. They probably would not have been
+able to say what was in Watson, or, if they could, would
+have shrugged their shoulders and dismissed him for a
+crank. But they would have owned the <i>Annals</i>, all the
+same. Then the Centennial shook them up and insisted on
+the value of Philadelphia's history, and Philadelphians
+were no longer in fashion if they did not feel, or affect,
+an interest in Philadelphia and its past. After the Centennial
+the few who began to write about it could rely
+upon the many to read about it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 304px;">
+<img src="images/gs069.jpg" width="304" height="400" alt="THE DOUBLE STAIRWAY IN THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE DOUBLE STAIRWAY IN THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Once, the Philadelphian who was not ashamed to write
+stories made them out of the fashionable life of Philadelphia.
+Dr. Weir Mitchell inaugurated the new era, or the
+revolt, or the secession, or whatever name may be given
+it with the first historical novel of Philadelphia. It is
+fortunate, when I come to <i>Hugh Wynne</i>, that I have renounced
+criticism and all its pretences. As a Friend by
+marriage, if such a thing is possible, I cannot underestimate
+the danger. Only a Friend born a Friend is qualified
+to write the true Quaker novel, and I am told by this
+kind of Friend that <i>Hugh Wynne</i> is not free from misrepresentations,
+misconceptions and misunderstandings.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span>
+This may be true&mdash;I breathe more freely for not being
+able to affirm or to deny it&mdash;but, as Henley used to say,
+there it is&mdash;the first romantic gold out of the mine Philadelphia
+history is for all who work it. Since these lines
+were written the news has reached me that never again
+will Dr. Mitchell work this or any other mine. I cannot
+imagine Philadelphia without him. When I last saw him,
+it seemed to me that no Philadelphian was more alive,
+more in love with life, better equipped to enjoy life in the
+way Philadelphia has fashioned it&mdash;the Philadelphia life
+in which his passing away must leave no less a gap than
+the disappearance of the State House or the Pennsylvania
+Hospital would leave in the Philadelphia streets. If Dr.
+Mitchell's digging brought up the romance of Philadelphia,
+Mr. Sydney George Fisher's has unearthed the facts,
+for Philadelphia was the root of the great growth of Pennsylvania
+which is the avowed subject of his history. And
+the men who helped to make this history have now their
+biographers at home, though hitherto the task of their
+biography had been left chiefly to anybody anywhere else
+who would accept the responsibility, and my Brother, Edward
+Robins, Secretary of the University of Pennsylvania,
+has written the life of Benjamin Franklin, without whom
+the University would not have been, at least would not
+have been what it is. And in so many different directions
+has the interest spread that my friend since <i>Our Convent
+Days</i>, Miss Agnes Repplier, has taken time from her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span>
+studies in literature and from building a monument to her
+beloved Agrippina to write its story. When she sent me
+her book, I opened it with grave apprehensions. In the
+volumes she had published, humour was the chief charm,
+and how would humour help her to see Philadelphia? I
+need not have been uneasy. There is no true humour
+without tenderness. If she had her smile for the town
+we all love, as we all have, it was a tender smile, and I
+think no reader can close her book without wanting to
+know still more of Philadelphia than it was her special
+business in that place to tell them. And that no vein of
+the Philadelphia mine might be left unworked. Miss Anne
+Hollingsworth Wharton has busied herself to gather up
+old traditions and old reminiscences, dipping into old
+letters and diaries, opening wide Colonial doorways, resurrecting
+Colonial Dames, reshaping the old social and domestic
+life disdained by historians. The numerous editions
+into which her books have gone explain that she has not
+worked for her own edification alone, that Philadelphia,
+once it was willing to hear any talk about itself, could not
+hear too much. And after Miss Wharton have come Mr.
+Mather Lippincott and Mr. Eberlein to collect the old
+Colonial houses and their memories, followed by Mr.
+Herbert C. Wise and Mr. Beidleman to study their architecture:
+just in time if Philadelphia perseveres in its crime
+of moving out of the houses for the benefit of the Russian
+Jew and of mixing their memories with squalor. Of all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span>
+the ways in which Philadelphia has changed, none is to me
+more remarkable than in this rekindling of interest out
+of which has sprung the new group of writers in its praise.</p>
+
+<p>Nor were the Philadelphia poets idle during my absence.
+Dr. Mitchell had not before sung so freely in public,
+nor had he ranked, as I am told he did at the end, his
+verse higher than his medicine. Mrs. Coates' voice had
+not carried so far. Dr. Francis Howard Williams had not
+rhymed for Pageants in praise of Philadelphia. Mr.
+Harrison Morris had not joined the Philadelphia choir.
+Mr. Harvey M. Watts had not been heard in the land. I
+have it on good authority that yearly the Philadelphia
+poets meet and read their verses to each other, a custom of
+which I cannot speak from personal knowledge as I have
+no passport into the magic circle, and perhaps it is just as
+well for my peace of mind that I have not. Rumour declares
+that, on certain summer evenings, a suburban porch
+here or there is made as sweet with their singing as with the
+perfume of the roses and syringa in the garden, and I am
+content with the rumour for there is always the chance the
+music might not be so sweet if I heard it. I like to remember
+that the poets on their porch, whether their voices
+be sweet or harsh, descend in a direct line from the young
+men who wandered, discoursing of literature, along the
+Schuylkill. And Philadelphia's love of poetry is to be
+assured not only by its own singers but by its care, now
+as in the past, for the song of others. Horace Howard<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span>
+Furness, Jr., has taken over his father's task and, in so
+doing, will see that Philadelphia continues to be famous
+for the most complete edition of Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>There had been equal activity during my absence
+among the story-tellers. Since Brockden Brown, not one
+had written so ambitious a tale as <i>Hugh Wynne</i>, not one
+had ever laughed so good-humouredly at Philadelphia as
+Thomas A. Janvier in his short stories of the Hutchinson
+Ports and Rittenhouse Smiths&mdash;what gaiety has gone out
+with his death! Not one had ever seen character with such
+truth as Owen Wister,&mdash;if only he could understand that
+as good material awaits him in Philadelphia as in Virginia
+and Wyoming. And John Luther Long is another
+of the story-tellers Philadelphia can claim though, like
+Mr. Wister, he shows a greater fancy for far-away lands
+or to wander among strange people at home.</p>
+
+<p>There is no branch of literature that Philadelphia has
+not taken under its active protection. Who has contributed
+more learnedly to the records of the Inquisition
+than Henry Charles Lea, or to the chronicles of the law in
+the United States than Mr. Hampton L. Carson and Mr.
+Charles Burr, duly conscious as Philadelphia lawyers
+should be of the Philadelphian's legal responsibility? Who
+can compete in knowledge of the evolution of the playing
+card with Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer or rival her
+collection? Who ever thought of writing the history of
+autobiography before Mrs. Anna Robeson Burr? The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span>
+time had but to come for an admirer to play the Boswell
+to Walt Whitman, and Mr. Traubel appeared. When
+Columbia wanted a Professor of Journalism, Philadelphia
+sent it Dr. Talcott Williams. When England seemed
+a comfortable shelter for research there was no need to be
+in a hurry about, Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith showed what
+could be done with an exhaustive study of Dr. Donne,
+though why he was not showing instead what could be
+done with the Loganian Library, where the chance to
+show it was his for the claiming, he alone can say. When
+such recondite subjects as Egyptian and Assyrian called
+for interpreters, Philadelphia was again on the spot with
+Mrs. Cornelius Stevenson and Dr. Morris Jastrow. And
+for authorities on the drama and history, it gives us Mr.
+Felix Schelling and Dr. McMaster,&mdash;but perhaps for me
+to attempt to complete the list would only be to make it
+incomplete. Here, too, I tread on dangerous ground. It
+may be cowardly, but it is safe to give the tribute of my
+recognition to all that is being accomplished by the University
+of Pennsylvania and its scholars&mdash;by Bryn Mawr
+College and its students&mdash;by the Historical Society of
+Pennsylvania&mdash;by other Colleges and learned bodies&mdash;by
+innumerable individuals&mdash;and not invite exposure by
+venturing into detail and upon comment. It is in these
+emergencies that the sense of my limitations comes to
+my help.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 309px;">
+<img src="images/gs070.jpg" width="309" height="400" alt="CARPENTER&#39;S HALL, BUILT 1771" title="" />
+<span class="caption">CARPENTER&#39;S HALL, BUILT 1771</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>At least I am not afraid to say that, on my return, I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span>
+fancied I found this side of Philadelphia life less a side
+apart, less isolated, more identified with the social side,
+and the social side, for its part, accepting the identification.
+The University and Bryn Mawr could not have played
+the same social part in the Philadelphia I remember. Perhaps
+I shall express what I mean more exactly if I say
+that, returning with fresh eyes, I saw Philadelphia ready
+and pleased, as I had not remembered it, to acknowledge
+openly talents and activities it once made believe to ignore
+or despise&mdash;to go further really and, having for the first
+time squarely faced its accomplishments, for the first time
+to blow its own trumpet. The new spirit is one I approve.
+I would not call all the work that comes out of Philadelphia
+monumental, as some Philadelphians do, or Philadelphia
+itself a modern Athens, or the hub of the literary
+universe, or any other absurd name. But I do think that
+in literature and learning it is now contributing, as it
+always has contributed, its fair share to the country, and
+that if Philadelphia does not say so, the rest of the country
+will not, for the rest of the country is still under the delusion
+that Philadelphia knows how to do nothing but sleep.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV: PHILADELPHIA AND ART</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>Ignorance of art and all relating to it could not
+have been greater than mine when I paid that first
+eventful visit to J.'s studio on Chestnut Street.</p>
+
+<p>I lay the blame only partly on my natural capacity
+for ignorance. It was a good deal the fault of the sort of
+education I received and the influences among which I
+lived&mdash;the fault of the place and the period in which I
+grew up. Nominally, art was not neglected at the Convent.
+A drawing-class was conducted by an old bear of a
+German, who also gave music lessons, and who prospered
+so on his monopoly of the arts with us that he was
+able to live in a delightful cottage down near the river.
+Drawing was an "extra" of which I was never thought
+worthy, but I used to see the class at the tables set out for
+the purpose in the long low hall leading to the Chapel,
+the master grumbling and growling and scolding, the
+pupils laboriously copying with crayon or chalk little
+cubes and geometrical figures or, at a more advanced
+stage, the old-fashioned copy-book landscape and building,
+rubbing in and rubbing out, wrestling with the composition
+as if it were a problem in algebra. The Convent
+could take neither credit, nor discredit, for the system;
+it was the one then in vogue in every school, fashionable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span>
+or otherwise, and not so far removed, after all, from
+systems followed to this day in certain Academies of Art.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs071.jpg" width="400" height="306" alt="INDEPENDENCE HALL&mdash;LENGTHWISE VIEW" title="" />
+<span class="caption">INDEPENDENCE HALL&mdash;LENGTHWISE VIEW</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Another class was devoted to an art then considered
+very beautiful, called Grecian Painting. It was not my
+privilege to study this either, but I gathered from friends
+who did that it was of the simplest: on the back of an
+engraving, preferably of a religious subject and prepared
+by an ingenious process that made it transparent,
+the artist dabbed his colours according to written instructions.
+The result, glazed and framed, was supposed to
+resemble, beyond the detection of any save an expert, a
+real oil painting and was held in high esteem.</p>
+
+<p>A third class was in the elegant art of making wax
+flowers and, goodness knows why, my Father squandered
+an appreciable sum of his declining fortunes on having me
+taught it. I am the more puzzled by his desire to bestow
+upon me this accomplishment because none of the other
+girls' fathers shared his ambition for their daughters and
+I was the only member of the class. Alone, in a room at
+the top of the house&mdash;chosen no doubt for the light, as if
+the deeds there done ought not to have been shrouded in
+darkness&mdash;I worked many hours under the tuition of
+Mother Alicia, cutting up little sheets of wax into leaves
+and petals, colouring them, sticking them together, and
+producing in the end two horrible masterpieces&mdash;one a
+water-lily placed on a mirror under a glass shade, the
+other a basket of carnations and roses and camelias&mdash;both
+of which masterpieces my poor family, to avoid hurting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span>
+my feelings, had to place in the parlour and keep there I
+blush to remember how long. It must be admitted that
+this was scarcely an achievement to encourage an interest
+in art. For the appreciation of art, as for its practice, it
+is important to have nothing to unlearn from the beginning;
+mine was the sort of training to reduce me to the
+necessity of unlearning everything; and most of my contemporaries,
+on leaving school, were in the same plight.</p>
+
+<p>My eyes were no better trained than my hands. Works
+of art at the Convent consisted of the usual holy statues
+designed for our spiritual, not &aelig;sthetic edification; the
+Stations of the Cross whose merit was no less spiritual;
+two copies of Murillo and Rafael which my Father, in the
+fervour of conversion, presented to the Mother Superior;
+and a picture of St. Elizabeth of Hungary that adorned
+the Convent parlour, where we all felt it belonged, such
+a marvel to us was its combination of
+brilliantly-<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'colored' and 'coloured' were used in this text. This was retained.">coloured</ins>
+needle-and-brush work.</p>
+
+<p>Illustrated books there must have been in the ill-assorted
+hodge-podge of a collection in the Library from
+which we obtained our reading for Thursday afternoons
+and Sundays. But though I doubt if there was a book
+I had not sampled, even if I had not been able to read it
+straight through, I can recall no illustrations except the
+designs by Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, made
+for Moxon's Tennyson and reproduced by the Harpers
+for a cheap American edition of the Poems, a copy
+of which was given to me one year as a prize. Little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span>
+barbarian as I was, I disliked the drawings of the Pre-Raphaelites
+because they mystified me&mdash;the Lady of
+Shalott, entangled in her wide floating web, the finest
+drawing Holman Hunt ever made; the company of weeping
+queens in the Vale of Avalon, in Rossetti's harmoniously
+crowded design&mdash;when I flattered myself I understood
+everything that was to be understood, more especially
+Tennyson's Poems, many of which I could recite
+glibly from beginning to end&mdash;and did recite diligently to
+myself at hours when I ought to have been busy with the
+facts and figures in the class books before me. Most
+people, young or old, dislike anything which shows them
+how much less they understand than they think they do.</p>
+
+<p>Of the history of art I was left in ignorance as abject,
+the next to nothing I knew gleaned from a <i>Lives of the
+Artists</i> adapted to children, a favourite book in the
+Library, one providing me with the theme for my sole
+serious effort in drama&mdash;a three-act play, Michael Angelo
+its hero, which, with a success many dramatists might
+envy. I wrote, produced, acted in, and found an audience
+of good-natured nuns for, all at the ripe age of eleven.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>When I left the Convent for the holidays and eventually
+"for good," little in my new surroundings was calculated
+to increase my knowledge of art or to teach me the
+first important fact, as a step to knowledge, that I knew
+absolutely nothing on the subject. In my Grandfather's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span>
+house, art was represented by the family portraits, the
+engraving after Gilbert Stuart's Washington, the illustrated
+lamp shade, and the Rogers Group. My Father,
+re-established in a house of his own, displayed an unaccountably
+liberal taste, straying from the Philadelphia
+standard to the extent of decorating his parlour walls
+with engravings of Napoleon he had picked up in Paris&mdash;to
+one, printed in colour, attaching a value which I doubt
+if the facts would justify, though, as I have never come
+across it in any collection, Museum, or Gallery, it may be
+rarer and, therefore, more valuable, than I think. Other
+fruits of his old journeys to Paris were two engravings,
+perhaps after Guys, of two famous ladies of that town,
+whose presence in our prim and proper and highly domestic
+dining-room seems to me the most incongruous
+accident in an otherwise correctly-appointed Philadelphia
+household. When I think of Napoleon replacing Washington
+on our walls, I suspect my Father of having broken
+loose from the Philadelphia traces in his youth, though
+by the time I knew him the prints were the only signs of a
+momentary dash for freedom on the part of so scrupulous
+a Philadelphian.</p>
+
+<p>It is curious that illustrations should have as small a
+place in my memory of home life as of the Convent. The
+men of the Golden Age of the Sixties had published their
+best work long before I had got through school, and in my
+childhood books gave me my chief amusement. But I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span>
+remember nothing of their fine designs. The earlier
+Cruikshank drawings for Dickens I knew well in the
+American edition which my Father owned, and never so
+long as I live can I see the Dickens world except as it
+is shown in the much over-rated Cruikshank interpretations.
+Other memories are of the highly-finished, sentimental
+steel-engravings of Scott's heroines, including Meg
+Merrilies, whom I still so absurdly associate with Crazy
+Norah. Another series of portraits, steel-engravings, as
+highly-finished and but slightly less insipid, illustrated my
+Father's edition of Thiers' <i>French Revolution</i> through
+which, one conscientious winter, I considered it my duty
+to wade. And I recall also the large volumes of photographs
+after Rafael and other masters that, in the
+Eighteen-Seventies, came into fashion for Christmas
+presents and parlour-table books, and that I think must
+have heralded the new departure the Centennial is supposed
+to have inaugurated.</p>
+
+<p>If I try to picture to myself the interior of the houses
+where I used to visit, art in them too seems best represented
+by family portraits no more remarkable than my
+Grandfather's, by the engraving of Stuart's Washington,
+or of Penn signing the Treaty with the Indians, or of the
+American Army crossing the Delaware, all three part of
+the traditional decoration of the Philadelphia hall and
+dining-room, and by a Rogers Group and an illustrated
+lamp shade. The library in which a friend first showed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span>
+me a volume of Hogarth's engravings I remember as exceptional.
+But I have an idea that had I possessed greater
+powers of appreciation then, I should have a keener
+memory now of other houses full of interesting pictures
+and prints and illustrated books, which I did not see simply
+because my eyes had not been trained to see them.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly, there were Philadelphia collections of these
+things then, as there always have been&mdash;only they were
+not heard of and talked about as they are now, or, if they
+were, it was to dismiss their collecting as an amiable fad.
+Mr. John S. Phillips had got together the engravings
+which the Pennsylvania Academy is to-day happy to
+possess. People who were interested did not have to be
+told that Mr. Claghorn's collection was perhaps the finest
+in the country; J. was one of the wise minority, and often
+on Sundays took advantage of Mr. Claghorn's generosity
+in letting anybody with the intelligence to
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins> the
+privilege come to look at his prints and study them; but
+I, who had not
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+to be interested, knew nothing of
+the collection until I knew J. Gebbie and Barrie's store
+flourished in Walnut Street as it hardly could had there
+not been people in Philadelphia, as Gebbie once wrote to
+Frederick Keppel, who collected "these smoky, poky
+old prints." Gebbie and Barrie have gone, but Barrie remains,
+a publisher of art books, and there are other dealers
+no less important and perhaps more enterprising, who
+prosper, as one of them has recently assured me they could
+not, if they depended for their chief support upon Philadelphia.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span>
+But Philadelphia gives, as it gave, solid foundations
+of support, with the difference that to-day it takes
+good care the world should know it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 305px;">
+<img src="images/gs072.jpg" width="305" height="400" alt="GIRARD COLLEGE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">GIRARD COLLEGE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>A few Philadelphians collected pictures. One of the
+show places, more select and exclusive than the Mint and
+Girard College, for the rare visitor to the town with a soul
+above dancing and dining, was Mr. Gibson's gallery in
+Walnut Street, open on stated days to anybody properly
+introduced, or it may be that only a visiting card with a
+proper address was necessary for admission. The less I
+say about the Gallery the better, for I never went to Mr.
+Gibson's myself, though I knew the house as I passed it for
+one apart in Philadelphia&mdash;one where so un-Philadelphia-like
+a possession as a picture gallery was allowed to disturb
+the Philadelphian's first-story arrangement of front
+and back parlours. The collection can now be visited,
+without any preliminary formalities, at the Academy of
+Fine Arts. Mrs. Bloomfield Moore was still living in
+Philadelphia and she must have begun collecting though,
+well as I knew the inside of her house in my young days,
+I hesitate to assert it as a fact&mdash;which shows my unpardonable
+blindness to most things in life worth while. I never,
+as far as I remember, went anywhere for the express purpose
+of looking at paintings. I had not even the curiosity
+which is the next best thing to knowledge and understanding.
+I have said how meagre are my impressions of the
+old Academy on Chestnut Street. It is a question to
+me whether I had ever seen more than the outside of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span>
+new Academy at Broad and Cherry Streets before I met
+J. To go to the exhibitions there had not as yet come
+within the list of things Philadelphians who were not
+artists made a point of doing. Altogether, judging from
+my own recollections, Philadelphians did not bother about
+art, and did not stop to ask whether there was any to
+bother about in Philadelphia, or not.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Their indifference was their loss. The art, with a
+highly respectable pedigree, was there for Philadelphia to
+enjoy and be proud of, if Philadelphia had not been as
+reticent about it as about all its other accomplishments
+and possessions. I have a decided suspicion that I have
+come to a subject about which I might do well to observe
+the same reticence, not only as a Philadelphian, but as the
+wife of an artist. For if, as the wife of a Friend, I have
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+that only Friends are qualified to write of themselves,
+as the wife of an artist I have reason to believe
+it more discreet to leave all talk of art to artists, though
+discretion in this regard has not been one of the virtues
+of my working life. But just now, I am talking not so
+much of art as of my attitude towards art which must have
+been the attitude of the outsider in Philadelphia, or else it
+would not have been mine. As for the genealogy of Philadelphia
+art, it is, like the genealogy of Philadelphia
+families, in the records of the town for all who will to read.</p>
+
+<p>In the very beginning of things Philadelphia may have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span>
+had no more pressing need for the artist's studio than for
+the writer's study. But it was surprising how soon its
+needs expanded in this direction. English and other
+European critics deplore the absence of an original&mdash;or
+aboriginal&mdash;school of art in America, as if they thought
+the American artist should unconsciously have lost, on his
+way across the Atlantic, that inheritance from centuries
+of civilization and tradition which the modern artist who
+calls himself Post-Impressionist is deliberately endeavoring
+to get rid of, and on his arrival have started all over
+again like a child with a clean slate. Only an American
+art based on the hieroglyphics and war paint of the
+Indians would satisfy the critic with this preconceived
+idea. But the first American artists were not savages,
+they were not primitives. They did not paint pictures
+like Indians any more than the first American architects
+built wigwams like Indians, or the first American Colonials
+dressed themselves in beads and feathers like
+Indians. Colonials had come from countries where art
+was highly developed, and they could no more forget
+the masters at home than they could forget the literature
+upon which they and their fathers had been nourished.
+If years passed before a Philadelphian began to paint
+pictures, it was because Philadelphians had not time to
+paint as they had not time to write. The wonder really
+is that they began so soon&mdash;that so soon the artist got
+to work, and so soon there was a public to care enough
+for his work to enable him to do it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In a thousand ways the interest of Philadelphians
+in art expressed itself. It is written large in the beauty
+of their houses and in their readiness to introduce ornament
+where ornament belonged. The vine and cluster
+of grapes carved on William Penn's front door; the
+panelling and woodwork in Colonial houses; the decoration
+of a public building like the State House; the
+furniture, the silver, the china, we pay small fortunes
+for when we can find them and have not inherited them;
+the single finely-proportioned mirror or decorative silhouette
+on a white wall; the Colonial rooms that have
+come down to us untouched, perfect in their simplicity, not
+an ornament too many;&mdash;all show which way the wind of
+art blew.</p>
+
+<p>There was hardly one of the great men from any
+American town, makers of first the Revolution and then
+the Union, who did not appreciate the meaning and importance
+of art and did not leave a written record, if only
+in a letter, of his appreciation. Few things have struck
+me more in reading the Correspondence and Memoirs and
+Diaries of the day. But these men were not only
+patriots, they were men of intelligence, and they knew
+the folly of expecting to find in Philadelphia or New
+York or Boston the same beautiful things that in Paris
+or London or Italy filled them with delight and admiration,
+or of seeing in this fact a reason to lower their
+standard. The critics who are shocked because we have
+no aboriginal school might do worse than read some of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span>
+these old documents. I recommend in particular a
+passage in a letter John Adams wrote to his wife from
+Paris. It impressed me so when I came upon it, it
+seemed to me such an admirable explanation of a situation
+perplexing to critics, that I copied it in my notebook,
+and I cannot resist quoting it now.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 307px;">
+<img src="images/gs073.jpg" width="307" height="400" alt="UPSALA, GERMANTOWN" title="" />
+<span class="caption">UPSALA, GERMANTOWN</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>"It is not indeed the fine arts which our country
+requires," he writes, "the useful, the mechanic arts are
+those which we have occasion for in a young country as
+yet simple and not far advanced in luxury, although
+much too far for her age and character.... The science
+of government it is my duty to study, more than all other
+sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and
+negotiation ought to take place of, indeed to exclude,
+in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and
+war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics
+and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics
+and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval
+architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in
+order to give their children a right to study painting,
+poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and
+porcelain."</p>
+
+<p>John Adams and his contemporaries may not have had
+American grandfathers with the leisure to earn for them
+the right to study art, but they did not ignore it. All the
+time they felt its appeal and responded to the appeal as
+well as busy men, absorbed in the development of a new
+country, could. They got themselves painted whenever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span>
+they happened to combine the leisure to sit and a painter
+to sit to. When a statesman like Jefferson, who confessed
+himself "an enthusiast on the subject of the arts,"
+was sent abroad, he devoted his scant leisure to securing the
+best possible sculptor for the statue of Washington, or the
+best possible models for public buildings at home. Much
+that we now prize in architecture and design we owe to
+the men who supposed themselves too occupied with
+politics and war to encourage art and artists. They were
+not too busy to provide the beauty without which liberty
+would have been a poor affair&mdash;not too busy to welcome
+the first Americans who saw to it that all the beauty
+should not be imported from Europe. "After the first
+cares for the necessaries of life are over, we shall come to
+think of the embellishments," Franklin wrote to his London
+landlady's daughter. "Already some of our young
+geniuses begin to lisp attempts at painting, poetry and
+music. We have a young painter now studying at Rome."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs074.jpg" width="400" height="318" alt="THE HALL AT CLIVEDEN, THE CHEW HOUSE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE HALL AT CLIVEDEN, THE CHEW HOUSE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>In this care for the embellishments of life, of so much
+more real importance than the necessaries, Philadelphia
+was the first town to take the lead, though Philadelphians
+have since gone out of their way to forget it. The old
+Quaker lady in her beautiful dress, preserving her beautiful
+repose, in her beautiful old and historic rooms, shows
+the Friends' instinctive love of beauty even if they never
+intentionally, or deliberately, undertook to create it. For
+the most beautiful of what we now call Colonial furniture
+produced in the Colonies, Philadelphia is given the credit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span>
+by authorities on the subject. Franklin's letters could
+also be quoted to show Philadelphians' keenness to have
+their portraits done in "conversation" or "family"
+pieces, or alone in miniatures, whichever were most in
+vogue. Even Friends, before Franklin, when they visited
+England sought out a fashionable portrait-painter like
+Kneller because he was supposed the best. Artists from
+England came to Philadelphia for commissions, artists
+from other Colonies drifted there, Peale, Stuart, Copley.
+Philadelphia, in return, spared its artists to England,
+and the Royal Academy was forced to rely upon
+Philadelphia for its second President&mdash;Benjamin West.
+The artist's studio in Philadelphia had become a place of
+such distinction by the Revolution that members of the
+first Congress felt honoured themselves when allowed
+to honour it with their presence&mdash;in the intervals between
+legislating and dining. The Philadelphian to-day, goaded
+by the moss-grown jest over Philadelphia slowness and
+want of enterprise into giving the list of Philadelphia
+"firsts," or the things Philadelphia has been the first to
+do in the country, can include among them the picture
+exhibition which Philadelphia was the first to hold, and
+the Pennsylvania Academy which was the first Academy
+of the Fine Arts instituted in America. Philadelphia was
+the richest American town and long the Capital; the
+marvel would be if it had not taken the lead in art as in
+politics.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XV: PHILADELPHIA AND ART&mdash;CONTINUED</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>By the time I grew up years had passed since
+Philadelphia had ceased to be the Capital, and
+during these years its atmosphere had not been
+especially congenial to art. But the general conditions
+had not been more stimulating anywhere in America.
+The Hudson River School is about all that came of a
+period which, for that matter, owed its chief good to
+revolt in countries where more was to be expected of
+it: in France, to first the Romanticists and then the
+Impressionists who had revolted against the Academic;
+in England to the Pre-Raphaelites who, with noisy advertisement,
+broke away from Victorian convention. Art in
+America had not got to the point of development when
+there was anything to revolt against or to break away
+from. What it needed was a revival of the old interest,
+a reaction from the prevailing indifference to all there
+was of art in the country.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 307px;">
+<img src="images/gs075.jpg" width="307" height="400" alt="THE OLD WATER-WORKS, FAIRMOUNT PARK" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE OLD
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: 'Waterworks,' 'Water Works,' and 'Water-Works' were used in this text. This was retained.">WATER-WORKS</ins>,
+FAIRMOUNT PARK</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Some say this came in Philadelphia with the Centennial.
+The Centennial's stirring up, however, would not
+have done much good had not artists already begun to stir
+themselves up. How a number of Americans who had
+been studying in Paris and Munich returned to America
+full of youth and enthusiasm in the early Eighteen-Seventies,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span>
+there to lead a new movement in American art, has
+long since passed into history&mdash;also the fact that one of
+the most remarkable outcomes of this new movement was
+the new school of illustration that quickly made American
+illustrated books and magazines famous throughout the
+world. But what concerns me as a Philadelphian is that,
+once more at this critical moment, Philadelphia took the
+lead. The publishers of the illustrated books and magazines
+may have been chiefly in New York, the illustrations
+were chiefly from Philadelphia, and there is no reason
+why Philadelphia should not admit it with decent pride.
+Abbey and Frost were actually, Howard Pyle and Smedley
+virtually, Philadelphians. Blum and Brennan passed
+through the Academy Schools. J., when I met him, was
+at the threshold of his career. And the illustrators were
+but a younger offshoot of the new Philadelphia group.
+Miss Mary Cassatt had already started to work in Paris,
+where Jules Stewart and Ridgway Knight represented
+the older Philadelphia school; Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt was
+already in London; J. McLure Hamilton had finished his
+studies at Antwerp; Alexander and Birge Harrison had
+been heard of in Paris where Sargent&mdash;who belongs to
+Philadelphia if to any American town&mdash;had carried off his
+first honours. At home Richards was painting his marines;
+Poore had begun his study of animals; Dana, I think, was
+beginning his water-colours; William Sartain had long
+been known as an engraver; Miss Emily Sartain was an
+art editor and soon to be the head of an art school; the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span>
+Moran family, with the second generation, had become
+almost a Philadelphia institution; from Stephen Ferris
+J. could learn the technic of etching as from the Claghorn
+collection he could trace its development through the
+ages; and of the younger men and women, his contemporaries,
+he did not leave me long in ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>My own work had led me to the discovery of so many
+worlds of work in Philadelphia, I could not have believed
+there was room for another. But there was, and the artists'
+world was so industrious, so full of energy, so sufficient
+unto itself, so absorbed in itself, that, with the first glimpse
+into it, the difficulty was to believe space and reason could
+be left for any outside of it. This new experience was as
+extraordinary a revelation as my initiation into the newspaper
+world. I had been living, without suspecting it,
+next door to people who thought of nothing, talked of
+nothing, occupied themselves with nothing, but art: people
+for whom a whole army of men and women were busily
+employed, managing schools, running factories, keeping
+stores, putting up buildings&mdash;delightful people with whom
+I could not be two minutes without reproaching myself
+for not having known from the cradle that nothing in life
+save art ever did count, or ever could. And at this point
+I can afford to get rid of Philadelphia reticence without
+scruple since through this, to me, new world of work
+I had the benefit of J.'s guidance.</p>
+
+<p>It was a moment when it had got to be the fashion
+for artists in all the studios in the same building to give<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span>
+receptions on the same day, and I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+that J.'s, so
+strange to me at first, was only one of an endless number.
+For part of my new experience was the round of the
+studios on the appointed day, when I was too oppressed
+by my ignorance and my desire not to expose it and my
+uncertainty as to what was the right thing to say in front
+of a picture, that I do not remember much besides, except
+the miniatures of Miss Van Tromp and the marines of
+Prosper Senat, and why they should now stand out from
+the confused jumble of my memories I am sure I cannot
+see.</p>
+
+<p>Then J. took me to the Academy of Fine Arts and it
+was revealed to me as a place not to pass by but to go
+inside of: artists from all over the country struggling to
+get in for its annual exhibition of paintings which already
+had a reputation as one of the finest given in the country;
+artists from all over the world drawn in for its international
+exhibitions of etchings&mdash;Whistler, Seymour
+Haden, Appian, Lalanne, a catalogue-full of etchers introduced
+for the first time to my uneducated eyes; everybody
+who could crowding in on Thursday afternoons to sit on
+the stairs and listen to the music, while I upbraided myself
+for not having known ages ago what delightful things
+there were to do, instead of letting my time hang heavy
+on my hands, in Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>J. had me invited to more private evenings and
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'reunion' and 're-union' were used in this text. This was retained.">reunions</ins>
+of societies of artists, and I remember&mdash;if they do
+not&mdash;meeting many who were at the very heart of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span>
+machinery that made the wheels of the new movement go
+round:&mdash;Mr. Leslie Miller, the director of the School of
+Industrial Art from which promising students were
+emerging or had emerged; Stephen Parrish and Blanche
+Dillaye and Gabrielle Clements, whose etchings were
+with the Whistlers and the Seymour Hadens in the international
+exhibitions; Alice Barber full of commissions from
+magazines; Margaret Leslie and Mary Trotter in their
+fervent apprenticeship; Boyle and Stephens the sculptors;
+Colin Cooper and Stephens the painters. What a rank
+outsider I felt in their company! And how grateful I
+was for my talent as a listener that helped to save me
+from exposure!</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>I saw another side of the revival at my Uncle's Industrial
+Art School in the eagerness of teachers and pupils
+both to know and to learn and to practise&mdash;an eagerness
+that had, I fear, an eye to ultimate profit. That was the
+worst feature of the booming of art in the Eighteen-Eighties.
+Gain was the incentive that drove too many
+students to the art schools of Philadelphia as to those of
+Paris, or London, and set countless amateurs in their own
+homes to hammering brass and carving wood and stamping
+leather. Art was to them an investment, a speculation,
+a gentlemanly&mdash;or ladylike&mdash;way of making a fortune.
+An English painter I know told me a few years since that
+he had put quite six thousand pounds into art, what with
+studying and travelling for subjects, and he thought he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span>
+had a right to look for a decent return on his money. That
+expresses the attitude of a vast number of Philadelphians
+in their new active enthusiasm. However trumpery the
+amount of labour they invested, they counted on it to
+bring them in a big dividend in dollars and cents.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 308px;">
+<img src="images/gs076.jpg" width="308" height="400" alt="THE STAIRWAY, STATE HOUSE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE STAIRWAY, STATE HOUSE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I am afraid my Uncle, without meaning to, encouraged
+this spirit, when he started not only the Industrial Art
+School, but the Decorative Art Club in Pine Street. He
+was an optimist and saw only the beautiful side of anything
+he was interested in. To please him I was made the Treasurer
+of the Club. The Committee sympathised with my
+Uncle and worked for the ultimate good he thought the
+Club was to accomplish in Philadelphia. Mrs. Harrison,
+Mrs. Mifflin, Mrs. Pepper, Miss Julia Biddle with whom I
+served, agreed with him that women who had some training
+in art would understand better the meaning of art and the
+pleasure of the stimulus this understanding could give.
+My Uncle, however, always ready to do anybody a good
+turn, went further and was anxious that provision should
+also be made to sell the work done in the Club, which in
+this way would be open to many who could not otherwise
+afford it. I fancy that this provision, if not the success of
+the Club, was one of its chief attractions. The amateur
+is apt to believe she can romp in gaily and snatch whatever
+prizes are going by playing with the art which is the
+life's work, mastered by toil and travail, of the artist.</p>
+
+<p>I criticise now, but in my new ardour I saw nothing
+to criticise. On the contrary, I saw perfection: artists and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span>
+students encouraged, occupations and interests lavished
+upon amateurs whose lives had been as empty as mine;
+and I worked myself up into a fine enthusiasm of belief
+in art as a new force, or one that if it had always existed
+had been waiting for its prophet,&mdash;just as electricity had
+waited for Franklin to capture and apply it to human
+needs. I went so far in my exaltation as to write an inspired&mdash;or
+so it seemed to me&mdash;article on Art as the New
+Religion, proving that the old religions having perished
+and the old gods fallen, art had re-arisen in its
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'splendor' and 'splendour' were used in this text. This was retained.">splendour</ins>
+and glory to provide a new gospel, a new god, to take
+their place, and I filled my essay with ingenious arguments,
+and liberal quotations from William Morris and
+Ruskin, and rhetorical flights of prophecy. I had not
+given the last finishing and convincing touches to my exposition
+of the new gospel when, with my marriage, came
+other work more urgent, and I was spared the humiliation
+of seeing my Palace of Art collapse, like the house built
+on sand, while I still believed in it. In the years that
+followed I got to know most of the galleries and exhibitions
+of Europe; despite my scruples I made a profession
+of writing about art; and the education this meant taught
+me, among other things, the simple truth that art is art,
+and not religion. But I cannot laugh at the old folly
+of my ignorance. The enthusiasm, the mood, out of which
+the article grew, was better, healthier, than the apathy
+that had saved me from being ridiculous because it risked
+nothing.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>These years away from home were spent largely in
+the company of artists and were filled with the talk of art;
+what had been marvels to me in Philadelphia became
+the commonplaces of every day. But I was all the time
+in Italy, or France, or England, and could not
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>
+the extent to which, for Philadelphians who had not
+wandered, artists and art were also becoming more and
+more a part of
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'everyday' and 'every-day' were used in this text. This was retained.">everyday</ins>
+life. I did not see Philadelphia
+in the changing, not until it had changed, and possibly I
+feel the change more than those who lived through it. It
+is not so much in the things done, in actual accomplishment,
+that I am conscious of it, as in the new concern for
+art, the new attentions heaped upon it, the new deference
+to it. Art is in the air&mdash;"on the town," a subject of
+polite conversation, a topic for the drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>When I first came out, art had never supplied small
+talk in society, never filled up a gap at a dull dinner or
+reception. We should have been disgracefully behind the
+times if we could not chatter about Christine Nilsson and
+Campanini and the last opera, or Irving and Ellen Terry
+and their interpretation of Shakespeare; if we had not
+kept up with Trollope and George Eliot, and read the
+latest Howells and Henry James, and raved over the
+Rubaiyat. But we might have had the brand-newest
+biographical dictionary of artists at our fingers' ends&mdash;as
+we had not&mdash;and there would have been no occasion to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span>
+use our information. Nobody sparkled by sprinkling his
+talk with the names of artists and sculptors, nobody asked
+what was in the last Academy or who had won the gold
+medal in Paris, nobody discussed the psychology or the
+meaning of the picture of the year. I remember thinking
+I was doing something rather pretentious and pedantic
+when I began to read Ruskin. I remember how a friend
+who was a tireless student of K&uuml;gler and Crowe and
+Cavalcaselle, as a preparation to the journey to Europe
+that might never come off, was looked upon as a sort of
+prodigy&mdash;a Philadelphia phenomenon. But to-day I am
+sure there is not the name of an artist, from Cimabue and
+Giotto to Matisse and Picasso, that does not go easily
+round the table at any Philadelphia dinner; not a writer
+on art, from Lionardo to
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Nordan'">Nordau</ins>,
+who cannot fill up
+awkward pauses at an afternoon crush; not one of the
+learned women of Philadelphia who could not tell you
+where every masterpiece in the world hangs and just what
+her emotions before it should be, who could not play the
+game of attributions as gracefully as the game of bridge,
+who could not dispose of the most abstruse points in art
+as serenely as she settles the simplest squabble in the
+nursery.</p>
+
+<p>The Academy is no longer abandoned in the wilderness
+of Broad and Cherry Streets; its receptions and private
+views are social functions, its exhibitions are events of
+importance, the best given in Philadelphia and throughout
+the land, its collections are the pride of the wealthy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span>
+Philadelphians who contribute to them, its schools are
+stifled with scholarships.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs077.jpg" width="400" height="314" alt="UPPER ROOM, STENTON" title="" />
+<span class="caption">UPPER ROOM, STENTON</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The other Art Schools have multiplied, not faster,
+however, than the students whose legions account for, if
+they do not warrant, the existence not of the Academy
+Schools alone, but of the School of Industrial Art, the
+Drexel Institute, the Woman's School of Design, the
+Uncle's old little experiment enlarged into a large Public
+Industrial Art School where, I am told, the Founder is
+comfortably forgotten&mdash;of more institutes, schools, classes
+than I probably have heard of.</p>
+
+<p>The Art Galleries have multiplied: there is some reason
+for Memorial Hall now that the Wilstach Collection is
+housed there, and the <i>Yellow Buskin</i>, one of the finest
+Whistlers, hangs on its walls, now that the collections of
+decorative art are being added to by Mrs. John Harrison
+and other Philadelphians who are ambitious for their town
+and its supremacy in all things. Nor does this Philadelphia
+ambition soar to loftier heights than in the project
+for the new Parkway from the City Hall with a new Art
+Gallery&mdash;the centre of a sort of University of Art if I
+can rely upon the plans&mdash;to crown the Park end of this
+splendid (partially still on paper) avenue, as the Arc de
+Triomphe crowns the western end of the Avenue of the
+Champs-Elys&eacute;es.</p>
+
+<p>The collectors multiply, their aims, purse, field of research,
+all expanding; their shyness on the subject surmounted;
+Old Masters for whom Europe now weeps making<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span>
+their triumphant entry into Philadelphia; the highest
+price, that test of the modern patron, paid for a Rembrandt
+in Philadelphia; the collections of Mr. Johnson
+and Mr. Widener and Mr. Elkins and Mr. Thomas in
+Philadelphia as well known by the authorities as the
+Borghesi collection in Rome or the Duke of Westminster's
+in London.</p>
+
+<p>The social life of art grows and can afford the large
+luxurious Club in South Broad Street, artists and their
+friends amply supporting it. And the old Sketch Club,
+once glad of the shelter of a room or so, has blossomed
+forth in a house of its own in the flourishing "Little Street
+of Clubs," with the Woman's Plastic Club close by.</p>
+
+<p>The artists only, as far as I can see, have not multiplied
+and grown in proportion. But the artist somehow
+appears to be the last consideration of those who think they
+are encouraging art. Still there are new names for my
+old list: Henry Thouron, Violet Oakley, Maxfield Parrish,
+now ranked with the decorative painters&mdash;and, I
+might just point out in passing, it is to Philadelphia that
+Boston, Harrisburg, and at times New York must send
+for their decorators, whose work I have not seen in place
+to express an opinion on it one way or the other. Cecilia
+Beaux and Adolphe Borie now figure with the portrait
+painters; Waugh and Fromuth with the marine painters,
+who include also Stokes, the chronicler of Arctic
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'splendor' and 'splendour' were used in this text. This was retained.">splendors</ins>
+of sea and sky, and Edward Stratton Holloway, the
+making of beautiful books claiming his interest no less<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span>
+than the sea; Glackens, Thornton Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen
+Green, Jessie Wilcox Smith with the illustrators;
+McCarter, Redfield with the group gathered about the
+Academy; Grafly with the sculptors; Clifford Addams,
+Daniel Garber with the winners of scholarships. Architects
+have not lagged behind in the race&mdash;after the Furness
+period, a Cope and Stewardson period, a Wilson Eyre
+period, to-day a Zantzinger, Borie, Medary, Day, Page,
+Trumbauer, and a dozen more periods each progressing
+in the right direction; with young men from the Beaux-Arts
+and young men from the University School, eager
+to tackle the ever-increasing architectural commissions in
+a town growing and
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'refashioning' and 're-fashioning' were used in this text. This was retained.">re-fashioning</ins>
+itself faster than any
+mushroom upstart of the West, to inaugurate a period of
+their own.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>I am not a fighter by nature, I set a higher value on
+peace as I grow older, and I look to ending my days in
+Philadelphia. Therefore I chronicle the change; I do not
+criticise it. But a few comments I may permit myself and
+yet hope that Philadelphia will not bear me in return the
+malice I could so ill endure. I think the gain to Philadelphia
+from this new interest has, in many ways, been great.
+If art is the one thing that lives through the ages&mdash;art
+whether expressed in words, or paint, or bricks and mortar,
+or the rhythm of sound,&mdash;it follows that the pleasure it
+gives&mdash;when genuine&mdash;is the most enduring. This is a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span>
+distinct, if perhaps at the moment negative, gain. A more
+visible gain I think comes from the new desire, the new
+determination to care for the right thing: a fashion due
+perhaps to the insatiable American craving for "culture,"
+and at times guilty of unintelligent excesses, but pleasanter
+in results than the old crazes that filled Philadelphia drawing-rooms
+with spinning wheels and cat's tails and Morris
+medi&aelig;valism,&mdash;if they brought <i>Art Nouveau</i> in their
+train, thank fortune it has left no traces of its passing; a
+fashion more dignified in results than the old standards
+that filled Philadelphia streets with flights of originality,
+and green stone monsters, and the deplorable Philadelphia
+brand of Gothic and Renaissance, Romanesque and
+Venetian, Tudor and everything except the architecture
+that belongs by right and tradition in Penn's beautiful
+town.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs078.jpg" width="400" height="311" alt="WYCK&mdash;The doorway from within" title="" />
+<span class="caption">WYCK<br />
+The doorway from within</span></div>
+
+<p>But interest in art does not create art, and when
+Philadelphia believes in this interest as a creator, Philadelphia
+falls into a mistake that it has not even the merit
+of having originated. I have watched for many years the
+attempts to make art grow, to force it like a hot-house
+plant. The same thing is going on everywhere. In England,
+South Kensington for more than half a century
+has had its schools in all parts of the kingdom, the County
+Council has added to them, the City Corporation and the
+City Guilds have followed suit, artists open private classes,
+exhibitions have increased in number until they are a drug
+on the market, art critics flourish, the papers devote<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span>
+columns to their platitudes. And what has England to
+show as the outcome of all this care? Go look at the decorations
+in the Royal Exchange and the pictures in the
+Royal Academy, examine the official records and learn
+how great is the yearly output of art teachers in excess of
+schools for them to teach in, and you will have a good
+idea of the return made on the money and time and red
+tape lavished upon the teaching of art. It is no better in
+Paris. Schools and students were never so many, foreigners
+arrive in such numbers that they are pushing the
+Frenchman out of his own Latin Quarter, American students
+swagger, play the prince on scholarships, are presented
+with clubs and homes where they can give afternoon teas
+and keep on living in a little America of their
+own. And what comes of it? Were the two Salons, with
+the Salon des Ind&eacute;pendants and the Salon d'Automne
+thrown in, ever before such a weariness to the flesh?&mdash;was
+mediocrity ever before such an invitation to the pos&egrave;ur
+and the crank to pass off manufactured eccentricity as
+genius?</p>
+
+<p>It would not be reasonable to expect more of Philadelphia
+than of London and Paris. I cannot see that finer
+artists have been bred there on the luxury of scholarships
+and schools than on their own efforts when they toiled all
+day to be able to study at night, when success was theirs
+only after a hard fight. The Old Masters got their training
+as apprentices, not as pampered youths luxuriating
+in fine schools and exhibitions and incomes and every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span>
+luxury; they were patronized and more splendidly than
+any artists to-day, but not until they had shown reason for
+it, not until it was an honour to patronize them. The new
+system is more comfortable, I admit, but great work does
+not spring from comfort. Philadelphia is wise to set up a
+high standard, but not wise when it makes the way too
+easy. For art is a stern master. It cares not if the weak
+fall by the roadside, so long as the strong, unhampered,
+succeed in getting into their own. The best thing that
+has been done at the Academy for many a day is the reducing
+of the scholarships from a two, or three, years'
+interval free of responsibility, to a summer's holiday
+among the masterpieces of Europe, which, I am told, is
+all they are now.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVI: PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>If interest in the art of eating called for justification,
+I could show that I come by mine legitimately. My
+family took care of that when the sensible ancestor
+who made me an American settled in Accomac, where
+most things worth eating were to be had for the fishing
+or the shooting or the digging, so that Accomac feasted
+while the rest of Virginia still starved, and when my
+Grandfather, in his day, moved to Philadelphia which is
+as well provided as Accomac and more conscientious in
+cultivating its possibilities. It would be sheer disloyalty
+to the family inheritance if I did not like to eat well, just
+as it would be rank hypocrisy to see in my loyalty a virtue.</p>
+
+<p>Accomac's reputation for good eating has barely got
+beyond the local history book, Accomac, I find, being a
+place you must have belonged to at one time or another,
+to know anything about. But Philadelphia made a reputation
+for its high living as soon as the Philadelphian
+emerged from his original cave, or sooner&mdash;read Watson
+and every other authority and you will find that before
+he was out of it, even the family cat occupied itself in
+hunting delicacies for the family feast. And right off
+the Philadelphian understood the truth the scientist
+has been centuries in groping after: that if people's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span>
+food is to do them good, they must take pleasure in it.
+The material was his the minute he landed on the spot,
+not the least recommendations of which were its fish
+and game and its convenience as a port where all the
+country did not produce could be brought from countries
+that did&mdash;a spot that,
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'halfway' and 'half-way' were used in this text. This was retained.">half-way</ins>
+between the North and
+the South, assured to Philadelphia one of the best-stocked
+markets in the world, ever the wonder and admiration of
+every visitor to the town. Pleasure in the material, if history
+can be trusted, dates as far back. A wise man once
+suggested the agreeable journeys that could be planned on
+a gastronomical map of France&mdash;from the Tripe of Caen
+to the Bouillabaisse of Marseilles, from the Ch&acirc;teau Margaux
+of Bordeaux to the Champagne of Rheims, from the
+Ducks of Rouen to the Truffles of P&eacute;rigord, and so, from
+one end to the other of that Land of Plenty. I would
+suggest that an agreeable record of Philadelphia might be
+based upon the dinners it has eaten, from the historic
+dinner foraged for by the cat over a couple of centuries
+ago, to the banquet of yesterday in Spruce Street or
+Walnut, at the Bellevue or the Ritz.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 307px;">
+<img src="images/gs079.jpg" width="307" height="400" alt="THE PHILADELPHIA DISPENSARY FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE PHILADELPHIA DISPENSARY FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I should like some day to write this history myself,
+when I have more space and time at my disposal. I have
+always been blessed with a healthy appetite, a decent
+sense of discrimination in satisfying it, and also a deep
+interest in the Philosophy of Food ever since I began to
+collect cookery books. The more profoundly I go into the
+subject, the readier I am to believe with Brillat-Savarin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span>
+that what a man is depends a good deal on what he eats.
+This is why I think that if the Philadelphian is to be
+understood, the study of him must not stop with his
+politics and his literature and his art, but must include his
+marketing and his bill of fare. He has had the wit never
+to doubt the importance of both, and the pride never to
+make light of his genius for living well.</p>
+
+<p>The early Friends in Philadelphia knew better than to
+pull a long face, burrowing for the snares of the flesh and
+the devil in every necessity of life, like the unfortunate
+Puritans up in New England. It was not to lead a
+hermit's existence William Penn invited them to settle
+on the banks of the Delaware, and he and they
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>d
+that pioneer's work could not be done on hermit's fare.
+They entertained no fanatical disdain for the pleasures
+of the table, no ascetic abhorrence to good food, daintily
+prepared. Brawn and chocolate and venison were Penn's
+tender offering as lover to Hannah Callowhill, olives
+and wine his loving gift as friend to Isaac Norris. For
+equally "acceptable presents" that admirable citizen had
+to thank many besides Penn. James Logan knew that the
+best way to manage your official is to dine him, and in his
+day, and after it, straight on, no public commissioner, and
+indeed no private traveller, could visit Philadelphia and
+not be fed with its banquets and comforted with its
+Madeira and Punch, while few could refrain from saying
+so with an eloquence and gratitude that did them honour.
+Benjamin Franklin, keeping up the tradition, was known<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span>
+to feast more excellently than a philosopher ought, and
+his philosophy of food is explained by his admission in a
+letter that he would rather discover a <i>recipe</i> for making
+Parmesan cheese in an Italian town than any ancient inscription.
+The American Philosophical Society could not
+conduct its investigations without the aid of dinners and
+breakfasts, nor could any other Philadelphia Society or
+Club study, or read, or hunt, or fish, or legislate, or pursue
+its appointed ends, without fine cooking and hard drinking&mdash;though
+I hope they were not the inspiration of Thomas
+Jefferson's severe criticism of his fellow Americans who,
+he said, were unable to terminate the most sociable meals
+without transforming themselves into brutes. It was
+impossible for young ladies and grave elders to keep
+descriptions of public banquets and family feasts and
+friendly tea-drinkings out of their letters and diaries:
+one reason of the fascination their letters and diaries have
+for Philadelphians who read them to-day. And altogether,
+by the Revolution, to judge from John Adams'
+account of his "sinful feasts" in Philadelphia, and
+General Greene's description of the luxury of Boston as
+"an infant babe" to the luxury of Philadelphia, and the
+rest of America's opinion of Philadelphia as a place of
+"crucifying expenses," and many more signs of the
+times, the dinners of Philadelphia had become so inseparable
+from any meeting, function, or business, that
+I am tempted to question whether, had they not been eaten,
+the Declaration of Independence could have been signed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span>
+But it was signed and who can say, in face of the fact, that
+Philadelphia was any the worse for its feasting? And
+what if it proved a dead weight to John Adams, did Boston,
+did any other town do more in the cause of patriotism
+and independence?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs080.jpg" width="400" height="310" alt="MORRIS HOUSE, GERMANTOWN" title="" />
+<span class="caption">MORRIS HOUSE, GERMANTOWN</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>One inevitable feature of the "sinful feasts" was the
+Madeira John Adams drank at a great rate, but suffered
+no inconvenience from. I could not dispense with it in
+these old records, such a sober place does it hold in my
+own memories of Philadelphia. The decanter of Madeira
+on my Grandfather's dinner table marked the state occasion,
+and I would not have recognized Philadelphia on my
+return had the same decanter not been produced in welcome.
+It was an assurance that Philadelphia was still
+Philadelphia, though sky-scrapers might break the once
+pleasant monotony of low, red brick houses and motor
+horns resound through the once peaceful streets.</p>
+
+<p>From the beginning Madeira was one of the things no
+good Philadelphia household could be without&mdash;just the
+sound, dignified, old-fashioned wine the Philadelphian
+would be expected to patronize, respectable and upright as
+himself. Orders for it lighten those interminably long
+letters in the Penn-Logan correspondence, so long that all
+the time I was reading them, I kept wondering which of
+the three I ought to pity the most: Penn for what he had
+to endure from his people; Logan for having to keep him
+posted in his intolerable wrongs; or myself for wading
+through all they both had to say on the subject. As time<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span>
+went on, I do not believe there was an official function at
+which Madeira did not figure. There I always find it&mdash;the
+wine of ceremony, the sacrificial wine, without which no
+compact could be sealed, no event solemnized, no pleasure
+enjoyed. It seems to punctuate every step in the career
+of Philadelphians and of Philadelphia, and I thought
+nothing could be more characteristic, when I read the
+<i>Autobiography</i> of Franklin, than that it should have been
+over the Philadelphia Madeira one Governor of Pennsylvania
+planned a future for him, and another Governor of
+Pennsylvania later on discoursed provincial affairs with
+him, "most profuse of his solicitations and promises"
+under its pleasant influence. Throughout the old annals
+I am conscious of that decanter of Madeira always at hand,
+the Philadelphian "as free of it as an Apple Tree of
+its Fruit on a Windy Day in the month of July," one old
+visitor to the town records with a pretty fancy for which,
+as like as not, it was responsible.</p>
+
+<p>And throughout the more modern records, there it is
+again. Even in the old-fashioned Philadelphia boarding-house
+less than a century ago, the men after dinner sat
+over their Madeira. New generations of visitors, like
+the old, drank it and approved, the Madeira that supported
+John Adams at Philadelphia's sinful feasts helping
+to steer Thackeray and an endless succession of
+strangers at the gate through Philadelphia's course of
+suppers and dinners. It amuses me to recall, as an instance
+of all it represented to Philadelphia, that for a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span>
+couple of years at the Convent, though a healthier child
+than I never lived, I was made by the orders of my Father,
+obeyed by no means unwillingly on my part, to drink a
+glass of Madeira, with a biscuit, every morning at eleven.
+And so deep-rooted was its use in the best traditions of
+Philadelphia respectability, that the irreproachable Philadelphia
+ladies who wrote cookery books never omitted the
+glass of Madeira from the Terrapin, and went so far as to
+quote Scripture and to recommend a little of it for the
+stomach's sake.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>One of these Philadelphia ladies wrote the most famous
+cookery book to this day published in America; a
+fact which pleases me, partly because, with Edward Fitzgerald,
+I cannot help liking a cookery book, and still more
+because it flatters my pride as a Philadelphian that so
+famous a book should come from Philadelphia. It seems
+superfluous to add that I mean Miss Leslie's <i>Complete
+Cookery</i>. What else could I mean?</p>
+
+<p>There had been cookery books in America before Miss
+Leslie's. America, with Philadelphia to set the standard,
+could not get on very far without them. If in the hurry
+and flurry of Colonial life, the American did not have the
+leisure to write them, he borrowed them, the speediest way
+to manufacture any kind of literature. There is an
+American edition of Mrs. Glasse, with Mrs. Glasse left
+out&mdash;the American pirate was nothing if not thorough.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span>
+There is an American edition of Richard Briggs who was
+not deprived of the credit of his book, though robbed of
+his title. There are American editions I have no doubt of
+many besides which I have only to haunt the old bookstalls
+and second-hand book stores of Philadelphia assiduously
+enough to find. But of American cookery books,
+either borrowed or original, before the time of Miss Leslie,
+I own but the stolen Mrs. Glasse and an insignificant little
+manual issued in New York in 1813, an American adaptation
+probably of an English model to which I have not yet
+succeeded in tracing it.</p>
+
+<p>Nor do I know of any I do not own, and I know as
+much of American cookery books as any of the authorities,
+and I do not mind saying so, as I can without the
+shadow of conceit. Vicaire includes only two or three in
+his <i>Bibliographie</i>; Hazlitt, to save trouble, confined himself
+to English books; Dr. Oxford's interest is frankly in
+the publications of his own country, though, in his first
+bibliography, he mentions a few foreign volumes, and in
+his second he refers to one American piracy, and these are
+the three chief bibliographers of the Kitchen in Europe.
+American authorities do not exist, when I except myself.
+It is true that G. H. Ellwanger made a list of cookery
+books, but he threw them together anyhow, with no attempt
+at classification, and his list scarcely merits the name of
+bibliography. The history of the American cookery book
+is a virgin field, and as such I present it to the innumerable
+American students who are turned out from the Universities,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span>
+year after year, for the research work that is frequently
+of as little use to themselves as to anybody else.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 355px;">
+<img src="images/gs081.jpg" width="355" height="400" alt="THE STATE HOUSE COLONNADE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE STATE HOUSE COLONNADE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But many as may be the discoveries in the future, Miss
+Leslie cannot be dethroned nor deprived of her distinction
+as the Mrs. Glasse of America. Other writers, if there
+were any, were allowed to disappear; should they be
+dragged out of their obscurity now, it would be as bibliographical
+curiosities, bibliographical specimens. Miss
+Leslie was never forgotten, she survives to-day, her name
+honoured, her book cherished. She leapt into fame on its
+publication, and with such ardour was the First Edition
+bought up, with such ardour either reverently preserved
+or diligently consulted that I, the proud possessor of Mrs.
+Glasse in her First Edition "pot folio," of Apicius C&oelig;lius,
+Gervase Markham, Scappi, Grimod de la Reyni&egrave;re, and
+no end of others in their first Editions, cannot as yet boast
+a First Edition of Miss Leslie. I have tried, my friends
+have tried; the most important
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'bookseller' and 'book-seller' were used in this text. This was retained.">book-sellers</ins>
+in the country
+have tried; and in vain, until I begin to think I might
+as well hope for the Elzevir <i>Patissier Fran&ccedil;ais</i> as the 1837
+<i>Complete Cookery</i>. It may be hidden on some unexplored
+Philadelphia book shelf, for it was as indispensable in the
+Philadelphia household as the decanter of Madeira. I ask
+myself if its appreciation in the kitchen, for which it was
+written, is the reason why I have no recollection of it in
+the Eleventh and Spruce Street house, well as I remember
+<i>Lippincott's</i> on the back parlour table, nor in my Father's
+library, well as I recall his editions of Scott and Dickens,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span>
+Voltaire and Rousseau, a combination expressive of a
+liberal taste in literature. But never anywhere have I seen
+that elusive First Edition, never anywhere succeeded in
+obtaining an earlier edition than the Fifty-Eighth. The
+date is 1858&mdash;think of it! fifty-eight editions in twenty-one
+years! Can our "Best Sellers" surpass that as a record?
+Or can any American writer on cookery after Miss Leslie,
+from Mrs. Sarah Joseph Hale and Jenny June to Marion
+Harland and the Philadelphia Mrs. Rorer, rank with her
+as a rival to Mrs. Glasse, as the author of a cookery book
+that has become the rare prize of the collector?</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>It is so proud an eminence for a quiet Philadelphia
+maiden lady in the Eighteen-Thirties and Forties to have
+reached that I cannot but wish I knew more of Miss Leslie
+personally. From her contemporaries I have
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+nothing save that she went to tea parties like any ordinary
+Philadelphian, that she was interested in the legends and
+traditions of her town, which wasn't like any ordinary
+Philadelphian, and that she condescended to journalism,
+editing <i>The Casket</i>. There is a portrait of her at the
+Academy, Philadelphia decorum so stamped upon her face
+and dress that it makes me more curious than ever to
+know why she was not the mother of children instead of a
+writer of books. These books explain that she had a
+literary conscience. In her preface to her <i>Domestic
+Economy</i>, which is not an unworthy companion to her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span>
+<i>Complete Cookery</i>, she reveals an unfeminine respect for
+style. "In this as in her Cookery Book," she writes, a
+dignity expressed in her use of the third person, "she has
+not scrupled when necessary, to sacrifice the sound to the
+sense; repeating the same words when no others could be
+found to express the purport so clearly, and being always
+more anxious to convey the meaning in such terms as could
+not be mistaken than to risk obscuring it by attempts at
+refined phraseology or well-rounded periods." Now and
+then the temptation was too strong and she fell into
+alliteration, writing of "ponderous puddings and curdled
+custards." But this is exceptional. As a rule, in her dry,
+business-like sentences, it would be impossible to suspect
+her of philandering with sound, or concerning herself
+with the pleasure of her readers.</p>
+
+<p>Her subject is one, happily, that can survive the sacrifice.
+The book is a monument to Philadelphia cookery.
+She was not so emancipated as to neglect all other kitchens.
+<i>Recipes</i> for Soup <i>&agrave; la Julienne</i> and Mulligatawny, for
+Bath Buns and Gooseberry Fools, for Pilaus and Curries,
+are concessions to foreign conventions. <i>Recipes</i> for Oysters
+and Shad, for Gumbo and Buckwheat Cakes, for
+Mint Juleps and Sweet Potatoes, for Pumpkins and Mush,
+show her deference to ideals cultivated by Americans from
+one State or another. But concessions and deference do
+not prevent her book&mdash;her two books&mdash;from being unmistakably
+Philadelphian:&mdash;an undefinable something in
+the quality and quantity, a definable something in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span>
+dishes and ingredients. I know that in my exile, thousands
+of miles from home, when I open her <i>Complete Cookery</i>,
+certain passages transport me straight back to Philadelphia,
+to my childhood and my youth, to the second-story
+back-building dining-room and the kitchen with the lilacs
+at the back-yard door. I read of Dried Beef, chipped or
+frizzled in butter and eggs, and, as of old in the Eleventh
+and Spruce Street house, a delicious fragrance, characteristic
+of Philadelphia as the sickly smell of the
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'ailantus' and 'ailanthus' were used in this text. This was retained.">ailanthus</ins>, fills
+my nostrils and my appetite is keen again for the eight
+o'clock tea, long since given way to the eight o'clock
+dinner. I turn the pages and come to Reed Birds, roasted
+or baked, and at once I feel the cool of the radiant fall
+evening, and I am at Belmont or Strawberry Mansion
+after the long walk through the park, one of the gay party
+for whom the cloth is laid. Or the mere mention of
+Chicken Salad sets back the clock of the years and drops
+me into the chattering midst of the Philadelphia five
+o'clock reception, in time for the spread that, for sentiment's
+sake, is dear to me in memory, but that, for digestion's
+sake, I hope never to see revived. Or a thrill is in
+the dressing for the salad alone, in the mere dash of mustard
+that Philadelphia has the independence to give to its
+Mayonnaise. I am conservative in matters of art. I would
+not often recommend a deviation from French precedent
+which is the most reliable and the finest. But Philadelphia
+may be trusted to deviate, when it permits itself the liberty,
+with discretion and distinction.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 310px;">
+<img src="images/gs082.jpg" width="310" height="400" alt="THE SMITH MEMORIAL, WEST FAIRMOUNT PARK" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE SMITH MEMORIAL, WEST FAIRMOUNT PARK</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVII: PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE&mdash;CONTINUED</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>So much of Philadelphia is in Miss Leslie that her
+silence on one or two matters essentially Philadelphian
+is the greater disappointment.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that when I was young it was the business
+of the man of the house to market and to make
+the Mayonnaise for the dinner's salad, and I have searched
+for the reason in vain. His appropriation of the marketing
+seems to be comparatively modern. If the chronicles
+are to be trusted, it was the woman's business as late as
+Mrs. Washington's day. But by mine, the man's going to
+market had settled solidly into one of those Philadelphia
+customs taken for granted by Philadelphians simply because
+they were Philadelphia customs. Never in print
+have I seen any reference to this division of family labour
+except in the Philadelphia stories of Thomas A. Janvier
+who, as a Philadelphian, knew that it became well brought
+up Philadelphia men to attend to the marketing and that
+duties becoming to them were above explanation. Janvier
+knew also that only in Philadelphia, probably, could it
+occur to the "master of a feast" to dress the salad, and
+that this was the reason "why a better salad is served at
+certain dinner tables in Philadelphia than at any other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span>
+dinner tables in the whole world." Miss Leslie is not
+without honour in her own town and was there reverenced
+by no one as truly as by Janvier, but his reverence for the
+Art of Cookery was more profound and he shared the
+belief of the initiated that in it man surpasses as hitherto,
+I regret to say, he has surpassed in all the arts.</p>
+
+<p>Janvier himself was the last "master of the feast" it
+was my good fortune to watch preparing the Mayonnaise.
+It was a solemn rite in his hands, and the result not unworthy&mdash;his
+salads were delicious, perfect, original, their
+originality, however, never pushed to open defiance of
+the Philadelphia precedents he respected. One of my
+pleasantest memories of him is of his salad-making at
+his own dinner table in his London rooms, one or two
+friends informally gathered about him, and the summer
+evening so warm that he appeared all in white&mdash;a splendid
+presence, for he was an unusually handsome man, of the
+rich, flamboyant type that has gone out of fashion almost
+everywhere except in the South of France. The white
+added, somehow, to the effect of ceremony, and he lingered
+over every stage of the preparation and the mixing,&mdash;the
+Philadelphia touch of mustard not omitted,&mdash;with due
+gravity and care. How different the salad created with
+this ceremony from the usual makeshift mixed nobody
+knows how or where!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs083.jpg" width="400" height="310" alt="THE BASIN, OLD WATER-WORKS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE BASIN, OLD
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: 'Waterworks,' 'Water Works,' and 'Water-Works' were used in this text. This was retained.">WATER-WORKS</ins></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>That the Philadelphia man should have accepted this
+responsibility, explains better than I could how high is
+the Philadelphia standard. I could not understand Miss<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</a></span>
+Leslie's silence on the subject, did I not suspect her of a
+disapproval as complete as her Cookery. She had no new-fangled
+notions on the position of woman, no desire to dispute
+man's long-established superiority. If she was willing
+to teach women how to become accomplished housewives,
+it was that they might administer to the comfort
+and satisfy the appetite of their fathers and brothers and
+husbands and sons. The end of woman, according to her
+creed, is to make the home agreeable for man, and it would
+save us many of to-day's troubles if we agreed with her.
+No man, since it is to his advantage, will blame her for
+being more orthodox as a woman than as a Philadelphian,
+nor is it at very great cost that I forgive her. I prize her
+book too much from the collector's standpoint, if from no
+other, to resent its sentiment. And my joy in my copy&mdash;in
+my Fifty-eighth Edition&mdash;is none the less because it was
+presented to me by Janvier who, in a few short stories,
+gave the spirit of the Philadelphia feast as Miss Leslie, in
+two substantial volumes, collected and classified its
+materials.</p>
+
+<p>Another thing I do not find in Miss Leslie is the Oyster
+Croquette, which she could not have ignored had she once
+eaten it. Therefore I am led to see in it the product of a
+generation nearer my own. In my memories of childhood
+it is inseparable from my Grandmother's eight
+o'clock tea on evenings when the family were invited in
+state&mdash;in my memories of youth inseparable from every
+afternoon or evening party at which I feasted fearlessly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</a></span>
+and well&mdash;and it figured at many a Sunday high-tea, that
+exquisite feast which, by its very name, refuses to let itself
+be confounded with its coarser counterpart known to the
+English as a meat-tea. From these facts I conclude,
+though I have no other data to rely upon, that the Oyster
+Croquette must have been not simply the masterpiece,
+but the creation of Augustine, for the Oyster Croquette
+which the well-brought-up Philadelphian then ate at moments
+of rejoicing was always of his cooking.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Augustine&mdash;the explanation is superfluous for Philadelphians
+of my age&mdash;was a
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'colored' and 'coloured' were used in this text. This was retained.">coloured</ins>
+man with the genius
+of his race for cookery and probably a drop or more of the
+white blood that developed in him also the genius for
+organization, so that he was a leader among caterers, as
+well as a master among cooks. It is worth noting that
+the demand for cooks in Philadelphia being great, the
+greatest cooks in America never failed to supply it: worth
+noting also that the Philadelphia housewife, being thus
+well supplied, had not begun when I was young to amuse
+herself with the chafing-dish as she does now. For many
+years, Augustine's name and creations were the chief distinction
+of every Philadelphia feast. To have entertained
+without his assistance would have been as serious a crime
+as to have omitted Terrapin&mdash;in season&mdash;and Ice-cream
+from the Philadelphia menu; as daring as to have gone for
+chocolates anywhere save to P&eacute;nas' or for smilax anywhere<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</a></span>
+save to Pennock's, and this sort of daring in Philadelphia
+would have been deplored not as harmless originality, but
+as eccentricity in the worst possible taste. Thanks to
+Augustine, Philadelphia became celebrated in America for
+its Oyster Croquettes and Terrapin and Broiled Oysters&mdash;what
+a work of genius this, with the sauce of his invention!&mdash;as
+Bresse is in France for its Chickens, or York in England
+for its Hams.</p>
+
+<p>So much I know about him, and no more&mdash;but his name
+should go down in history with those of Vatel and Car&ecirc;me
+and Gouff&eacute;: an artist if ever there was one! Because he
+did not commit suicide like Vatel&mdash;his oysters were never
+late&mdash;because he did not write
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'encyclop&aelig;dia' and 'encyclopedia' were used in this text. This was retained.">encyclopedias</ins> of cookery
+like Car&ecirc;me and Gouff&eacute;, his name and fame are in danger
+of perishing unless every Philadelphian among my contemporaries
+hastens to lay a laurel leaf upon his grave.
+I fear nothing as yet has been done to preserve his memory.
+His name survives on the simple front of a South Fifteenth
+Street house, where I saw it and rejoiced when
+I was last at home and, in compliment to him, went inside
+and ate my lunch in the demure light of a highly respectable
+dining-room in the society of a dozen or more highly
+respectable Philadelphians seated at little tables. I could
+not quarrel with my lunch&mdash;it was admirably cooked and
+served&mdash;but it was an
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'everyday' and 'every-day' were used in this text. This was retained.">everyday</ins>
+lunch, not the occasional
+feast&mdash;the Augustine of old did not cook the ordinary meal
+and the Fifteenth Street house is too modest to be accepted
+as the one and only monument to his memory.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 286px;">
+<img src="images/gs084.jpg" width="286" height="400" alt="GIRARD STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">GIRARD STREET</span>
+</div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Oyster Croquette could not have sprung up in a
+day and triumphed were Philadelphia as hide-bound with
+convention as it is supposed to be. Philadelphia is conservative
+in matters of cookery when conservatism means
+clinging to its great traditions; it is liberal when liberality
+means adapting to its own delightful ends the new idea or
+the new masterpiece. It never ceased to be sure of its
+materials nor of their variety, the Philadelphia market
+half way between North and South continuing to provide
+what is best in both: the meats of the finest&mdash;the fattest
+mutton he ever saw, Cobbett, though an Englishman,
+found in Philadelphia&mdash;its fruits and vegetables of the
+most various, its butter, good Darlington butter, famed
+from one end of the land to the other. And in the preparation
+of its materials, for the sake of eating better, Philadelphians
+never have hesitated to take their good where
+they have found it. Dishes we prize as the most essentially
+Philadelphian have sometimes the shortest pedigree. Why,
+the Ice-cream that is now one of Philadelphia's most respected
+institutions, came so recently that people we, of
+my generation, knew could remember its coming. On
+my return to Philadelphia, with the advantage the perspective
+absence gives, I could appreciate more clearly
+than if I had stayed at home how well Philadelphia eats
+and how nobly it has maintained its old ideals, how nobly
+accepted new ones. It has not wavered in the practice
+of eating well and taking pleasure in the eating&mdash;the
+reputation of giving good dinners is, as in my youth, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[Pg 443]</a></span>
+most highly prized. To quote Janvier: "The person who
+achieves celebrity of this sort in Philadelphia is not unlike
+the seraph who attains eminence in the heavenly choir."
+But I am conscious of a latitude that would not have been
+allowed before in the choice of a place to eat them in, and
+amazed at the number of new dishes.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>The back-building dining-room was the one scene I
+knew for the feast. If I were a man I could tell a different
+tale. As a woman I used to hear&mdash;all Philadelphia
+women used to hear&mdash;of colossal masculine banquets at the
+Philadelphia Club and the Union League, of revels at the
+Clover Club, of fastidious feasts at more esoteric clubs&mdash;the
+State in Schuylkill, the Fish-House Club, and what
+were the others?&mdash;clubs carrying on the great Colonial
+traditions, perpetuating the old Colonial Punch as zealously
+as the Vestal Virgins watched their sacred fire,
+observing mystic practices in the Kitchen, the Philadelphia
+man himself, it was said, putting on the cook's apron, presiding
+over grills and saucepans, and serving up dishes of
+such exquisite quality as it has not entered into the mind
+of mere woman to conceive or to execute: with the true
+delicacy of the gourmet choosing rather to consecrate his
+talents to the one perfect dish than to squander them upon
+many, shrinking as an artist must from the plebeian
+"groaning-board" of the gluttonous display. To stories
+of these marvels I listened again and again, but my only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[Pg 444]</a></span>
+knowledge of them is based on hearsay. I would as soon
+have expected to be admitted to Mount Athos or to the
+old Chartreuse as to banquets and feasts and revels so
+purely masculine; to ask for the vote would have seemed
+less ambitious than to pray for admission. What folly
+then it would be for me to pretend to describe them! What
+presumption to affect a personal acquaintance I have not
+and could not have! Into what pitfalls of ignorance
+would I stumble! It is for the Philadelphia man some day
+to write this particular chapter in the history of Philadelphia
+at Table.</p>
+
+<p>As to the Philadelphia woman at the period of which
+I speak, she had no Clubs. It was not supposed to be
+good form for her to feast outside of the back-building
+dining-room. She might relieve her hunger with Oysters
+in Jones's dingy little shop, or a plate of Ice-cream
+in Sautter's sombre saloon; or, with a boating party in
+spring or summer, she might go for dinner or supper to
+one of the restaurants in the Park. But for more serious
+entertaining, home, or her friends' home, was the place.
+Not that she was, as the fragile, fainting Angelina type
+once admired, too ethereal to think of food and drink.
+She could order and eat a luncheon, or a dinner, with the
+best, though she did not do the marketing or make the
+Mayonnaise. But she would rather have gone without
+food than defy the unwritten Philadelphia law.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 302px;">
+<img src="images/gs086.jpg" width="302" height="400" alt="THE UNION LEAGUE, FROM BROAD AND CHESTNUT STREETS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE UNION LEAGUE, FROM BROAD AND CHESTNUT STREETS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Now Philadelphia has changed all that. The wise remain
+faithful to the back-building dining-room and, within<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[Pg 447]</a></span>
+its grave and tranquil walls, on its substantial leather-covered
+chairs, Stuart's Washington looking down from
+his place above the mantelpiece, they continue to feast with
+a luxury Lucullus might have envied. Fashion, however,
+drives the less wise to more frivolous scenes. I never
+thought to see the day when I should, in Philadelphia,
+lunch at a large, well-appointed, luxurious woman's club,
+when I should be invited to feast at the Union League&mdash;my
+lunch there was one of the most extraordinary of all
+my extraordinary experiences on my return to Philadelphia&mdash;when
+the cloth for my dinner would be laid in a big,
+gay, noisy, crowded Country Club&mdash;and yet the miracle
+had been worked in my absence and I saw not the day, but
+the many days when these things happened. Not only this.
+In Clubs and Country Clubs a degree of privacy is still
+assured. But it is a degree too much, to judge from the
+way Philadelphia rushes to lunch, and dine, and drink the
+tea it does not want at five o'clock, in hotels and restaurants:
+our little secluded oyster saloons exchanged for
+dazzling lunch counters, the Spruce and Pine and Walnut
+Street house that could not be except in Philadelphia
+deserted for the Ritz and the Bellevue that might be in
+New York or Chicago, Paris or London, Vienna or Rome.
+The old fashion was to celebrate the feast in cloistered
+seclusion, to let none intrude who was not bidden to share
+it. Now the fashion is to cry out and summon the mob
+and the multitude to gaze upon Philadelphia feasting. I
+know that this is in a measure the result of a change that is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[Pg 448]</a></span>
+not peculiar to Philadelphia alone. All the world to-day,
+wherever you go, dines in public&mdash;the modern Dives must
+always dine where his Lazarus cannot possibly mistake the
+gate. But I could not have believed that Philadelphia
+would come to it&mdash;that Philadelphia would step out from
+the sanctuary into the market-place and proclaim to the
+passer-by the luxury he had once so scrupulously kept
+to himself.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>Nor is the feast quite what it was, though this is not
+because it has lost, but rather because it has gained. I
+trembled on my return lest the old gods be fallen. My
+first visit after long years away was one of a few hours
+only. I ran over from New York to lunch with old friends.
+There was a horrid moment of bewilderment when I
+stepped from the Pennsylvania Station into a street where
+I ought to have been at home and was not, and this made
+me dread that at the luncheon the change would be more
+overwhelming. Certain things belong to, are a part of,
+certain places that can never be the same without them.
+I met a Frenchman the other day in London, who had not
+been there for ten years, and who was in despair because
+at no hotel or restaurant could he find a gooseberry or an
+apple tart. They were not dishes of which he was warmly
+enamoured; no Frenchman could be; but a London shorn
+of gooseberry and apple tarts was not the London he had
+known. The dread of the same disillusionment was in my
+heart as I drew near my luncheon, more serious in my case<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[Pg 449]</a></span>
+because the things I did not want to lose were too good to
+lose. But my dread was wasted. Broad Street might
+have changed, but not the Chicken Salad with the Philadelphia
+dash of mustard in the Mayonnaise, not the Croquettes
+though Augustine had gone, not the Ice-cream
+rising before me in the splendid pyramid of my childhood
+with the solid base of the Coffee Ice-cream I had
+never gone to Sautter's without ordering. And I knew
+that hope need not be abandoned when I was assured that,
+though Sautter's have opened a big new place on Chestnut
+Street, where a long <i>menu</i> disputes the honours with
+their one old masterpiece, it is to the gloomy store in the
+retirement of Broad and Locust that the Philadelphia
+woman, who gives a dinner, sends for her Ice-cream.</p>
+
+<p>These things were unaltered&mdash;they are unalterable.
+All the old friends reappeared at the breakfasts, luncheons
+and dinners that followed in the course of the longer
+visit when, not the Fatted Calf, but the Fatted Shad,
+Soft-Shell Crab, Fried Oyster, Squab&mdash;how the name
+mystified my friend, George Steevens, though he had but
+to open an old English cookery book in my collection to
+know that in England, before he was born, a Squab was a
+young Pigeon&mdash;Broiled Chicken, Cinnamon Bun, little
+round Cakes with white icing on top, were prepared for
+the prodigal. But there were other dishes, other combinations
+new to me: Grape Fruit had come in during my
+absence, though long enough ago to have reached England
+in the meanwhile; also the fashion of serving Shad and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[Pg 450]</a></span>
+Asparagus together, the <i>dernier cri</i> of the Philadelphia
+epicure, though&mdash;may I admit it now as I have not dared
+to before?&mdash;a combination in which I thought two delicate
+flavours were sacrificed, one to the other. And there were
+amazing combinations in the Salads, daring, strange, unPhiladelphian,
+calling for the French Dressing for which
+my Philadelphia had small use. I so little liked the new
+sign of the new Sundae at the new popular lunch-counter
+and druggist's that, with true Philadelphia prejudice, I
+never sampled it. And there were other innovations I
+would need to write a cookery book to exhaust&mdash;sometimes
+successful, sometimes not, but with no violation of the
+canons of the art in which Philadelphia has ever excelled.
+In every experiment, every novelty, the motive, if not the
+result, was sound.</p>
+
+<p>For this reason I have no fear for the future of Philadelphia
+cookery, if only it has the courage not to succumb
+unreservedly to cold storage. The changes may be many,
+but Philadelphia knows how to sift them, retaining only
+those that should be retained, for beneath them all is the
+changelessness that is the foundation of art.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[Pg 451]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVIII: PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>I confess to a good deal of emotion as the train
+slowed up in the Pennsylvania Station, and I think
+I had a right to it. It is not every day one comes
+home after a quarter of a century's absence, and at
+the first glance everything was so bewilderingly home-like.
+Not that I had not had my misgivings as the train
+neared Philadelphia. From the car windows I had seen
+my old Convent at Torresdale transformed beyond recognition,
+many new stations with new names by the way,
+rows and rows of houses where I remembered fields, Philadelphia
+grown almost as big as London to get into, a
+new, strange, unbelievable sky-line to the town, the bridges
+multiplied across the Schuylkill&mdash;change after change
+where I should have liked to find everything, every house,
+field, tree, blade of grass even, just as I had left it. But
+what change there might be in the station kept itself, for
+the moment anyway, discreetly out of sight. For all the
+difference I saw, I might have been starting on the journey
+that had lasted over a quarter of a century instead of returning
+from it.</p>
+
+<p>This made the shock the greater when, just outside in
+Market Street, I was met by a company of mounted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[Pg 452]</a></span>
+policemen. It is true they were there to welcome not me,
+but the President of the United States who was due by the
+next train, and were supported by the City Troop, as
+indispensable a part of my Philadelphia as the sky over
+my head and the bricks under my feet; true also that, well-uniformed,
+well-mounted, well-groomed as they were, I
+felt they would be a credit to any town. But the shock
+was to find them there at all. Philadelphia in my day could
+not have run, or would not have wanted to run, to anything
+so officially imposing; that it could and did now was
+a warning there was no mistaking. Whatever Philadelphia
+might have developed, or deteriorated, into, it was
+not any longer the Philadelphia I had known and loved.</p>
+
+<p>It was the same sort of warning all the way after that.
+Wherever I went, wherever I turned, I stumbled upon an
+equally impossible jumble of the familiar and the unfamiliar.
+At times, I positively ached with the joy of
+finding places so exactly as I remembered them that I
+caught myself saying, just here "this" happened, or
+"that," as I and my Youth met ourselves; at others I
+could have cried for the absurdity, the tragedy, of finding
+everything so different that never in a foreign land had
+I seemed more hopelessly a foreigner.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 310px;">
+<img src="images/gs087.jpg" width="310" height="400" alt="BROAD STREET STATION" title="" />
+<span class="caption">BROAD STREET STATION</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I did not have to go farther than my hotel for a reminder
+that Philadelphia, to oblige me, had not stood
+altogether still during my quarter of a century's absence,
+but had been, and was, busy
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'refashioning' and 're-fashioning' were used in this text. This was retained.">refashioning</ins>
+itself into something
+preposterously new. From one of my high windows<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[Pg 455]</a></span>
+I might look down to the Philadelphia Library and the
+Episcopal Academy,&mdash;those two bulwarks of Philadelphia
+respectability&mdash;and beyond, stretching peacefully
+away to the peaceful curves of the Delaware, to a wide
+plain of flat red roofs and chimneys, broken by the green
+lines of the trees that follow the straight course of
+Philadelphia's streets and by the small green spaces of
+the trees that shade Philadelphia's back-yards: level and
+lines and spaces I knew as well as a lesson
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learnt</ins> by heart.
+But, from the midst of this red plain of roofs, huge high
+buildings, like towers, that I did not know, sprang up into
+the blue air, increasing in number as my eye wandered
+northward until, from the other window, I saw them
+gathered into one great, amazing, splendid group with
+William Penn, in full-skirted coat and broad-brimmed hat,
+springing still higher above them.</p>
+
+<p>When I went down into the streets, I might walk for a
+minute or two between rows of the beloved old-fashioned
+red brick houses, with their white marble steps and their
+white shutters below and green above, and then, just as
+exultantly I began to believe them changeless as the
+Pyramids and the Sphinx, I would come with a jar upon
+a Gothic gable, an absurd turret, a Renaissance doorway,
+a fa&ccedil;ade disfigured by a hideous array of fire escapes, a
+sham Colonial house, or some other upstart that dated
+merely from yesterday or the day before. And here and
+there a sky-scraper of an apartment house swaggered in
+the midst of the little "homes" that were Philadelphia's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[Pg 456]</a></span>
+pride&mdash;the last new one, to my dismay, rearing its countless
+stories above the once inviolate enclosure of Rittenhouse
+Square.</p>
+
+<p>When I went shopping in Chestnut Street my heart
+might rejoice at the sight of some of the well remembered
+names&mdash;Dreka, Darlington, Bailey, Caldwell, as indispensable
+in my memory as that of Penn himself&mdash;but it
+sank as quickly in the vain search for the many more that
+have disappeared, or indeed, for the whole topsy-turvy
+order of things that could open the big new department
+stores into Market Street and make it the rival of Chestnut
+as a shopping centre, or that could send other stores up to
+where stores had never ventured in my day: stores in
+Walnut Street as high as Eighteenth, a milliner's in
+Locust Street almost under the shadow of St. Mark's, a
+stock-broker at the corner of Fifteenth and Walnut,
+Hughes and M&uuml;ller&mdash;I need tell no Philadelphian who
+Hughes and M&uuml;ller are even if they have unkindly made
+two firms of the old one&mdash;within a stone's throw of Dr.
+Weir Mitchell's house; when I saw that I felt that sacrilege
+could go no further.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 308px;">
+<img src="images/gs088.jpg" width="308" height="400" alt="WANAMAKER&#39;S" title="" />
+<span class="caption">WANAMAKER&#39;S</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>For sentiment's sake, I might eat my plate of ice-cream
+at the old little marble-topped table in the old
+Locust Street gloom at Sautter's, or buy cake at Dexter's
+at the old corner in Spruce Street, but Mrs. Burns with her
+ice-cream, Jones with his fried oysters, had vanished, gone
+away in the <i>Ewigkeit</i> as irrevocably as Hans Breitmann's
+Barty or the snows of yester-year. And Wyeth's and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[Pg 459]</a></span>
+Hubbell's masqueraded under other names, and Shinn,
+from whom we used to buy our medicines, was dead, and the
+new firm sold cigars with their ice-cream sodas, and my
+Philadelphia was stuffed with saw-dust.</p>
+
+<p>Not a theatre was as I had left it, new ones I had
+never heard of drawing the people who used to crowd the
+Chestnut, which has rung down its curtain on the last act
+of its last play even as I write; the Arch, given over now,
+alas! to the "Movies" and the "Movies" threaten the
+end of the drama not only at the Arch but at all theatres
+forever; well-patronized houses flourishing in North Broad
+Street; the staid Academy of Music thrown into the
+shadow by its giddy prosperous upstart of a rival
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'uptown' and 'up-town' were used in this text. This was retained.">up-town</ins>.</p>
+
+<p>Vanished were old landmarks for which I confidently
+looked&mdash;the United States Mint from Chestnut Street;
+from Broad and Walnut the old yellow Dundas House
+with the garden and the magnolia for whose blossoming
+I had once eagerly watched with the coming of spring;
+from Thirteenth and Locust the old Paterson House,
+turned into the new, imposing, very much criticised building
+of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; from
+Eleventh and Spruce, that other garden overlooked by the
+windows of the house my Grandfather built and lived in, as
+my Father did after him, and, to me more cruel, the house
+itself passed into other hands, grown shabby with time, and
+the sign "For Sale" hanging on its neglected walls.
+Change, change, change&mdash;that was what I had come home
+for!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[Pg 460]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>I am not sure, however, that I had not the worst shock
+of all when I wandered from the old home, further down
+Spruce Street, below the beautiful Eighteenth Century
+Hospital, dishonoured now and shut in on the Spruce
+Street side by I hardly know what in the way of new
+wings and wards. As I had left it, this lower part of
+Spruce and Pine and the neighbouring streets, had
+changed less perhaps than any other part of the town&mdash;has
+changed less to-day in mere bricks and mortar. It had
+preserved the appropriate background for its inheritance
+of history and traditions. Numerous Colonial houses remained
+and upon them those of later date were modelled.
+It had kept also the serenity and repose of the Quaker
+City's early days, the character, dignity, charm. Many
+old Philadelphia families had never moved away. It was
+clean as a little Dutch town with nothing to interrupt the
+quiet but the gentle jingling of the occasional leisurely
+horse-car.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 301px;">
+<img src="images/gs089.jpg" width="301" height="400" alt="ST. PETER&#39;S CHURCHYARD" title="" />
+<span class="caption">ST. PETER&#39;S CHURCHYARD</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And what did I find it?&mdash;A slum, captured by the
+Russian Jew, the old houses dirty, down-at-the-heel; the
+once spotless marble steps unwashed, the white shutters
+hanging loose; the decorative old iron hinges and catches
+and insurance plaques or badges rusting, and nobody can
+say how much of the old woodwork inside burned for
+kindling; Yiddish signs in the windows, with here a Jewish
+Maternity Home, and there a Jewish newspaper office; at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[Pg 463]</a></span>
+every door, almost every window, and in groups in the
+street, men, women and children with Oriental faces, here
+and there a man actually in his caftan, bearded, with the
+little curls in front of his ears, and a woman with a
+handkerchief over her head, and all chattering in Yiddish
+and slatternly and dirty as I remembered them in South-Eastern
+Europe, from Carlsbad and Prague to those remote
+villages of Transylvania where dirt was the sign by
+which I always knew when the Jewish quarter was reached.
+A few patriotic Philadelphians have recently returned hoping
+to stem the current, and their houses shine with cleanliness.
+In Fourth Street the dignified Randolph House,
+which the family never deserted, seems to protest against
+the wholesale surrender to the foreign invasion. In Pine
+Street, St. Peter's, with its green graveyard, has survived
+untarnished the surrounding desecration. But I could
+only wonder how long the church and these few houses will
+be able to withstand the triumphing alien, and I abandoned
+hope when, at the very gate of St. Peter's, a woman with a
+handkerchief tied over her head stopped me to ask the way
+to "<i>Zweit und Pine</i>."</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>I know that the same thing is going on in almost all
+the older parts of the United States, and the new parts
+too&mdash;I know that some small New England towns can
+support their two and three Polish newspapers, that
+New York swarms with people who talk any and every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[Pg 464]</a></span>
+language under the sun except English, and can boast, if it
+is a thing to boast of, more Italians than Rome, more Jews
+than Jerusalem; that San Francisco has its Chinatown,
+that the Middle West abounds in German and Swedish
+settlements&mdash;in a word, I know that everywhere throughout
+the country, the native American is retreating before this
+invasion of the alien. But it is with a certain difference in
+Philadelphia. Have I not said that one of the absurdities
+of my native town&mdash;I can afford to call them absurdities
+because I love them&mdash;is that for the Philadelphian who
+looks upon himself as the real Philadelphian, Philadelphia
+lies between the Delaware and the Schuylkill, and is
+bounded on the north by Market Street, on the south by
+Lombard; that in the ancient rhyming list of its streets he
+recognizes only the line:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine"?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now, when I left home this narrow section was
+threatening to grow too narrow and it was with some
+difficulty the Philadelphian kept within it. Up till then,
+however, it was in no danger except from his own increasing
+numbers. The tragedy is that the Russian Jew should
+have descended upon just this section, should now, not so
+much dispute it with him, as oust him from it&mdash;the Russian
+Jew, a Jew by religion but not by race, who has been
+found impossible in every country on the Continent of
+Europe into which he has drifted, so impossible when that
+country is Holland that the Jews who have been there for
+centuries collect among themselves the money to send<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[Pg 467]</a></span>
+him post haste on to England and poor America, for even
+the Dutch Jew cannot stand the Russian Jew&mdash;and, from
+what I have heard, neither can the decent Pennsylvania
+Jew who has been with us almost from the beginning. Other
+aliens have been more modest and set up their slums where
+they interfere less with Philadelphia tradition. I cannot
+understand, and nobody has been able to explain to me,
+why the Russian Jew was allowed to push his way in. But
+the indolent never see the thin end of the wedge, and there
+are philanthropists whose philanthropy for the people
+they do not know increases in direct proportion to the harm
+it does to those they do know. I was told more than once
+to consider what Philadelphia was doing for the Russian
+Jew, to remember that he has paid America the compliment
+of accepting it as the Promised Land, that his race
+in America has produced Mary Antin, and to see for myself
+what good Americans were being made of his children.
+But though Philadelphia may one day blossom like
+the rose with Mary Antins, though there might have been
+an incipient patriot in every one of the small Russian
+Jews I met being taken in batches across Independence
+Square to Independence Hall to imbibe patriotism at the
+fount, I could not help considering rather what the Russian
+Jew is just now doing for Philadelphia. For it is as
+plain as a pipe stem to anybody with eyes to see that the
+Philadelphians to whom Philadelphia originally belonged
+are being pushed by the Russian Jew out of the only part
+of it they care to live in.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs090.jpg" width="400" height="301" alt="CITY HALL FROM THE SCHUYLKILL" title="" />
+<span class="caption">CITY HALL FROM THE SCHUYLKILL</span>
+</div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[Pg 468]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I wondered at first why so many people had fled to the
+country, why so many signs "For Sale" or "For Rent"
+were to be seen about Spruce and Pine and Walnut
+Streets. Various reasons were given me:&mdash;with the Law
+Courts now in the centre of the town and the new Stock
+Exchange at Broad and Walnut, and stores everywhere,
+nobody could live in town; the noise of the
+trolleys is unbearable; the dirt of the city is unhealthy;
+soft coal has made Philadelphia grimier than London;
+the motor has destroyed distance;&mdash;excellent reasons,
+all of them. But it was not until I discovered the Russian<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Jew that I understood the most important. It is</span><br />
+the Russian Jew who, with an army of aliens at his back&mdash;thousands
+upon thousands of Italians, Slavs, Lithuanians,
+a fresh emigration of negroes from the South, and
+statistics alone can say how many other varieties&mdash;is pushing
+and pushing Philadelphians out of the town&mdash;first up
+Spruce Street, nearer and nearer to the Schuylkill, then
+across the Schuylkill into the suburbs, eventually to be
+swept from the suburbs into the country, until who can
+say where there will be any room for them at all? With
+the Russian Jew's genius for adapting himself to American
+institutions, I could fancy him taking possession of,
+and adding indefinitely to, the little two-story houses that
+already stretch in well-nigh endless rows to the West and
+the North, Germantown and West Philadelphia built
+over beyond recognition. I remember when, one day in a
+trolley, I had gone for miles and miles between these rows&mdash;each<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[Pg 471]</a></span>
+little house with the same front yard, the same
+porch, the same awning, the same rocking-chairs&mdash;I had a
+horrible waking nightmare in which I saw them multiplying&mdash;as
+the alien himself multiplied beyond the most
+ardent dreams of Mr. Roosevelt,&mdash;and creeping out
+further and further, across the city limits, across the State,
+across the Middle West, across the prairies, across the
+Rockies, across the Sierras, until at last they joined East
+to West in one unbroken line&mdash;one great, unbroken, unlovely
+monument to the enterprise of the new American,
+and the philanthropy of the old: while only the Russian
+Jew at the door of the State House, like Macaulay's New
+Zealander under the shadow of St. Paul's, remained to
+muse and moralize on the havoc he had wrought.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 313px;">
+<img src="images/gs091.jpg" width="313" height="400" alt="CHESTNUT STREET BRIDGE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">CHESTNUT STREET BRIDGE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>This may seem a trifle fantastic, but I should find it
+hard to give an idea of how impossibly fantastic the prevailing
+presence of the alien in Philadelphia appeared to
+me. To be sure, we had our aliens a quarter of a century
+ago. But they were mostly Irish, Germans, Swedes. The
+Italian at his fruit-stall was as yet rather the picturesque
+exception, and I can remember how, not very long before
+I left home, the whole town went to stare at the first importation
+of Russian Jews, dumped down under I have
+forgotten what shelter, as if they were curiosities or freaks
+from Barnum's. But now the aliens are mostly Latins,
+Slavs, Orientals who do not fit so unobtrusively into
+our American scheme of things, and who come from the
+lowest classes in their own countries, so ignorant and degraded<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[Pg 472]</a></span>
+most of them that, what with their increasing
+numbers and our new negro population from the South,
+there are people in Pennsylvania who are trying to introduce
+an educational test at the polls&mdash;America having
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+the evil of universal suffrage just as England is
+coquetting with it.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>The rest of Philadelphia&mdash;the rest of America, for that
+matter&mdash;may be accustomed to this new emigration to my
+town as well as to all parts of the country. But I had not
+seen the latter-day alien coming in by every steamer, and
+gradually, almost imperceptibly, establishing himself.
+The advantage, or disadvantage, of staying away from
+home so long is that, on returning, one gets the net result
+of the change the days and the years bring with them.
+Those who stay at home are broken in to the change in its
+initial stages and can accept the result as a matter of
+course. I could not. To be honest, I did not like it. I
+did not like to find Philadelphia a foreign town.</p>
+
+<p>I did not like to find Streets where the name on almost
+every store is Italian. I did not like to find the new types
+of negro, like savages straight from the heart of Africa
+some of them looked, who are disputing South Street and
+Lombard Street and that disgraceful bit of Locust Street
+with the decent, old-fashioned, self-respecting Philadelphia
+darkies. I did not like to find the people with
+foreign manners&mdash;for instance, to have my hand kissed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[Pg 473]</a></span>
+for a tip in the hotel by a Lithuanian chambermaid, though
+I should add that in a month she had grown American
+enough to accept the same tip stoically with a bare "Thank
+You." I did not like to find the foreigner forcing his way
+not only into the Philadelphian's houses, the Philadelphian's
+schools, the Philadelphian's professions&mdash;professions
+that have been looked upon as the sacred right of certain
+Philadelphia families for almost a couple of centuries.
+I have heard all about his virtues, nobody need remind
+me of them; I know that he is carrying off everything
+at the University so that rich Jews begin to think they
+should in return make it a gift or bequest, as no rich Jew
+has yet, I believe. I know that the young Philadelphian
+must give up his sports and his gaieties if he can hope to
+compete with the young Russian Jew who never allows
+himself any recreation on the road to success&mdash;and perhaps
+this won't do the young Philadelphian any harm. I
+know that if the Russian Jew keeps on studying law, the
+Philadelphia lawyer will be before long as extinct as the
+dodo&mdash;a probability that if it wakes up the Philadelphia
+lawyer may have its uses. All this, and much besides, I
+know&mdash;also, incidentally, I might add the fact that the
+Russian Jew, who is not unintelligent, has mastered in a
+very short time the possibilities of arson and bankruptcy
+as investments. But if there were no other side to his
+virtues&mdash;and of course there is that other side too&mdash;I should
+not like to think of the new Philadelphian that is to come
+out of this incredible mixture of Russian Jews and countless<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[Pg 474]</a></span>
+other aliens as little like us in character and tradition.</p>
+
+<p>The new Philadelphian may be a finer creature far
+than in my hopes for him, finer far than the old Philadelphian
+I have known&mdash;but then he will not be that old Philadelphian
+whom I do not want to lose and whom it would
+be a pity to lose in a country for which, ever since Penn
+pointed the way to the constitution of the United States, he
+has probably accomplished more than any other citizen.</p>
+
+<p>Personally, I might as well say that I do not believe
+he will be a finer creature. It seems to me that he is doing
+away with the old American idea of levelling up and is
+bent on the levelling down process that is going on all over
+Europe. And so foreign is he making us, that I would
+not think J. very far wrong in declaring himself the only
+real American left, if only he would include me with him.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 294px;">
+<img src="images/gs092.jpg" width="294" height="400" alt="THE NARROW STREET" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE NARROW STREET</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[Pg 477]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIX: PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY&mdash;CONTINUED</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>It was not only the change that oppressed me those
+first days of my return. As bewildering, as discouraging,
+were the signs everywhere of the horrible
+haste with which it has been brought about: a haste foreign
+to the Philadelphia habit. But the aliens pouring
+into Philadelphia have increased its population at such a
+prodigious rate that it has been obliged to grow too
+prodigiously fast to meet or to adapt itself to the new
+conditions without the speed that does not belong to it.</p>
+
+<p>I had left it a big, prosperous, industrial town&mdash;Baldwin's,
+Cramp's, Kensington and Germantown mills all in
+full swing&mdash;but it carried off its bigness, prosperity, and
+industry with its old demure and restful airs of a country
+town. The old-fashioned, hard-working, Philadelphia
+business man could still dine at four o'clock and spend the
+rest of the afternoon looking out of the window for the
+people who rarely passed and the things that never happened&mdash;nobody
+would be free to dine at four
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'nowadays' and 'now-a-days' were used in this text. This was retained.">now-a-days</ins>,
+nobody would have the leisure to sit at any hour looking
+out of the window, except perhaps the Philadelphia clubman
+who clings to that amiable pastime, as he does, so
+far successfully, to his Club house, threatened on every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[Pg 478]</a></span>
+side as it is by the advance of the sky-scraper. The old-fashioned
+busy Philadelphia crowds, as I remember them,
+could still take their time in the streets, so that I remember,
+too, my friend, George Steevens' astonishment because a
+passer-by he thanked for information could linger to say
+"You are very welcome." The old-fashioned Philadelphia
+business, going on at a pace that only New York and
+Chicago could beat, was still accomplished with so little
+fuss that the rest of America laughed at Philadelphia for
+its slowness and sleepiness, and told those old time-worn
+stories that have passed into folk-lore. It was just this
+that gave Philadelphia such a distinct character of its
+own&mdash;that it could be laughed at for slowness and sleepiness
+by the other towns, and all the while be sleepy and
+slow to such good purpose as to make itself into one of the
+most prosperous and influential in the country: to be able
+to work at the American pace and yet preserve its dignity
+and sedateness.</p>
+
+<p>But the old stories have lost what little point they had.
+Philadelphia does not look slow and sleepy any longer.
+Things have changed, indeed, when a modern traveller like
+Mr. Arnold Bennett can speak of "spacious gaiety" in
+connection with Philadelphia&mdash;with its spacious dulness
+the earlier traveller was more apt to be impressed. At last,
+however, it has given up its country-town airs for the
+airs of the big town it is&mdash;given up the calmness that was
+its chief characteristic for the hurry-flurry of the ordinary
+American town. And there is scarcely a Philadelphian<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481">[Pg 481]</a></span>
+who regrets it, that is the saddest part of it&mdash;scarcely a
+Philadelphian who does not rejoice that Philadelphia is
+getting to be like New York.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs093.jpg" width="400" height="297" alt="THE MARKET STREET ELEVATED AT THE DELAWARE END" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE MARKET STREET ELEVATED AT THE DELAWARE END</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I think, of all the innovations, this was the one that
+distressed me most, though I could understand the difficulty
+of calm in the face of the multitude of new housing
+and traffic problems it has had to tackle, at a rate and with
+a speed that the Philadelphian, left to himself, would never
+have imposed upon it. Somehow, it has had to keep on
+putting up those rows of little two-story houses in sufficient
+numbers to shelter the too rapidly increasing population
+if it is to maintain its reputation as the City of
+Homes; somehow, it has had to provide subways, and
+elevateds, and new suburban lines with no level crossings,
+and new central Stations and Terminals, and big trolley
+cars out of all proportion to Philadelphia's narrow streets,
+and taxis too dear for any but the millionaire to drive in, if
+the too-rapidly increasing crowds are to be got to work and
+back again; somehow, new bridges have had to cross the
+Schuylkill, new streets have had to be laid out, so many
+new things have had to be begun and done in the too-rapidly
+growing town, that there is small chance and less
+time for it to take them calmly or, alas! to keep itself
+clean and tidy.</p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>In my memory Philadelphia was a model of cleanliness
+under a clean sky, free of the smoke that the use of
+soft coal has brought with it. Every Saturday every servant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[Pg 482]</a></span>
+girl&mdash;"maid," Philadelphia calls her now&mdash;turned
+out with mops and buckets and hose, for such a washing up
+of the front for a week that, until the next Saturday,
+Philadelphia could not look dirty if it tried. But I do not
+believe that a legion of servant girls, with all the mops,
+buckets, and hose in the world, could ever wash Philadelphia
+clean again, to such depths of dirt has it fallen. It
+could not have been more of a disgrace to its citizens when
+Franklin deplored the shocking condition of its streets,
+especially in wet weather, or when Washington had to
+wade through mud to get to the theatre where he found
+his recreation. It has become actually the Filthydelphia
+somebody once called it in jest. Not even in the little
+Spanish and Italian towns whose dirt the American deplores,
+have I seen such streets&mdash;all rivers and pools and
+lakes when it rains, ankle-deep in dust when it is dry,
+papers flying loose, corners choked with dirt, tins of ashes
+and garbage standing at the gutter side all day long&mdash;even
+London, that I used to think the dirtiest of dirty
+towns, knows how to order its garbage better than that.
+We Americans are supposed to be long-suffering, to endure
+almost anything until the crisis comes. But I thought
+that crisis had long since come in the Philadelphia streets.
+Everybody agreed with me, and I was assured that a
+corrupt government having been got out and a reform
+government got in, already there was tremendous talk of
+schemes for garbage&mdash;bags to be hauled off full of garbage,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[Pg 485]</a></span>
+dust-tight on the way, and hauled back empty, old
+paper to be bought up by the city so that no thrifty citizen
+would throw a scrap of paper into the street&mdash;and as
+tremendous talk of experiments in garbage, ten patriotic
+citizens promising to contribute one thousand dollars each
+to make them. I was assured also that the reform Mayor
+has done his best and struggled valiantly against the evil,
+but unfortunately it is not he alone who can vote the money
+for a wholesale spring-cleaning. It occurred to me that, in
+the meanwhile, we might be better off if we returned with
+much less expense, to the hogs that were "the best of
+scavengers" when William Cobbett visited Philadelphia.
+Or, at no more than the cost of a ticket to New York, the
+reformers might at least learn how to keep garbage tins
+off the front steps of inoffensive, tax-paying citizens at
+five o'clock in the afternoon when they ask their friends to
+drink tea in that English fashion which is as novel in my
+Philadelphia as the difficulty with the garbage.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs094.jpg" width="400" height="309" alt="THE RAILROAD BRIDGES AT FALLS OF SCHUYLKILL" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE RAILROAD BRIDGES AT FALLS OF SCHUYLKILL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>My own opinion was that Philadelphia had lost its
+head over the magnitude of the task before it. In no other
+way could I account for the recklessness with which old
+streets were torn up for blocks and repaired by inches;
+new streets built and horrible stagnant pools left on their
+outskirts&mdash;the suburbs quite as bad in this respect, so bad
+that I understand associations of citizens are formed to
+do what the authorities don't seem able to; boulevards
+planned and held up when half finished, a monumental<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_486" id="Page_486">[Pg 486]</a></span>
+entrance designed to the most beautiful Park in the world
+and, on its either side, silly little wooden pergolas set up to
+try the effect, by the dethroned government I believe, and,
+though nobody, from one end of the town to the other,
+approves, neither the time nor the money is found to pull
+them down again&mdash;neither the time nor the money found
+for anything but dirt and untidiness.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>The people, their manners, their life,&mdash;everything
+seemed to me to have been caught in this mad whirlwind
+of change and haste. The crowds in the street were not
+the same, had forgotten the meaning of repose and leisureliness;
+had at last given in to the American habit of
+leaving everything until the last moment and then rushing
+when there was no occasion for rush, and pretending to
+hustle so that not one man or woman I met could have
+spared a second to say
+"<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Your'">You</ins>
+are welcome" for anybody's
+"Thank you," or, for that matter, to provide the
+information for anybody's thanks;&mdash;indeed, these crowds
+seemed to me to have mastered their new r&ocirc;le with such
+thoroughness that to-day the visitor from abroad will carry
+away the same idea of Philadelphia as Arnold Bennett,
+who, during his sojourn there, never ceased to marvel at its
+liveliness.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 318px;">
+<img src="images/gs095.jpg" width="318" height="400" alt="THE PARKWAY PERGOLAS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE PARKWAY PERGOLAS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And the crowds have migrated from the old haunts&mdash;every
+sign of life now gone from Third Street and round
+about the Stock Exchange, where nobody now is ever in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_489" id="Page_489">[Pg 489]</a></span>
+a hurry&mdash;carts and cars going at snail's pace, the whole
+place looking as if time did not count&mdash;the old town business
+quarter deserted for Market Street and Broad Street
+round the City Hall.</p>
+
+<p>And the crowds do not get about in the same way&mdash;no
+slow, leisurely ride in the horse-car to a <i>Depot</i> in the
+wilds of Frankford, or at Ninth and Green, on the way
+to the suburbs, but a leap on a trolley, or a rush through
+thronged streets to the <i>Terminal</i> at Twelfth and Market,
+to the <i>Station</i> at Broad and Market. And it was another
+sign of how Philadelphia had "moved" since the old days
+when, in place of the old horse-car, which I could rely upon
+to go in a straight line from one end of the long street to
+the other, I took the new trolley and it twisted and turned
+with me until the exception was to arrive just where I
+expected to, or, if I only stayed in it long enough, not to
+be landed in some remote country town where I had no
+intention of going. I have been told the story of the stay-at-home
+Philadelphian as puzzled as I, who was promised
+by a motorman, as uncertain as she where he was going,
+that at least he could give her a "nice ride through a
+handsome part of the town." Worse still, the trolley did
+not stop at the corners where the car used to stop so that I,
+a native Philadelphian, had to be told where to wait for it
+by an interloper with a foreign accent. Nor was it crowded
+at the same hours as the car used to be, so that going out to
+dinner in a Walnut Street trolley I could sit comfortably
+and not be obliged to hang on to a strap, with everybody<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490">[Pg 490]</a></span>
+who got in or out helping to rub the freshness from my best
+evening gown, which would have been my fate in the old
+days.</p>
+
+<p>And the crowds were not managed in the old way&mdash;the
+ordinary policeman used to do his best to keep out of
+sight, and here was the mounted policeman prancing about
+everywhere, and, at congested corners, adding to the confusion
+by filling up what little space the overgrown trolleys
+left in the narrow streets. I am not sure that it was not
+this mounted policeman&mdash;unless it was the
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'colored' and 'coloured' were used in this text. This was retained.">coloured</ins> policemen
+and the <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'colored' and 'coloured' were used in this text. This was retained.">coloured</ins>
+postmen&mdash;I had most difficulty in
+getting accustomed to. I came upon him every day, or
+almost every hour, with something of a new shock. Can
+this be really I, I would say to myself when I saw him in
+his <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'splendor' and 'splendour' were used in this text. This was retained.">splendour</ins>,
+can this be really Philadelphia?</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>The difference I deplored was not confined to the
+crowds I did not know; it was no less marked in the people
+I did know, in their standards and outlook, in the way
+they lived. It is hard to say what struck me most, though
+nothing more obviously the first few days than that flight
+to the suburbs which had left such visible proofs as those
+signs "For Rent" and "For Sale" everywhere in the
+streets where I was most at home&mdash;a flight necessitated
+perhaps by the inroads of the alien, but only made possible
+by the annihilation of space due to the motor-car.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 319px;">
+<img src="images/gs096.jpg" width="319" height="400" alt="MARKET STREET WEST OF THE SCHUYLKILL" title="" />
+<span class="caption">MARKET STREET WEST OF THE SCHUYLKILL</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Once, when a Philadelphian set up a carriage, it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493">[Pg 493]</a></span>
+the announcement to Philadelphia that he had earned the
+fifty thousand dollars which fulfilled his ideal of a fortune.
+In my day Fairman Rogers' four-in-hand was the limit,
+and but few Philadelphians had the money and the recklessness
+to rival him. Now the Philadelphian does not
+have to earn anything at all before he sets up his motor-car,
+and it is the announcement of nothing except that he
+is bound to keep in the swim. Our children begin where
+we leave off, as one of my contemporaries said to me.
+Everybody has a motor-car. Everybody who can has one
+in London, I know, and there also the signs "To Let"
+and "For Sale" in such regions as Kensington and Bayswater
+have for some time back explained to me the way it
+has turned London life upside down. But in Philadelphia
+not merely everybody who can, but everybody who can't
+has one, and the Philadelphian would not do without it, if
+he had to mortgage his house as its price. I remember
+how incredulous I was, one of my first Sunday evenings
+at home, when I was dining with friends in the crowded-to-suffocation
+dining-room at the Bala Country Club and
+was given as an excuse for being rushed from my untasted
+coffee to catch an inconsiderately early last train, that ours
+was probably the only dinner party in the room without a
+car to take us back to town. But from that evening on I
+had no chance for incredulity, my own movements beginning
+to revolve round the motor-car. If I was asked to
+dinner and lunch at a distance to which nobody would
+have thought of dragging me by train in the old days, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494">[Pg 494]</a></span>
+motor was sent to whirl me out in no time at all. If I went
+into a far suburb for an afternoon visit, instead of coming
+soberly back to town on my return ticket, I would take a
+short cut by flying over half the near country, often in the
+car of people I had never seen before, as the most convenient
+route to the hotel. All Philadelphia life is regulated
+by the motor-car. It makes a ball or a tea or a dinner
+ten miles away as near as one just round the corner was in
+my time, and so half the gaiety is transferred to the
+suburbs and the suburban country, and, to my surprise, I
+found girls still going to dances at midsummer.</p>
+
+<p>And the motor has made club life for women indispensable.
+The woman who comes up to town in her car
+must have a Club, and there is the Acorn Club in Walnut
+Street, The New Century, and the College and Civic
+Clubs, jointly housed at Thirteenth and Spruce, and
+more clubs in other streets, probably, which it was not
+my privilege to be invited to; all, to judge by the Acorn,
+with luxurious drawing-and dining-and smoking-and
+dressing-and bed-rooms, and women coming and going
+as if they had lived in clubs all their lives, when a
+short quarter of a century before there had not been one
+for them to see the inside of. And for men and women
+both, the car has brought within their reach those amazing
+Country Clubs that have sprung up in my absence. I had
+read of Country Clubs in American novels and short
+stories, I had seen them on the stage in American plays,
+but I had never paused to think of them as realities in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_495" id="Page_495">[Pg 495]</a></span>
+Philadelphia until I was actually taken to the Bala and
+Huntington Valley Clubs, and until I ate their admirable
+dinners&mdash;at Bala, with the crowds and in the light and to
+the music that would have made me feel I was in a London
+restaurant, had it not been for the inevitable cocktail&mdash;and
+until I saw with my own eyes the luxurious houses so
+comfortably and correctly appointed&mdash;even to brass bedroom
+candlesticks on a table in the second-story hall, just
+as in an old-fashioned English inn, though as far as I could
+make out there was excellent electric light everywhere&mdash;until
+I also saw with my own eyes the trim lawns, and
+gardens, and the wide view over the delicate American
+landscape, and women in the tennis courts, and the men
+bringing out their ponies for polo, and the players dotted
+over the golf course.</p>
+
+<p>And whether the Country Clubs have created the
+sport or the sport has created the Country Clubs, I cannot
+say, but in the increased attention to sport I was confronted
+with another difference as startling. Philadelphia,
+I know, has always been given to sport. It hunted
+and raced and fished before time and conscience allowed
+most of the other Colonists in the North the chance to
+amuse themselves out-of-doors, or indoors either, poor
+things! And the old sports, barring the least civilized
+like bull-baiting and cock-fighting, were kept up, and are
+kept up, and had their Clubhouses, which, in some cases,
+have survived. But, in my time, these sports had been
+limited to the few who had country houses in the right districts<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_496" id="Page_496">[Pg 496]</a></span>
+or the leisure for the gentlemanly pursuit of foxes
+and fishes, and their clubs were primitive compared to the
+palatial Country Clubs, whose luxury women now share
+with men. If you were in the hunting or fishing set,
+you heard all about it; but if you were not, you heard
+little enough. But you did not have to be in any set
+to keep up with the great Philadelphia game of cricket,
+which was popular, exclusive as the players in their
+team might be&mdash;all Philadelphia that did not play scrupulously
+going on the proper occasions to the Germantown
+Cricket Ground to watch all Philadelphia that did.
+The one alternative as popular was the pastime of rowing,
+the exclusiveness here in the rowing men's choice
+among the Clubs with the little boating clubhouses on
+the Schuylkill where boats could be stowed. And now?
+The cricket goes on, as gentlemanly and correct a
+pastime as ever. And the boating goes on, but with a
+delightful exclusive old Colonial house, for one Club at
+least, hidden in thickets of the Park where the stranger
+might pass within a stone's throw and never discover it,
+but where the boating party can dine with a privacy and a
+sumptuousness undreamed of at Belmont, where boating
+parties dined in my young days. And, in addition, time
+has been prodigal with golf and tennis and polo; women,
+who had begun tennis in my time, now beginning golf,
+games which, I might as well admit, I have no use for
+and can therefore say little about. And I am told that
+the University <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'football' and 'foot-ball' were used in this text. This was retained.">foot-ball</ins>
+matches are among the most<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_499" id="Page_499">[Pg 499]</a></span>
+important and lavishly patronized social functions of the
+year. And in town is the big Racquets Club, in a fine
+new building, big enough to shelter any number of sports
+besides. And the Natatorium, in moving from the unpretentious
+premises in South Broad Street, where it has
+left its old building and name, to the marble palace
+that was once George W. Childs's. Oh, the sacrilege!
+the house where his emperors and princes and lords and
+authors were entertained,&mdash;has converted the swimming
+lesson into the luxury of sport. And all told, so many,
+and so exhaustive, and so universal are the provisions for
+sport that I might have believed the Philadelphian had
+nothing in the world to do, save to invent amusements to
+help him through his empty hours.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs097.jpg" width="400" height="313" alt="MANHEIM CRICKET GROUND" title="" />
+<span class="caption">MANHEIM CRICKET GROUND</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And, apparently, it is to provide for the same empty
+hours that those elaborate lunch places have multiplied on
+Chestnut Street, some delightful where you feast as only
+Philadelphia can, some horrible where you sit on high
+stools at counters and fight for your food; that little quiet
+discreet tea-places have sprung up in side streets; that
+gilded restaurants, boasting they reproduce the last London
+fads and fashions, have succeeded the old no restaurant
+at all; that hotels as big and strident as if they had
+strayed off Fifth Avenue increase in number year by
+year, culminating in the Adelphia, the latest giant, which
+I have not seen; that the old poky hotels of my day have
+branched out in roof gardens where on hot summer evenings
+you can sit up among the sky-scrapers, a near neighbour<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_500" id="Page_500">[Pg 500]</a></span>
+to William Penn on his tower, and get whatever air
+stirs over the red-hot furnace of Philadelphia; that a huge
+new hotel has appeared up Broad Street where it seems the
+Philadelphian sometimes goes with the feeling of adventure
+with which he once descended upon Logan Square.
+Even business hours are broken into; the lunch of a dozen
+oysters or a sandwich snatched up anywhere has gone out
+of fashion; the chop, in the Philadelphia imitation of a
+London chop-house that seemed luxurious in my Father's
+day, has become far too simple; and disaster was predicted
+to me for the Stock Exchange by a pessimistic member
+who knew that, from the new building that has followed
+the Courts to the centre of the town, brokers will be running
+over to lunch at the Bellevue and to incapacitate
+themselves more or less for the rest of the day, and business
+will go on drifting, as it has begun to, to New York
+and will all be done by telephone. And as if the feasting
+were not enough of a pastime, everywhere lunches, teas
+and dinners are served to the sound of music, so that distraction
+and diversion may be counted upon without the
+effort to talk for them. When I was young, the best
+Philadelphia could do in the way of combining music and
+eating&mdash;or principally drinking&mdash;was at the M&auml;ennerchor
+Garden at Ninth and Green, where a pretzel might be had
+with a glass of beer, or a sherry cobbler, or a mint julep&mdash;"high-balls"
+had not been heard of&mdash;and the Philadelphia
+girl who went, though it was under the irreproachable
+charge of her brother, could feel that she was doing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_503" id="Page_503">[Pg 503]</a></span>
+something very shocking and compromising. But in the
+new Philadelphia, it is music whenever the Philadelphian
+eats or drinks in public, which seems to be next to always.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 335px;">
+<img src="images/gs098.jpg" width="335" height="400" alt="DOCK STREET AND THE EXCHANGE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">DOCK STREET AND THE EXCHANGE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It may be said that these are harmless innovations, part
+of the change in town life as lived in any other town as
+big. But the marvel to me was their conquest of Philadelphia,
+the town that used to pride itself on not being like
+other towns, and there they exaggerated themselves in my
+eyes into nothing short of revolution. The craving for
+novelty&mdash;that was at the root of it all: of the restlessness,
+the willingness to do what the old-fashioned Philadelphian
+would rather have been seen dead than caught doing,
+of the deliberate break with tradition. Nothing now can
+be left peacefully as it was. I felt the foundations of
+the world crumble when I heard that the Dancing Class
+has taken new quarters over in Horticultural Hall and the
+Assembly in the Bellevue, that Philadelphia consents to
+go up Broad Street for its opera, quieting its conscience
+by the compromise of going in carriages and motors and
+never on foot. There surely was the end of the old
+Philadelphia, the real Philadelphia. And it made matters
+no better to be assured that so rapidly does Philadelphia
+move with the times that the Philadelphian who stays away
+from home, or who is in mourning, for a year or so, finds on
+coming back, or out of retirement, that Philadelphia society
+has been as completely transformed in the meanwhile
+as Philadelphia streets. Nor did it make matters
+better to discover the different prices that different<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_504" id="Page_504">[Pg 504]</a></span>
+standards have brought in their train. I could see the new
+pace at which life in public is set, I heard much of the
+new pace set for it in private&mdash;servants' wages prohibitive
+according to old ways of thinking, provisions risen to a
+scale beyond belief,
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'everyday' and 'every-day' were used in this text. This was retained.">every-day</ins>
+existence as dear as in London&mdash;in
+Philadelphia, as elsewhere, people threatened with
+ruin from, not the high cost of living, but the cost of high
+living.</p>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>And the change is not simply in the outward panoply,
+in the parade of life, it is in the point of view, in the new
+attitude toward life&mdash;a change that impressed itself upon
+me in a thousand and one ways. I have already referred to
+my astonishment at finding Philadelphia occupying itself
+with art and literature. But really there is nothing with
+which it does not occupy itself. Universal knowledge has
+come into fashion and it makes me tired just to think of
+the struggle to keep up to it. Once the Philadelphian
+thought he knew everything that was necessary to know
+if he could tell you who every other Philadelphian's
+grandfather was. But now he, or I should say she&mdash;for
+it is the women who rule when it comes to fashion&mdash;is not
+content unless she knows everything, or thinks she does,
+from the first chapter in Genesis to the latest novelty on
+the Boulevards, the latest club gossip in Pall Mall. And
+how she can talk about it! I have made so many confessions
+in these pages that it will do no harm to add one
+more to their number, and to own my discomfiture when,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_505" id="Page_505">[Pg 505]</a></span>
+on finding myself one of a group of Philadelphia women,
+I have been stunned into silence, in my ignorance reduced
+to shame and confusion by their encyclopedic,
+Baedeker-Murray information and their volubility in imparting
+it. It is wonderful to know so much, but, as the
+philosopher says, what a comfort, to be sure, a dull person
+may be at times.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, it was the new interest in politics that
+most astonished me. That just when Philadelphia has
+plunged into incredible frivolity, it should develop an
+interest in problems it calmly shirked in its days of
+sobriety&mdash;that is astounding if you will. When I left
+home, politics were still beneath the active interest of the
+Philadelphian&mdash;still something to steer clear from, to keep
+one's hands clean of. A man who would rather live on
+the public than do an honest day's work, was my Father's
+definition of the politician. I remember what a crank we
+all thought one of my Brother's friends who amused himself
+by being elected to the Common Council. It was not
+at all good form&mdash;who of self-respect could so far forget
+himself as to become part, however humble, of the machine,
+a hail-fellow-well-met among the Bosses and liable
+to be greeted as Bill or Tom or Jim by the postman on his
+rounds or the policeman at the corner. Better far let the
+city be abominably governed and the tax-payers outrageously
+robbed, than to submit to such indignities. The
+Philadelphian who <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>d
+what he owed to himself and
+his position was superior to politics. But he is not any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_506" id="Page_506">[Pg 506]</a></span>
+longer. I found him up to his eyes in politics&mdash;taking the
+responsibility of municipal reform, waging war against
+state corruption, running meetings for Roosevelt and
+Progress at the last Presidential election. And not only
+this. The women are sharing his labours&mdash;the women
+who of old hardly knew the meaning of politics, might
+have been puzzled even to know how to spell the unfamiliar
+word&mdash;they too are busy with civic reform,
+and turn a watchful but unavailing eye on the garbage,
+and run settlements in the slums, and qualify as policemen,
+and demand the vote&mdash;parade for it, hold public
+meetings for it, hob-nob with
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'colored' and 'coloured' were used in this text. This was retained.">coloured</ins>
+women for it,
+run after the discredited English militant for it,&mdash;and talk
+politics on any and every occasion. There were days when
+I heard nothing but politics&mdash;politics at lunch, politics at
+tea, politics at dinner&mdash;think of it! politics at a Philadelphia
+dinner party, politics over the Soft Shell Crabs and
+the Shad and the Broiled Chicken and the Ice-cream from
+Sautter's and the Madeira! It is better and wiser and
+more improving, no doubt, than the old vapid talk&mdash;but
+then the old vapid talk was part of my Philadelphia, and
+my Philadelphia was what I wanted to come back to.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs099.jpg" width="400" height="304" alt="THE LOCOMOTIVE YARD, WEST PHILADELPHIA" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE LOCOMOTIVE YARD, WEST PHILADELPHIA</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_509" id="Page_509">[Pg 509]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XX: PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY&mdash;CONTINUED</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>Of course I resented all the changes and, equally of
+course, it was unreasonable that I should. I had
+not stood stock still for a quarter of a century,
+why should I expect Philadelphia to?</p>
+
+<p>And little by little, as I got my breath again after my
+first indignant surprise, as I pulled myself together after
+my first series of shocks, I began to understand that the
+wonder was that anything should be left, and to see that
+Philadelphia has held on to enough of its character and
+beauty to impress the stranger, anyway, with the fine
+serenity that I missed at every turn. Philadelphia does
+not "bristle," Henry James wrote of it a very few years
+ago, by which he meant that it does not change, is incapable
+of changing, though to me it was, in this sense, so "bristling"
+that I tingled all over with the pricks. But, then,
+I knew what Philadelphia had been. That was why I was
+impressed first with the things that had changed, why, also,
+my pleasure was the keener in my later discovery of the
+things that had not.</p>
+
+<p>I can laugh now at myself for my joy in all sorts of
+dear, absurd trifles simply because of their homely proof
+that the new Philadelphia had saved some relics of the old.
+What they stood for in my eyes gave value to the little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_510" id="Page_510">[Pg 510]</a></span>
+iced Cakes of my childhood; to the frequent street parade,
+glorified as it was beyond recognition by the new presence
+of the mounted police; to the City Troop, gorgeous and
+splendid as of old, and as of old turning out to decorate
+every public ceremony; to the nice old-fashioned "ma'am,"
+unheard in England except, I believe, at court; to all the
+town, including my hotel, getting ready for the summer
+with matting and gauze and grey Holland. Old associations,
+old emotions, were stirred by the fragrance of the
+Cinnamon Bun that is never so fragrant out of Philadelphia,
+and one of the cruelest disappointments of my return
+was not to be able to devour it with the untrammelled
+appetite of youth when it was offered me in an interval
+between the Soft-Shell Crab and Ice-cream of a Philadelphia
+lunch and the Planked Shad and Broiled Chicken of
+a Philadelphia dinner. The row of heads at the Philadelphia
+Club windows, so embarrassing to me in my youth,
+borrowed beauty from association. I was thrilled by the
+decanter of Sherry or Madeira on the dinner table, where
+I had not seen it served in solitary grandeur since I had
+last dined in Philadelphia. The old rough kindliness of the
+people&mdash;when they were not aliens&mdash;in the streets, in the
+stores, in the trolleys, went to my heart. And in larger
+ways, too, the place filled me with pride for its constancy:
+for the steady development of all that made it great from
+the beginning&mdash;its schools, its charities, its hospitals, its
+libraries, its galleries; above all, for retaining what it
+could of its dignified reticence in keeping its private affairs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_513" id="Page_513">[Pg 513]</a></span>
+to itself. It may live more in public than it did, but it still
+does not shriek all its secrets from the house-top. It does
+not thrust all its wealth down every man's throat. It still
+hides many of its luxurious private palaces behind modest
+brick fronts. It may have broken out in gaudy hotels and
+restaurants, but Friends still continue to go their peaceful
+way completely apart in their spacious houses and
+pleasant gardens. Nor would any other town be so shy
+in acknowledging to itself, and boasting to others of, its
+beauty.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 307px;">
+<img src="images/gs100.jpg" width="307" height="400" alt="THE GIRARD TRUST COMPANY" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE GIRARD TRUST COMPANY</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Philadelphia has always been over-modest as to its
+personal appearance,&mdash;always on the surface, indifferent
+to flattery. Nobody would suspect it of ever having heard
+that to a philosopher like Voltaire it was, without his seeing
+it, one of the most beautiful cities in the universe, that a
+matter-of-fact traveller like William Cobbett thought it a
+fine city from the minute he knew it, that all the old travel-writers
+had a compliment for it, and all the new travellers
+as well, down to Li Hung Chang, who described it felicitously
+as "one of the most smiling of cities"&mdash;the "Place
+of a Million Smiles." It was not because it had ceased to
+be beautiful that it assumed this indifference. As I recall
+it in my youth, it was beautiful with the beauty Philadelphians
+searched Europe for, while they were busy destroying
+it at home&mdash;the beauty that life in England has helped
+me to appreciate as I never did before, for it has given me
+a standard I had not when I knew only Philadelphia.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_514" id="Page_514">[Pg 514]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Judged by this standard, I found Philadelphia in its
+old parts more beautiful than I remembered it. In a street
+like Clinton, which has escaped the wholesale destruction,
+or in a block here and there in other streets less
+fortunate, I felt as I never had before the austere loveliness
+of their red brick and white marble and pleasant
+green shade. As never before I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>d
+the Eighteenth-Century
+perfection of the old State House and Carpenter's
+Hall. I know of no English building of the same date
+that has the dignity, the harmonious proportions, the restrained
+ornament of the State House,&mdash;none with so
+noble a background of stately rooms for those stately
+figures who were the makers of history in Philadelphia.
+And the old churches came as a new revelation. I questioned
+if I ever could have thought an English Cathedral
+in its close lovelier than red brick St. Peter's in its walled
+graveyard on a spring day, with the green in its first
+freshness and the great wide-spreading trees throwing
+soft shadows over the grassy spaces and the grey crumbling
+gravestones. The pleasure it gave me positively hurt
+when&mdash;after walking in the filth of Front Street, where
+the old houses are going to rack and ruin and where a Jew
+in his praying shawl at the door of a small, shabby synagogue
+seemed the explanation of the filth&mdash;I came upon
+the little green garden of a graveyard round the Old
+Swedes' Church, sweet and still and fragrant in the May
+sunshine, though the windows of a factory looked down
+upon it to one side, and out in front, on the railroad tracks,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_517" id="Page_517">[Pg 517]</a></span>
+huge heavy freight cars rattled and rumbled and shrieked
+by, and beyond them rose the steam stacks of steamers
+from Antwerp and Liverpool that unload at its door the
+hordes of aliens who not only degrade, but "impoverish"
+Philadelphia, as the Irish porter in my hotel said to me.
+And what pleasure again, after the walk full of memories
+along Front and Second Streets, with the familiar odours
+and Philadelphia here quiet as of yore, to come upon
+Christ Church a part of the street like any French Cathedral
+and not in its own little green, but with a greater
+architectural pretension to make up for it, and with a
+gravestone near the sanctuary to testify that John Penn,
+one at least of the Penn family, lies buried in Philadelphia.
+And what greater pleasure in the old Meeting Houses&mdash;why
+had I not known, in youth as in age, their tranquil
+loveliness?&mdash;What repose there, down Arch Street, in that
+small simple brick building, with its small simple green,
+one bed of tulips at the door, shut off from the noise and
+confusion and dirt and double trolley lines of Arch Street
+by the old high brick wall; and no less in that equally small
+and simple brick building in South Twelfth Street, an old
+oasis, or resting place, in a new wilderness of sky-scrapers.
+With these churches and meeting-houses standing, can
+Philadelphians deplore the ugliness of their town?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 304px;">
+<img src="images/gs101.jpg" width="304" height="400" alt="TWELFTH STREET MEETING HOUSE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">TWELFTH STREET MEETING HOUSE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And the old Eighteenth-Century houses? Would I
+find them as beautiful? I asked myself. Would they survive
+as triumphantly the test of my travelled years and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_518" id="Page_518">[Pg 518]</a></span>
+more observant eyes? How foolish the question, how unnecessary
+the doubt! More beautiful all of them, because
+my eyes were better trained to appreciate their architectural
+merit; more peaceful all of them, with the feeling
+of peace so intense I wondered whether it came of the
+Colonial architecture or of associations with it.</p>
+
+<p>Germantown may be built up beyond recognition, its
+Lanes, many of them, turned into Streets for no reason
+the average man can see, but some of the big old estates,
+are still green and untouched as if miles away, and
+the old houses are more guarded than ever from change.
+One by one, I returned to them:&mdash;Stenton restored, but as
+yet so judicially that Logan would to-day feel at home in
+its halls and rooms, on its stairway, outside by the dovecote
+and the wistaria-covered walls,&mdash;at home in the garden
+full of tulips and daisies, and old familiar Philadelphia
+roses and Johnny-jump-ups, enclosed by hedges, every
+care taken to plant in it afresh just the blossoms he loved.
+But what would he have said to the factories opposite? To
+the rows of little two-story houses creeping nearer and
+nearer? And the Chew House&mdash;could the veterans of the
+Revolution return to it, as the veterans of the Civil War
+return every year to Gettysburg, how well they would
+know their way in the garden, how well, in the wide-pillared
+hall with the old portraits on the white wall, and
+in the rooms with their Eighteenth-Century panelling and
+cornices and fire-places, and in the broad hall upstairs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_521" id="Page_521">[Pg 521]</a></span>
+could they follow the movements of the enemy that lost for
+them the Battle of Germantown? And Wyck white,
+cloistered, vine-laden, with fragrant garden and shade-giving
+trees! And the Johnson House, and the Wistar
+House, and the Morris House. And how many other old
+houses beyond Germantown! Solitude, and Laurel Hill,
+and Arnold's Mansion in the Park, Bartram's at Gray's
+Ferry.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs102.jpg" width="400" height="310" alt="WYCK" title="" />
+<span class="caption">WYCK</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I thought first I would not put Bartram's to the test,
+no matter how bravely the others came out of it&mdash;Bartram's,
+associated with the romance of work and the dawn
+of my new life. But how glad I am that I thought twice
+and went back to it! For I found it beautiful as ever,
+though I could reach it by trolley, and though it was unrecognizably
+spick and span in the little orchard, and
+under the labelled trees, and by the old house and the old
+stables, and in the garden where gardeners were at work
+among the red roses. But the disorder has not been quite
+done away with in the wilderness below the garden, and
+there was the bench by the river, and there the outlook up
+and down&mdash;had so many chimneys belched forth smoke
+and had the smoke been as black on the opposite bank, up
+the river, in the old days? Certainly there had not been so
+many ghosts&mdash;not one of those that now looked at me with
+reproachful eyes, asking me what I had done with the
+years, for which such ambitious plans had been made on
+that very spot ages and ages ago?<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_522" id="Page_522">[Pg 522]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Philadelphia is not responsible for the ghosts; they are
+my affair; but it has made itself responsible for the beauty,
+not only at Bartram's but at as many other of the old
+places as it has been able to lay claims upon, converting
+them into what the French would call historic monuments.
+And Philadelphia, with the help of Colonial Dames, and
+an Automobile Club, and those societies and individuals
+who have <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+at last to love the Philadelphia monuments
+though still indifferent to the town, has not been too
+soon in prescribing the desperate remedies their desperate
+case demands. In the new care of these old places, as well
+as in the new devotion to the old names and the old
+families, in the new keenness for historic meetings and
+commemorations, in the new local lectures on local subjects
+and traditions, in the very recent restoration of Congress
+Hall, in all this new native civic patriotism I seemed
+to see Philadelphia's desperate, if unconscious, struggle
+against the modern invader of the town's ancient beauty
+and traditions. The grown-up aliens who can be persuaded,
+as I am told they can be, to come and listen to
+papers on their own section of the town, whether it be
+Southwark, or Manayunk, or Frankford, or Society Hill,
+or the Northern Liberties, will probably in the end look
+up the old places and their history for themselves, just
+as the little aliens will who, in the schools, are given prizes
+for essays on local history:&mdash;offer anything, even a school<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_525" id="Page_525">[Pg 525]</a></span>
+prize, to a Russian Jew, and he will labour for it, in this
+case working indirectly for patriotism.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 310px;">
+<img src="images/gs103.jpg" width="310" height="400" alt="THE MASSED SKY-SCRAPERS ABOVE THE HOUSETOPS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE MASSED SKY-SCRAPERS ABOVE THE HOUSETOPS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But I am not sure that the greatest good the Society
+of Colonial Dames is doing is not in emphasizing the value
+of the past to those who date back to it. It has helped
+one group of Philadelphians to
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realize</ins>
+that there are other
+people in their town no less old as Philadelphians and
+more important in the history of Philadelphia, what is
+called society luckily not having taken possession of the
+Colonial Dames in Philadelphia as in New York. If all
+who date back see in the age of their families their passport
+into the aristocracy of Philadelphia and therefore
+of America, they may join together as a formidable force
+against the advance of the formidable alien. Mr. Arnold
+Bennett was amused to discover that every Bostonian
+came over in the Mayflower, but he does not understand
+the necessity for the native to hold on like grim death to
+the family tree&mdash;pigmy of a tree as it must seem in Europe&mdash;if
+America is to remain American. My one fear is
+lest this zeal, new to me, is being overdone, for I fancy
+I see an ill-concealed threat of a new reaction, this time
+against it. What else does the Philadelphian's toying with
+the cause of the "loyalists" during the Revolution and
+his belated espousal of it mean, unless perhaps the childish
+Anglomania which fashion has imposed upon Philadelphia?
+People are capable of anything for the sake of
+fashion. The ugliest blot on the history of Philadelphia
+is its running after the British when they were in possession<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_526" id="Page_526">[Pg 526]</a></span>
+of the town that winter we ought to try to forget
+instead of commemorating its feasts&mdash;that winter when
+Philadelphia danced and Washington and his troops
+starved. Now Philadelphia threatens another blot as ugly
+by upholding the citizens who would have kept the
+British there altogether. However, this is as yet only
+a threat, Philadelphians are too preoccupied in their
+struggle for survival.</p>
+
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>Not only the new patriotism, but the new architecture
+is Colonial. For long after Colonial days Philadelphia
+kept to red brick and white facings in town, to grey stone
+and white porches in Germantown, often losing the old
+dignity and fine proportions, but preserving the unity, the
+harmony of Penn's original scheme, and the repose that is
+the inevitable result of unity. But there were many terrible
+breaks before and during my time&mdash;breaks that gave
+us the Public Buildings and Memorial Hall and many of
+the big banks and insurance offices down town, and a long
+list of regrettable mistakes;&mdash;breaks that burdened us
+with the brown stone period fortunately never much in
+favour, and the Furness period which I could wish had
+been less in favour so much too lavish was its gift of undesirable
+originality, and the awful green stone period of
+which a church here and a big mansion there and substantial
+buildings out at the University, too substantial to
+be pulled down for many a day, rise, a solid reproach to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_529" id="Page_529">[Pg 529]</a></span>
+us for our far straying from righteousness; breaks that
+courted and won the admiration of Philadelphia for imitations
+of any and every style that wasn't American, especially
+if it was English, Philadelphia tremendously
+pleased with itself for the bits borrowed from the English
+Universities and dumped down in its own University and
+out at Bryn Mawr, there as unmistakable aliens as our
+own Rhodes Scholars are at Oxford.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs104.jpg" width="400" height="301" alt="SUNSET. PHILADELPHIA FROM ACROSS THE DELAWARE" title="" />
+<span class="caption">SUNSET. PHILADELPHIA FROM ACROSS THE DELAWARE</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But from the moment Philadelphia began to look up
+its genealogy and respect it, the revival of Colonial was
+bound, sooner or later, to follow. It meant a change from
+which I could not escape, had I deliberately refused to see
+the many others. I was face to face with it at every step
+I took, in every direction I went&mdash;from the Navy Yard on
+League Island to the far end of North Broad Street; from
+Germantown, the old grey stone here returned to its own
+again, to West Philadelphia; from the University where
+the Law School building looks grave and distinguished
+and genuine in the midst of sham Tudor and sham I hardly
+know what, and deplorable green stone, to the Racquets
+Club in town; from the tallest sky-scraper to the smallest
+workman's dwelling&mdash;it was Colonial of one sort or another:
+sometimes with line results, at others with Colonial
+red brick and white facings and Colonial gables and
+Colonial columns and Colonial porches so abused that,
+after passing certain Colonial abortions repeated by the
+dozens, the hundreds, the thousands, in rows upon rows
+of two-story houses, all alike to the very pattern of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_530" id="Page_530">[Pg 530]</a></span>
+awning and the curves of the rocking chair on the invariable
+porch. I had it in my heart to wish that Philadelphia
+had never heard the word Colonial. However,
+on the whole, more good has been done than harm. The
+original model is a fine one, it belongs to Philadelphia,
+and in reviving it the Philadelphia architect is working
+along legitimate lines.</p>
+
+<p>But even as I write this, I
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'realise' and 'realize' were used in this text. This was retained.">realise</ins>
+that it is not to
+the revival of Colonial that Philadelphia owes all its new
+beauty. Indeed, the architecture that has done most for it
+in its new phase is that from which least would be expected
+by those who believe in appropriateness or utility as indispensable
+to architectural beauty. A town that has
+plenty of space to spread out indefinitely has no reason
+whatever to spread up in sky-scrapers, and this is precisely
+what Philadelphia has done and, moreover, looks all
+the better for having done. Its sky-scrapers compose
+themselves with marvellous effectiveness as a centre to
+the town, though they threaten by degrees to become too
+scattered to preserve the present composition; they provide
+an astounding and ever-varying arrangement of
+towers and spires from neighbouring corners and crossings;
+they give new interest as a background to some
+simple bit of old Philadelphia, as where Wanamaker's
+rises sheer and high above the little red brick meeting-house
+in Twelfth Street; they add to the charm of some
+ambitious bit of new Philadelphia as where the little
+Girard Trust Building&mdash;itself a happy return to standards<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_533" id="Page_533">[Pg 533]</a></span>
+that gave us Girard College and the Mint and Fairmount
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: 'Waterworks,' 'Water Works,' and 'Water-Works' were used in this text. This was retained.">Water-Works</ins>&mdash;stands
+low among the clustered
+towers, just as many a town in the Alps or Apennines
+lies low in the cup of the hills, and is the lovelier for
+it; they redeem from ugliness buildings of later periods,
+as where they give the scale in the most surprising fashion
+to the Union League; from far up or down the long
+straight line of Broad Street they complete the perspective
+as impressively as the Arc de Triomphe completes that
+other impressive perspective from the Garden of the
+Tuileries in Paris. They are as beautiful when you see
+them from the bridges or from the Park, a great group
+of towers high above the houses, high above the lesser
+towers and spires, high above the curls and wisps of smoke
+that now hang over Philadelphia; and from the near
+country they give to the low-lying town a sky-line that
+for loveliness and grandeur is not to be surpassed by the
+famous first view of Pisa across the Italian plain.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 308px;">
+<img src="images/gs105.jpg" width="308" height="400" alt="THE UNION LEAGUE BETWEEN THE SKY-SCRAPERS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE UNION LEAGUE BETWEEN THE SKY-SCRAPERS</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Philadelphia is, in truth, such a beautiful town that I
+am surprised the world should be so slow in finding it out.
+The danger to it now is the Philadelphian's determination
+to thrust beauty upon it at any cost, not knowing that it
+is beautiful already. There is too much talk everywhere
+about town-planning as a reform, as a part of the whole
+tiresome business of elevating the masses. As I have said,
+Penn talked no nonsense of that kind, nor did Sir Christopher
+Wren when he made the fine design that London
+had not the sense to stick to, nor L'Enfant when he laid<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_534" id="Page_534">[Pg 534]</a></span>
+out Washington. For the town that gets into the clutches
+of the reformer, I feel much as Whistler did for art&mdash;"What
+a sad state the slut is in an these gentlemen can
+help her." A town, like a woman, should cultivate good
+looks and cannot be too fastidious in every detail. But
+that is no reason why it should confuse this decent personal
+care with a moral mission. There is too much reform in
+Philadelphia just now for my taste, or its good. The
+idea of the new Parkway; with fine buildings like the new
+Free Library and the new Franklin Institute, along its
+route through the town; with the City Hall at one end and
+the fine new Art Gallery in the Park at the other; promises
+well, and I suppose that eventually the silly little wooden
+pergolas will disappear and the new buildings go up in
+their place. But though I know it sounds like shocking
+heresy, I should feel more confidence if its completion
+were in the hands of the old corrupt government we never
+tired of condemning, which may have stolen some of
+our money but at least gave us in return a splendidly
+planned and thoroughly well-kept Park, one of the most
+beautiful in the world. I believe that not only this monumental,
+but more domestic experiments are in view, the
+workman this time to profit&mdash;our old self-reliant American
+workman to have a taste of the benevolent interference that
+has taken the backbone out of the English workman.
+Rumours have reached me of emissaries sent to spy out
+the land in the Garden Cities of Germany and England.
+But what have we, in our far-famed City of Homes, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_537" id="Page_537">[Pg 537]</a></span>
+learn from other people's Garden Cities? For comfort,
+is the workman anywhere better off at a lower rent than
+in the old streets of neat little two-story brick houses, or
+in the new streets of luxurious little Colonial abortions?
+And what does he want with the reformer's gardens when
+he lives in the green country town of Philadelphia?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs106.jpg" width="400" height="312" alt="UP BROAD STREET FROM LEAGUE ISLAND" title="" />
+<span class="caption">UP BROAD STREET FROM LEAGUE ISLAND</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>Philadelphia might have lost more of its old architecture
+and been less successful with its new, and would still
+be beautiful, for as yet it has not ceased to respect Penn's
+wish to see it fair and green. It is not so green as it was,
+I admit&mdash;not so green as in the days of my childhood to
+which, in looking back, the spring always means streets
+too well lined with trees for my taste, since in every one
+those horrid green measuring worms were waiting to fall,
+crawling, upon me. There are great stretches in some
+streets from which the trees have disappeared, partly because
+they do not prosper so well in the now smoke-laden
+air; partly because every one blown down or injured must
+be replaced if replaced at all by some thrifty citizen held
+responsible for whatever damage it may do through no
+fault of his; partly, I believe, because at one time street
+commissioners ordered one or two in front of a house to
+be cut down, charged the landlord for doing it, and found
+too much profit not to persevere in their disastrous policy.
+Still, though Philadelphians in summer fly to little European
+towns to escape the streets they deplore as arid in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_538" id="Page_538">[Pg 538]</a></span>
+Philadelphia, I know of no other town as large that is as
+green. The notes I made in Philadelphia are full of my
+surprise that I should have forgotten how green and shady
+are its streets, how tender is this green in its first spring
+growth under the high luminous sky, how lovely the
+wistaria-draped walls in town and the dogwood in the
+suburbs. Walk or drive in whatever direction I chose,
+and at every crossing I looked up or down a long green
+vista, so that I understood the Philadelphia business man
+who described to me his daily walk from his Spruce Street
+house to the Reading Terminal as a lesson in botany.
+On the other side of the Schuylkill, in any of the suburbs,
+every street became a leafy avenue. There were evenings
+in that last June I spent in Philadelphia, when,
+the ugly houses bathed in golden light and the trees one
+long golden-green screen in front of them, I would not
+have exchanged Walnut or Spruce Street in West Philadelphia
+or many a Lane in Germantown, for any famous
+road or boulevard the world over. Really, the trees convert
+the whole town into an annex, an approach to that
+Park which is its chief green beauty and which, to me,
+was more than sufficient atonement for the corrupt government
+Philadelphia is said to have groaned under all the
+years Fairmount was growing in grace and beauty. And
+beyond the Park, beyond the suburbs, the leafy avenues
+run on for miles through as beautiful country as ever shut
+in a beautiful town.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/gs107.jpg" width="400" height="311" alt="FROM GRAY&#39;S FERRY" title="" />
+<span class="caption">FROM GRAY&#39;S FERRY</span>
+</div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_541" id="Page_541">[Pg 541]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>After all, there is beauty enough left to last my time,
+and I suppose with that I should be content. But I cannot
+help thinking of the future, cannot help wondering,
+now that I see the change the last quarter of a century
+has made, what the next will do for Philadelphia&mdash;whether
+after twenty-five years more a vestige of my Philadelphia
+will survive. I do not believe it will; I may be wrong,
+but I am giving my impressions for what they are worth,
+and nothing on my return impressed me so much as the
+change everywhere and in everything. I think any American,
+from no matter what part of the country, who has been
+away so long, must, on going back, be impressed in the
+same way&mdash;must feel with me that America is growing
+day by day into something as different as possible from
+his America. For my part, I am just as glad I shall not
+live to see the Philadelphia that is to emerge from the
+present chaos, since I have not the shadow of a doubt that,
+whatever it may be, it will be as unlike Philadelphia as I
+have just <ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'learnt' and 'learned' were used in this text. This was retained.">learned</ins>
+to know it again, as this new Philadelphia
+is unlike my old Philadelphia, the beautiful, peaceful
+town where roses bloomed in the sunny back-yards and
+people lived in dignity behind the plain red brick fronts of
+the long narrow streets.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_543" id="Page_543">[Pg 543]</a></span></p>
+<h2>INDEX</h2>
+
+
+<div>
+Abbey, Edwin A., <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Academy of Fine Arts, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a><br />
+<br />
+Academy of Music, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a><br />
+<br />
+Academy of Natural Sciences, <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br />
+<br />
+Acorn Club, <a href="#Page_494">494</a><br />
+<br />
+Adams, John, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>-<a href="#Page_422">422</a><br />
+<br />
+Addams, Clifford, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+Adelphia, the, <a href="#Page_499">499</a><br />
+<br />
+Adirondacks (mountains), <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br />
+<br />
+Aitken, Robert, <a href="#Page_310">310</a><br />
+<br />
+Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, <a href="#Page_243">243</a><br />
+<br />
+Alexander, John W., <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Alhambra, The</i>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a><br />
+<br />
+Alicia, Mother, <a href="#Page_371">371</a><br />
+<br />
+Allen's, <a href="#Page_125">125</a><br />
+<br />
+America, new and old, <a href="#Page_471">471</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>American</i>, the (weekly), <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+American Army crossing the Delaware, <a href="#Page_375">375</a><br />
+<br />
+American Philosophical Society, <a href="#Page_418">418</a><br />
+<br />
+Angelo, Michael, <a href="#Page_373">373</a><br />
+<br />
+Annabel, Miss, school, <a href="#Page_258">258</a><br />
+<br />
+Annals, Watson's, <a href="#Page_314">314</a><br />
+<br />
+Antin, Mary, <a href="#Page_467">467</a><br />
+<br />
+Appian etchings, <a href="#Page_395">395</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Arabian Nights, The</i>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br />
+<br />
+Arc de Triomphe, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+Arch Street Meeting House, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_517">517</a><br />
+<br />
+Arch Street Theatre, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a><br />
+<br />
+Ardea, Father, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br />
+<br />
+Arnold, Matthew, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>-<a href="#Page_344">344</a><br />
+<br />
+Arnold's Mansion, <a href="#Page_521">521</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Arrah-na-Pogue</i>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+Art Gallery in the Park, proposed, <a href="#Page_534">534</a><br />
+<br />
+Art (Industrial) School, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Art Nouveau</i>, <a href="#Page_408">408</a><br />
+<br />
+Assembly, the (social), <a href="#Page_153">153</a>-<a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_503">503</a><br />
+<br />
+Atlantic City, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a><br />
+<br />
+Augustine's, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a><br />
+<br />
+Bailey, Banks &amp; Biddle, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+Bala Country Club, <a href="#Page_493">493</a>, <a href="#Page_495">495</a><br />
+<br />
+Baldwin's Locomotive Works, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_477">477</a><br />
+<br />
+Bank, Philadelphia, <a href="#Page_49">49</a><br />
+<br />
+Baptists, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a><br />
+<br />
+Bar Harbor, <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br />
+<br />
+Barber, Alice, <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+Barcelona (churches of), <a href="#Page_199">199</a><br />
+<br />
+Barrett, Lawrence, <a href="#Page_324">324</a><br />
+<br />
+Barrie (publisher of art books), <a href="#Page_376">376</a><br />
+<br />
+Bartram, John, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>, <a href="#Page_521">521</a><br />
+<br />
+Bartram's Garden, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>-<a href="#Page_303">303</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_521">521</a>, <a href="#Page_522">522</a><br />
+<br />
+Bayswater, England, <a href="#Page_493">493</a><br />
+<br />
+Beau Nash, <a href="#Page_145">145</a><br />
+<br />
+Beaux, Cecilia, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Beaux-Arts (school), <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Beidelman'">Beidleman</ins> (architecture), <a href="#Page_361">361</a><br />
+<br />
+Bellamy (<i>Looking Backward</i>), <a href="#Page_338">338</a><br />
+<br />
+Bellevue-Stratford (hotel), <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>, <a href="#Page_500">500</a>, <a href="#Page_503">503</a><br />
+<br />
+Belmont (Fairmount Park), <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_430">430</a>, <a href="#Page_496">496</a><br />
+<br />
+Bennett, Arnold, <a href="#Page_478">478</a>, <a href="#Page_486">486</a>, <a href="#Page_525">525</a><br />
+<br />
+Biblioth&egrave;que Nationale, <a href="#Page_12">12</a><br />
+<br />
+Biddle, Miss Julia, <a href="#Page_399">399</a><br />
+<br />
+Biddles, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>-<a href="#Page_216">216</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Biglow Papers</i>, <a href="#Page_320">320</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Black Crook, The</i>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+Blanchard (publisher), <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br />
+<br />
+Blitz, Signor, <a href="#Page_91">91</a><br />
+<br />
+Blum, Robert, artist, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Board of Education, <a href="#Page_257">257</a><br />
+<br />
+Bobbelin, Father, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br />
+<br />
+Boker, George H., <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>-<a href="#Page_325">325</a><br />
+<br />
+Booth, Edwin, <a href="#Page_68">68</a><br />
+<br />
+Borghesi collection (art), <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Borie, C. L. Jr., architect, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+Bories, the, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br />
+<br />
+Borrow, George Henry, <a href="#Page_320">320</a><br />
+<br />
+Boswell, James, <a href="#Page_290">290</a><br />
+<br />
+Boudreau, Father, <a href="#Page_193">193</a><br />
+<br />
+Boudreau, Mother, <a href="#Page_97">97</a><br />
+<br />
+Bowie, Mrs., social leader, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a><br />
+<br />
+Boyle, John, sculptor, <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+Bradstreet, Anne, <a href="#Page_309">309</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Breitmann Ballads</i>, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+Brennan, artist, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Brewster, Benjamin Harris, <a href="#Page_342">342</a><br />
+<br />
+Briggs, Richard, <a href="#Page_424">424</a><br />
+<br />
+Brillat-Savarin, <a href="#Page_414">414</a><br />
+<br />
+British Museum, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a><br />
+<br />
+Broad and Locust Streets, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a><br />
+<br />
+Broad and Walnut, <a href="#Page_42">42</a><br />
+<br />
+Broad Street, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>, <a href="#Page_489">489</a>, <a href="#Page_499">499</a>-<a href="#Page_503">503</a>, <a href="#Page_529">529</a>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a><br />
+<br />
+Broad Street, North, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>, <a href="#Page_529">529</a><br />
+<br />
+Broad Street Station, <a href="#Page_12">12</a><br />
+<br />
+Brook Farm, <a href="#Page_347">347</a><br />
+<br />
+Brown, Charles Brockden, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+Browning Societies, <a href="#Page_352">352</a><br />
+<br />
+Bryn Mawr, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>, <a href="#Page_529">529</a><br />
+<br />
+Bullitts, the, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br />
+<br />
+Bunyan, John, <a href="#Page_308">308</a><br />
+<br />
+Burns's, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+Burr, Anna Robeson, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+Burr, Charles, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Burton's Gentleman's Magazine</i>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a><br />
+<br />
+Business and Professional Club, <a href="#Page_352">352</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Cadwallader-Biddle, <a href="#Page_343">343</a><br />
+<br />
+Cadwalladers, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a><br />
+<br />
+Caldwell, J. E. &amp; Co., <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Callista</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a><br />
+<br />
+Callowhill, Hannah, <a href="#Page_417">417</a><br />
+<br />
+Callowhill Street Bridge, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+Camac Street, <a href="#Page_351">351</a><br />
+<br />
+Camden (N. J.), <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>-<a href="#Page_329">329</a><br />
+<br />
+Campanini, opera singer, <a href="#Page_401">401</a><br />
+<br />
+Campbell, Helen, <a href="#Page_338">338</a><br />
+<br />
+Cape May, <a href="#Page_170">170</a><br />
+<br />
+Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_243">243</a><br />
+<br />
+Carpenter's Hall, <a href="#Page_514">514</a><br />
+<br />
+Carson, Hampton L., <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+Cary (publisher), <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Casket, The</i>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a><br />
+<br />
+Cassatt, Mary, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Castleman, Richard, <a href="#Page_6">6</a><br />
+<br />
+Cathedral, the, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a><br />
+<br />
+Catholics, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>-<a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a><br />
+<br />
+Cavalcaselle, Giovanni B., <a href="#Page_402">402</a><br />
+<br />
+Centennial Exposition, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>-<a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Century, The</i>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a><br />
+<br />
+Champs-Elys&eacute;es, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+Chapman, Miss, school, <a href="#Page_258">258</a><br />
+<br />
+Charles the Bold, <a href="#Page_337">337</a><br />
+<br />
+Chartres Cathedral, <a href="#Page_199">199</a><br />
+<br />
+Chartreuse, the old, <a href="#Page_444">444</a><br />
+<br />
+Chase, William M., <a href="#Page_246">246</a><br />
+<br />
+Chester, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a><br />
+<br />
+Chestnut Hill, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a><br />
+<br />
+Chestnut Street, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>, <a href="#Page_499">499</a><br />
+<br />
+Chestnut Street Theatre, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a><br />
+<br />
+"Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine," <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_464">464</a><br />
+<br />
+Chew House, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_518">518</a><br />
+<br />
+Childs, George W., <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_342">342</a>, <a href="#Page_499">499</a><br />
+<br />
+Chippendale furniture, <a href="#Page_289">289</a><br />
+<br />
+Christ Church, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_517">517</a><br />
+<br />
+Christ Church Burial Ground, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+Church (painting), <a href="#Page_246">246</a><br />
+<br />
+Church of England, <a href="#Page_183">183</a><br />
+<br />
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Cimabu&eacute;'">Cimabue</ins>, Giovanni, <a href="#Page_402">402</a><br />
+<br />
+City Companies in London, <a href="#Page_152">152</a><br />
+<br />
+City Hall, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>, <a href="#Page_489">489</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a>, <a href="#Page_534">534</a><br />
+<br />
+City of Homes, <a href="#Page_481">481</a>, <a href="#Page_534">534</a><br />
+<br />
+City Troop, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>, <a href="#Page_510">510</a><br />
+<br />
+Civic Club, <a href="#Page_494">494</a><br />
+<br />
+Civil War, the, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_518">518</a><br />
+<br />
+Claghorn's collection of old prints, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_394">394</a><br />
+<br />
+Clements, Gabrielle, <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+Clinton Street, <a href="#Page_514">514</a><br />
+<br />
+Clover Club, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a><br />
+<br />
+Club (Art), South Broad Street, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Coates, Mrs. Florence Earle, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_362">362</a><br />
+<br />
+Cobbett, William, <a href="#Page_440">440</a>, <a href="#Page_485">485</a>, <a href="#Page_513">513</a><br />
+<br />
+Coghlan, Father, <a href="#Page_193">193</a><br />
+<br />
+Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, <a href="#Page_324">324</a><br />
+<br />
+College Club, the, <a href="#Page_494">494</a><br />
+<br />
+Colonial (American) art, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>, <a href="#Page_389">389</a><br />
+<br />
+Colonial Congress, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a><br />
+<br />
+Colonial Dames, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>, <a href="#Page_522">522</a>, <a href="#Page_525">525</a><br />
+<br />
+Colonial days, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a><br />
+<br />
+Colonial doorways, <a href="#Page_361">361</a><br />
+<br />
+Colonial history, <a href="#Page_9">9</a><br />
+<br />
+Colonial houses, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>, <a href="#Page_460">460</a>, <a href="#Page_496">496</a>, <a href="#Page_518">518</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a>, <a href="#Page_529">529</a><br />
+<br />
+Colonial life and society, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a><br />
+<br />
+Colonists, <a href="#Page_495">495</a><br />
+<br />
+Colonnade (hotel), <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br />
+<br />
+Columbia (College), <a href="#Page_364">364</a><br />
+<br />
+Comegys, Mrs., school, <a href="#Page_258">258</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Complete Cookery</i> (Miss Leslie), <a href="#Page_423">423</a>-<a href="#Page_430">430</a><br />
+<br />
+Concord (Mass.), <a href="#Page_347">347</a>-<a href="#Page_348">348</a><br />
+<br />
+Coney Island, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+Conflans (convent), <a href="#Page_175">175</a><br />
+<br />
+Congress Hall, <a href="#Page_522">522</a><br />
+<br />
+Connor, Mrs., social leader, <a href="#Page_147">147</a><br />
+<br />
+Contemporary Club, <a href="#Page_352">352</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Continent, Our</i>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a><br />
+<br />
+Continental (hotel), <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br />
+<br />
+Convent, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a> sq., <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>-<a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a> sq., <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_451">451</a><br />
+<br />
+Convent at Paris, <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br />
+<br />
+Cooper, Colin Campbell, <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+Cope, Walter, architect, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+Copley, John Singleton, <a href="#Page_389">389</a><br />
+<br />
+Country Clubs, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>, <a href="#Page_494">494</a>-<a href="#Page_496">496</a><br />
+<br />
+Courts (of law), <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_500">500</a><br />
+<br />
+Cox, Kenyon (painting), <a href="#Page_246">246</a><br />
+<br />
+Cramp's shipyard, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_477">477</a><br />
+<br />
+"Crazy Norah," <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a><br />
+<br />
+Crowe, Joseph Archer, <a href="#Page_402">402</a><br />
+<br />
+Cruikshank drawings, <a href="#Page_375">375</a><br />
+<br />
+Curtis Publishing Co. Building, <a href="#Page_355">355</a><br />
+<br />
+Cushman, Charlotte, <a href="#Page_68">68</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Dana, William P. W., artist, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Dancing Class, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-<a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_503">503</a><br />
+<br />
+Darlington butter, <a href="#Page_440">440</a><br />
+<br />
+Darlington, J. G. &amp; Co., <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+Darwin, Charles, <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br />
+<br />
+Daughters of Pennsylvania, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a><br />
+<br />
+Davenports, the (actors), <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br />
+<br />
+Davis, Clarke, <a href="#Page_246">246</a><br />
+<br />
+Davis, Mrs. Rebecca Harding, <a href="#Page_336">336</a><br />
+<br />
+Davis, Richard Harding, <a href="#Page_336">336</a><br />
+<br />
+Day, Frank Miles, architect, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+Declaration of Independence, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a><br />
+<br />
+Decorative Art Club, <a href="#Page_399">399</a><br />
+<br />
+Delaware River, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_455">455</a><br />
+<br />
+Dexter's, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+Dickens, Charles, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_427">427</a><br />
+<br />
+Dickinson, Jonathan, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br />
+<br />
+Dillaye, Blanche, <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Domestic Economy</i> (Miss Leslie), <a href="#Page_428">428</a><br />
+<br />
+Drama-Reforming Societies, <a href="#Page_352">352</a><br />
+<br />
+Dreka Co. (engraver), <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+Drew, Mrs. John (actress), <a href="#Page_68">68</a><br />
+<br />
+Drexel, Anthony J., <a href="#Page_342">342</a><br />
+<br />
+Drexel Institute, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+Duclaux, Mme (Mary Robinson), <a href="#Page_260">260</a><br />
+<br />
+Duke of Westminster's collection (art), <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Dundas house, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a><br />
+<br />
+Dutch descent, <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br />
+<br />
+Dutch in New York, <a href="#Page_16">16</a><br />
+<br />
+Dutch Jew, <a href="#Page_467">467</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Earle's, <a href="#Page_125">125</a><br />
+<br />
+Eastern Shore, Maryland, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a><br />
+<br />
+Eberlein, Harold Donaldson, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a><br />
+<br />
+Education, Board of, <a href="#Page_257">257</a><br />
+<br />
+Eleventh Street, <a href="#Page_48">48</a><br />
+<br />
+Eleventh and Spruce (streets), <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a> sq., <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>, <a href="#Page_430">430</a><br />
+<br />
+Eliot, George, <a href="#Page_401">401</a><br />
+<br />
+Eliphas, Levi, <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br />
+<br />
+Elkins art collection, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Ellwanger, G. H., <a href="#Page_424">424</a><br />
+<br />
+Elwood, Thomas, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a><br />
+<br />
+Episcopal Academy, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_455">455</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Head Master of, <a href="#Page_181">181</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Episcopalians, <a href="#Page_176">176</a> 177, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Evening Telegraph</i>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a><br />
+<br />
+Ewing, Miss Julia, <a href="#Page_341">341</a><br />
+<br />
+Exposition, Centennial, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a><br />
+<br />
+Eyre, Wilson, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Fabiola</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a><br />
+<br />
+Fairmount Park, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>, <a href="#Page_486">486</a>, <a href="#Page_496">496</a>, <a href="#Page_521">521</a>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a>, <a href="#Page_534">534</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a><br />
+<br />
+Fairmount <ins title="Transcriber's Note: 'Waterworks,' 'Water Works,' and 'Water-Works' were used in this text. This was retained.">Water-Works</ins>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Faith Gartney's Girlhood</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a><br />
+<br />
+Ferris, Stephen, <a href="#Page_394">394</a><br />
+<br />
+Fildes, Luke, <a href="#Page_231">231</a><br />
+<br />
+Fisher, Sydney George, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a><br />
+<br />
+Fishers, the, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Fish-House Club, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a><br />
+<br />
+Fitzgerald, Edward, <a href="#Page_423">423</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Fool's Errand</i>, <a href="#Page_338">338</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Forget-Me-Not</i>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a><br />
+<br />
+Fourth of July, <a href="#Page_63">63</a><br />
+<br />
+Fox, George, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a><br />
+<br />
+<i><ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Francesco'">Francesca</ins> da Rimini</i>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a><br />
+<br />
+Frankford, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_489">489</a>, <a href="#Page_522">522</a><br />
+<br />
+Franklin, Benjamin, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>, <a href="#Page_482">482</a><br />
+<br />
+Franklin Inn, <a href="#Page_351">351</a><br />
+<br />
+Franklin Institute, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_534">534</a><br />
+<br />
+Free Public Library, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_534">534</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>French Revolution</i> (Thiers), <a href="#Page_375">375</a><br />
+<br />
+Friends, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>, <a href="#Page_513">513</a><br />
+<br />
+Friends' School (Germantown), <a href="#Page_258">258</a><br />
+<br />
+Fromuth, marine painter, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Front Street, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>, <a href="#Page_514">514</a>, <a href="#Page_517">517</a><br />
+<br />
+Frost, Arthur B., artist, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Furness (architecture), <a href="#Page_407">407</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a><br />
+<br />
+Furness, Dr. Horace Howard, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a><br />
+<br />
+Furness, Horace Howard, Jr., <a href="#Page_362">362</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+Furness, William Henry, D.D., <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Garber, Daniel, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+Gebbie and Barrie, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a><br />
+<br />
+German mystics, <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+<br />
+Germans (immigrants), <a href="#Page_471">471</a><br />
+<br />
+Germantown, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_477">477</a>, <a href="#Page_496">496</a>, <a href="#Page_518">518</a>, <a href="#Page_521">521</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a>, <a href="#Page_529">529</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a><br />
+<br />
+Germantown Cricket Ground, <a href="#Page_496">496</a><br />
+<br />
+Gettysburg (battle-fields), <a href="#Page_518">518</a><br />
+<br />
+Gibson collection, <a href="#Page_379">379</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Gift, The</i>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a><br />
+<br />
+Gilchrist, Mrs. Alexander, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a><br />
+<br />
+Gillespie, Mrs., social leader, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a><br />
+<br />
+Giotto di Bondone, <a href="#Page_402">402</a><br />
+<br />
+Girard College, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a><br />
+<br />
+Girard House, <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br />
+<br />
+Girard Trust Building, <a href="#Page_530">530</a><br />
+<br />
+Gissing, George, <a href="#Page_239">239</a><br />
+<br />
+Glackens, William J., illustrator, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Glackmeyer, Father, <a href="#Page_193">193</a><br />
+<br />
+Glasse, Mrs. (Cookery Book), <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>-<a href="#Page_428">428</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Godey's Lady's Book</i>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a><br />
+<br />
+Gough Square (London), <a href="#Page_324">324</a><br />
+<br />
+Grafly, Charles, sculptor, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Graham's</i> (Magazine), <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a><br />
+<br />
+Grants, the, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Gray's Ferry, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_521">521</a><br />
+<br />
+Green, Elizabeth Shippen, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Greene, General, <a href="#Page_418">418</a><br />
+<br />
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Greland'">Grelaud</ins>, Miss, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br />
+<br />
+Griggs (publisher), <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br />
+<br />
+Groton (school), <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Haden, Seymour, etchings, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>, <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+Hale, Mrs. Sarah Josepha, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a><br />
+<br />
+Hallowell, Mrs. Sarah, <a href="#Page_341">341</a><br />
+<br />
+Hamilton, J. McLure, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Handy, Moses P., <a href="#Page_245">245</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Hans Breitmann</i>, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+Harland, Marion, <a href="#Page_428">428</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Harper's</i> (magazine), <a href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a><br />
+<br />
+Harrison, Alexander, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Harrison, Birge, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Harrison, John, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+Harrison, Mrs. (Art Club), <a href="#Page_399">399</a><br />
+<br />
+Harvard (College), <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br />
+<br />
+Hassler's band, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br />
+<br />
+Haverford (school), <a href="#Page_258">258</a><br />
+<br />
+Hawthorne, Nathaniel, <a href="#Page_347">347</a><br />
+<br />
+Hawthorne, Rose, <a href="#Page_347">347</a><br />
+<br />
+Historical Society of Pennsylvania, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a><br />
+<br />
+Hogarth's engravings, <a href="#Page_376">376</a><br />
+<br />
+Holloway, Edward Stratton, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Holmes, Oliver Wendell, <a href="#Page_243">243</a><br />
+<br />
+Holmesburg, <a href="#Page_258">258</a><br />
+<br />
+Holy Trinity (church), <a href="#Page_183">183</a><br />
+<br />
+Home Arts School (London), <a href="#Page_257">257</a><br />
+<br />
+Homer and Colladay's, <a href="#Page_125">125</a><br />
+<br />
+Hooper, Mrs. Lucy, <a href="#Page_341">341</a><br />
+<br />
+Hopkins, the, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Hopkins, Dr. (dentist), <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br />
+<br />
+Horticultural Hall, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>, <a href="#Page_503">503</a><br />
+<br />
+Hospital, Pennsylvania, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>, <a href="#Page_460">460</a><br />
+<br />
+Hotel Meurice, <a href="#Page_222">222</a><br />
+<br />
+Howells, William Dean, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a><br />
+<br />
+Howland's Hotel at Long Branch, <a href="#Page_103">103</a><br />
+<br />
+Hubbell's, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a><br />
+<br />
+Hudson River School, <a href="#Page_390">390</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Hugh Wynne</i>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+Hughes and <ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Muller'">M&uuml;ller</ins>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+Huguet, Madame, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a><br />
+<br />
+Hunt, Holman, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a><br />
+<br />
+Huntington Valley Club, <a href="#Page_495">495</a><br />
+<br />
+Hutchinson Ports, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Impressionists (artists), <a href="#Page_390">390</a><br />
+<br />
+Independence Hall, <a href="#Page_467">467</a><br />
+<br />
+Independence Square, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>, <a href="#Page_467">467</a><br />
+<br />
+Industrial Art School, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a><br />
+<br />
+Ingersolls, the, <a href="#Page_145">145</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Initials, The</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a><br />
+<br />
+International expositions, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a><br />
+<br />
+Irish immigrants, <a href="#Page_471">471</a><br />
+<br />
+Irving, Henry, <a href="#Page_401">401</a><br />
+<br />
+Irving, Washington, <a href="#Page_315">315</a><br />
+<br />
+Irwin, Miss, school, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a><br />
+<br />
+Italians (immigrants), <a href="#Page_464">464</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+James, Henry, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>, <a href="#Page_509">509</a><br />
+<br />
+Janauschek (actress), <a href="#Page_348">348</a><br />
+<br />
+Janvier, Thomas Allibone, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>-<a href="#Page_437">437</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a><br />
+<br />
+Jastrow, Dr. Morris, <a href="#Page_364">364</a><br />
+<br />
+Jefferson, Thomas, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a><br />
+<br />
+Jenkins, Howard, <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+Jesuits, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a><br />
+<br />
+Jew, Dutch, <a href="#Page_467">467</a><br />
+<br />
+Jew, Pennsylvania, <a href="#Page_467">467</a>, <a href="#Page_514">514</a><br />
+<br />
+Jew, Russian, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>, <a href="#Page_460">460</a>, <a href="#Page_464">464</a>-<a href="#Page_473">473</a>, <a href="#Page_525">525</a><br />
+<br />
+Jews, religious liberty of, <a href="#Page_177">177</a><br />
+<br />
+Johnson, Dr. Samuel, <a href="#Page_324">324</a><br />
+<br />
+Johnson House, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_521">521</a><br />
+<br />
+Johnson's, John G., art collection, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Jones's, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+Jourdain, M., <a href="#Page_282">282</a><br />
+<br />
+June, Jenny, <a href="#Page_428">428</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Kate Vincent</i>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a><br />
+<br />
+Keatings, the, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Kellogg, Clara Louise, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+Kensington, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_477">477</a><br />
+<br />
+Kensington, England, <a href="#Page_493">493</a><br />
+<br />
+Keppel, Frederick, <a href="#Page_376">376</a><br />
+<br />
+Kings, the, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Kirk, John Foster, <a href="#Page_337">337</a><br />
+<br />
+Kirkbride's Insane Asylum, <a href="#Page_263">263</a><br />
+<br />
+Kneller, portrait-painter, <a href="#Page_389">389</a><br />
+<br />
+Knight, Ridgway, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Kugler'">K&uuml;gler</ins>, Franz, <a href="#Page_402">402</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>La Belle H&eacute;l&egrave;ne</i>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>La Grande Duchesse</i>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a><br />
+<br />
+La Pierre House, <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Ladies' Home Journal</i>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a><br />
+<br />
+Ladies of the Sacred Heart, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Convent, <a href="#Page_72">72</a> sq.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Lady of Shalott</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a><br />
+<br />
+Lalanne etchings, <a href="#Page_395">395</a><br />
+<br />
+Lamb, Charles, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Lamplighter, The</i>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a><br />
+<br />
+Long, John Luther, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+Lathrop, Mr. and Mrs. George, <a href="#Page_347">347</a><br />
+<br />
+Latin Quarter, <a href="#Page_411">411</a><br />
+<br />
+Laurel Hill, <a href="#Page_521">521</a><br />
+<br />
+Law Courts, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_500">500</a><br />
+<br />
+Law School, building, <a href="#Page_529">529</a><br />
+<br />
+Lea, Henry Charles, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+League Island, <a href="#Page_529">529</a><br />
+<br />
+Leary's, <a href="#Page_126">126</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Ledger</i> (newspaper), <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a><br />
+<br />
+Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), <a href="#Page_260">260</a><br />
+<br />
+Leland, Charles Godfrey, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>-<a href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_240">240</a>-<a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>-<a href="#Page_330">330</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>-<a href="#Page_348">348</a>, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+Leland, Charles Godfrey, <i>Memoirs</i> of, <a href="#Page_276">276</a><br />
+<br />
+L'Enfant (architect), <a href="#Page_533">533</a><br />
+<br />
+Leslie, Margaret (artist), <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+Leslie, Miss, Cookery Book, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>-<a href="#Page_437">437</a><br />
+<br />
+Levi, Eliphas, <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br />
+<br />
+Lewises, <a href="#Page_50">50</a><br />
+<br />
+Li Hung Chang, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_513">513</a><br />
+<br />
+Library, Bryn Mawr College, <a href="#Page_307">307</a><br />
+<br />
+Library of Congress, <a href="#Page_309">309</a><br />
+<br />
+Library, Free Public, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_534">534</a><br />
+<br />
+Library, Friends', Germantown, <a href="#Page_307">307</a><br />
+<br />
+Library, Historical Society, <a href="#Page_307">307</a><br />
+<br />
+Library, Mercantile, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br />
+<br />
+Library, Philadelphia, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_455">455</a><br />
+<br />
+Library, Ridgway, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Life of Blake</i>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a><br />
+<br />
+Lionardo da Vinci, <a href="#Page_402">402</a><br />
+<br />
+Lippincott, Horace Mather, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a><br />
+<br />
+Lippincott, J. B., <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br />
+<br />
+Lippincott's (book-store), <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Lippincott's Magazine</i>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>, <a href="#Page_427">427</a><br />
+<br />
+Lithuanians (immigrants), <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_473">473</a><br />
+<br />
+"Little England" of Kensington, <a href="#Page_19">19</a><br />
+<br />
+"Little Street of Clubs, the," <a href="#Page_351">351</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Lives of the Artists</i>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a><br />
+<br />
+Locust Street, <a href="#Page_472">472</a><br />
+<br />
+Logan, Deborah, <a href="#Page_309">309</a><br />
+<br />
+Logan, James, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>, <a href="#Page_518">518</a><br />
+<br />
+Logan Square, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_500">500</a><br />
+<br />
+Loganian Library (see Ridgway), <a href="#Page_364">364</a><br />
+<br />
+Lombard Street, <a href="#Page_472">472</a><br />
+<br />
+Long Branch, <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br />
+<br />
+Longfellow, Henry W., <a href="#Page_320">320</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Looking Backward</i>, <a href="#Page_338">338</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Lost Heiress, The</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a><br />
+<br />
+Lowell, James Russell, <a href="#Page_316">316</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Macalisters, the, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+McCalls, the, <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br />
+<br />
+McCarter, Henry, artist, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+MacVeagh, Wayne, <a href="#Page_343">343</a><br />
+<br />
+Madeira (wine), <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>-<a href="#Page_423">423</a>, <a href="#Page_506">506</a>, <a href="#Page_510">510</a><br />
+<br />
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Maennerchor'">M&auml;ennerchor</ins> Garden, <a href="#Page_500">500</a><br />
+<br />
+Main Line, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a><br />
+<br />
+Main Street in Germantown, <a href="#Page_297">297</a><br />
+<br />
+Manayunk, <a href="#Page_522">522</a><br />
+<br />
+Maria, Father de, <a href="#Page_191">191</a><br />
+<br />
+Marion, General Francis, <a href="#Page_216">216</a><br />
+<br />
+"Market, Arch, Race and Vine," <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+Market Street, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>, <a href="#Page_489">489</a><br />
+<br />
+Martin, Madame, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a><br />
+<br />
+Maryland, Eastern Shore of, <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br />
+<br />
+Matisse, artist, <a href="#Page_402">402</a><br />
+<br />
+Mayflower (ship), <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_525">525</a><br />
+<br />
+Meeting-Houses, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_517">517</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Meg Merrilies</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a><br />
+<br />
+Memorial Hall, <a href="#Page_213">213</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a><br />
+<br />
+Mennonites in Germantown, <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+<br />
+Mercantile Library, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a><br />
+<br />
+Merritt, Mrs. Anna Lea, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Methodists, <a href="#Page_183">183</a><br />
+<br />
+Mifflin, Mrs. (Art Club), <a href="#Page_399">399</a><br />
+<br />
+Millais, John Everett, <a href="#Page_275">275</a><br />
+<br />
+Miller, Leslie, <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+Milton, John, <a href="#Page_308">308</a><br />
+<br />
+Mint, United States, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Mischief in the Middle Ages</i>, <a href="#Page_243">243</a><br />
+<br />
+Mitchell, Dr. S. Weir, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+Moore, Mrs. Bloomfield, <a href="#Page_379">379</a><br />
+<br />
+Moran family, <a href="#Page_394">394</a><br />
+<br />
+Moravians, monasteries of, <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+<br />
+Morrises, the, <a href="#Page_216">216</a><br />
+<br />
+Morris, Gouverneur, <a href="#Page_133">133</a><br />
+<br />
+Morris, Harrison S., <a href="#Page_362">362</a><br />
+<br />
+Morris House, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_521">521</a><br />
+<br />
+Morris, William, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>, <a href="#Page_408">408</a><br />
+<br />
+Mother Goose, <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br />
+<br />
+Mount Airy, <a href="#Page_170">170</a><br />
+<br />
+Mount Pleasant, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a><br />
+<br />
+Moxon's <i>Tennyson</i>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a><br />
+<br />
+Moyamensing Prison, <a href="#Page_263">263</a><br />
+<br />
+Murillo (painting), <a href="#Page_372">372</a><br />
+<br />
+Mustin's, <a href="#Page_125">125</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Napoleon, pictures of, <a href="#Page_374">374</a><br />
+<br />
+Narragansett Pier, <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br />
+<br />
+Nash, Richard ("Beau"), <a href="#Page_145">145</a><br />
+<br />
+Natatorium, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_499">499</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Nation</i>, the (New York), <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>National Observer</i>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a><br />
+<br />
+Navy Yard, <a href="#Page_529">529</a><br />
+<br />
+New Century Club, <a href="#Page_494">494</a><br />
+<br />
+New Testament (German), <a href="#Page_310">310</a><br />
+<br />
+New Year's Day, <a href="#Page_152">152</a><br />
+<br />
+New York magazines, <a href="#Page_337">337</a><br />
+<br />
+Newman's <i>Callista</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a><br />
+<br />
+Nilsson, Christine, <a href="#Page_401">401</a><br />
+<br />
+Ninth and Green (streets), <a href="#Page_489">489</a>, <a href="#Page_500">500</a><br />
+<br />
+Nordau, Max, <a href="#Page_402">402</a><br />
+<br />
+Norrises, the, <a href="#Page_216">216</a><br />
+<br />
+Norris, Isaac, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_417">417</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>North American</i>, the, <a href="#Page_355">355</a><br />
+<br />
+Northern Liberties, <a href="#Page_522">522</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Oakdale Park, <a href="#Page_293">293</a><br />
+<br />
+Oakley, Thornton, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Oakley, Violet, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Old Mam'selle's Secret</i>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a><br />
+<br />
+Old Swedes Church, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a><br />
+<br />
+Orpheus Club, <a href="#Page_153">153</a><br />
+<br />
+Ouida's Guardsman, <a href="#Page_275">275</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Our American Cousin</i>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Our Continent</i>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Our Convent Days</i>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Ours</i>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+Oxford (England), <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_529">529</a><br />
+<br />
+Oxford, Dr. (cookery books), <a href="#Page_424">424</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Page, George Bispham, architect, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+Paget, Violet (Vernon Lee), <a href="#Page_260">260</a><br />
+<br />
+Park (see Fairmount), <a href="#Page_534">534</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a><br />
+<br />
+Parkway, the new, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>, <a href="#Page_534">534</a><br />
+<br />
+Parrish, Maxfield, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Parrish, Stephen, <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+Patterson, General, house of, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a><br />
+<br />
+Peale, Charles Wilson, <a href="#Page_389">389</a><br />
+<br />
+Pegasus Societies, <a href="#Page_352">352</a><br />
+<br />
+Penn Club, <a href="#Page_351">351</a><br />
+<br />
+Penn, John, <a href="#Page_517">517</a><br />
+<br />
+Penn, William, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>-<a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>, <a href="#Page_455">455</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>, <a href="#Page_474">474</a>, <a href="#Page_500">500</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a><br />
+<br />
+Penn, William, statue of, <a href="#Page_9">9</a><br />
+<br />
+Pennell, Joseph, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>-<a href="#Page_303">303</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>, <a href="#Page_393">393</a>-<a href="#Page_395">395</a>, <a href="#Page_474">474</a><br />
+<br />
+Pennock Brothers, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a><br />
+<br />
+Pennsbury, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Pennsylvania Historical Society, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a><br />
+<br />
+Pennsylvania Hospital, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>, <a href="#Page_460">460</a><br />
+<br />
+Pennsylvania Jew, <a href="#Page_467">467</a><br />
+<br />
+Pennsylvania, promotion of science by, <a href="#Page_309">309</a><br />
+<br />
+Pennsylvania Railroad, <a href="#Page_276">276</a><br />
+<br />
+Pennsylvania Railroad Station, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_448">448</a>, <a href="#Page_451">451</a><br />
+<br />
+Pennsylvania, University of, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>, <a href="#Page_473">473</a>, <a href="#Page_496">496</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a><br />
+<br />
+Pennypacker, Governor, <a href="#Page_307">307</a><br />
+<br />
+Peppers, the, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Peterson's</i> (magazine), <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a><br />
+<br />
+Philadelphia Art Club, <a href="#Page_324">324</a><br />
+<br />
+Philadelphia Bank, <a href="#Page_49">49</a><br />
+<br />
+Philadelphia Club, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>, <a href="#Page_510">510</a><br />
+<br />
+Philadelphia Library, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>, <a href="#Page_455">455</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Philadelphia Saturday Museum</i>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a><br />
+<br />
+Phillips, John S., <a href="#Page_376">376</a><br />
+<br />
+Philosophical Society, American, <a href="#Page_418">418</a><br />
+<br />
+Picasso, artist, <a href="#Page_402">402</a><br />
+<br />
+Plastic Club, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Pocahontas, <a href="#Page_9">9</a><br />
+<br />
+Poe, Edgar Allan, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a><br />
+<br />
+Poor Richard (club), <a href="#Page_352">352</a><br />
+<br />
+Poor Richard's Almanac, <a href="#Page_310">310</a><br />
+<br />
+Poore, Harry, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>, <a href="#Page_272">272</a><br />
+<br />
+Pope of Rome, <a href="#Page_120">120</a><br />
+<br />
+Pope's Head, <a href="#Page_310">310</a><br />
+<br />
+Porter and Coates, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a><br />
+<br />
+Post-Impressionists, <a href="#Page_381">381</a><br />
+<br />
+Powhatan, <a href="#Page_9">9</a><br />
+<br />
+Pre-Raphaelites, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a><br />
+<br />
+Presbyterian Building, <a href="#Page_271">271</a><br />
+<br />
+Presbyterians, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Press</i>, the, <a href="#Page_245">245</a><br />
+<br />
+Provence, <a href="#Page_60">60</a><br />
+<br />
+Public Buildings (see City Hall), <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a><br />
+<br />
+Public Industrial Art School, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Punch</i> (London), <a href="#Page_250">250</a><br />
+<br />
+Puritans (New England), <a href="#Page_417">417</a><br />
+<br />
+Putnam (N. Y. publisher), <a href="#Page_315">315</a><br />
+<br />
+Pyle, Howard, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Quakers (see Friends), <a href="#Page_15">15</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Queechy</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Race (Sassafras) Street, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Racquet'">Racquets</ins> Club, <a href="#Page_499">499</a>, <a href="#Page_529">529</a><br />
+<br />
+Rafael (pictures), <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a><br />
+<br />
+Ralph (Franklin's friend), <a href="#Page_310">310</a><br />
+<br />
+Randolph House, <a href="#Page_463">463</a><br />
+<br />
+Reading Terminal, <a href="#Page_538">538</a><br />
+<br />
+Redfield, Edward W., artist, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+Rembrandt (painting), <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Renaissance, period of, <a href="#Page_11">11</a><br />
+<br />
+Repplier, Agnes, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a><br />
+<br />
+Revolution (American), <a href="#Page_382">382</a>, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>, <a href="#Page_418">418</a>, <a href="#Page_518">518</a>, <a href="#Page_525">525</a><br />
+<br />
+Rhodes scholars, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_529">529</a><br />
+<br />
+Richards, William T., artist, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Ridgway Library, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a><br />
+<br />
+Rittenhouse Smiths, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+Rittenhouse Square, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+Ritz-Carlton (hotel), <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_414">414</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Robin Hood</i> (Howard Pyle's), <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+Robins, Edward, Jr., <a href="#Page_358">358</a><br />
+<br />
+Robins, Edward, Sr., <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_423">423</a>, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>, <a href="#Page_500">500</a>, <a href="#Page_505">505</a><br />
+<br />
+Robins, Grant, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_505">505</a><br />
+<br />
+Robins, Mrs. Thomas, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_437">437</a><br />
+<br />
+Robins, Thomas, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>-<a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>-<a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>-<a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a><br />
+<br />
+Robinson, Mary (Mme. Duclaux), <a href="#Page_260">260</a><br />
+<br />
+Rogers, Fairman, <a href="#Page_493">493</a><br />
+<br />
+"Rogers Group," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a><br />
+<br />
+Romanticists (artists), <a href="#Page_390">390</a><br />
+<br />
+Roosevelt, Theodore, <a href="#Page_506">506</a><br />
+<br />
+Rorer, Mrs. (cookery book), <a href="#Page_428">428</a><br />
+<br />
+Ross, Betsy, house of, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a><br />
+<br />
+Rossetti, William Michael, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Routledge</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a><br />
+<br />
+Royal Academy, <a href="#Page_389">389</a>, <a href="#Page_411">411</a><br />
+<br />
+Royal Exchange, <a href="#Page_411">411</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Rubaiyat</i>, the, <a href="#Page_401">401</a><br />
+<br />
+Rubens (painting), <a href="#Page_246">246</a><br />
+<br />
+Rue de Rivoli, <a href="#Page_225">225</a><br />
+<br />
+Rush, Dr. Benjamin, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a><br />
+<br />
+Rush, Mrs., social leader, <a href="#Page_146">146</a><br />
+<br />
+Ruskin, John, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>, <a href="#Page_402">402</a><br />
+<br />
+Russian Jew, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>, <a href="#Page_460">460</a>, <a href="#Page_464">464</a>-<a href="#Page_471">471</a>, <a href="#Page_473">473</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Sacred Heart, Ladies of the, <a href="#Page_72">72</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Convent of, <a href="#Page_72">72</a> sq., <a href="#Page_258">258</a></span><br />
+<br />
+St. Andrew's (church), <a href="#Page_184">184</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Augustine's (church), <a href="#Page_198">198</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Clement's (church), <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a><br />
+<br />
+St. James's (church), <a href="#Page_183">183</a><br />
+<br />
+St. John's (church), <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Joseph's (church), <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>-<a href="#Page_199">199</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Mark's (church), <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Mary's (church), <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Michael's (church), <a href="#Page_198">198</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Patrick's (church), <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Paul's (school), <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br />
+<br />
+St. Peter's (church), <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_463">463</a>, <a href="#Page_514">514</a><br />
+<br />
+Salons (Paris), <a href="#Page_411">411</a><br />
+<br />
+Sargent, John S., artist, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Sartain, Miss Emily, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Sartain, William, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Sartain's Union Magazine</i>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a><br />
+<br />
+Sassafras (Race) Street, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+Saturday Club, <a href="#Page_152">152</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Saturday Evening Post</i>, <a href="#Page_355">355</a><br />
+<br />
+Saur's New Testament, <a href="#Page_310">310</a><br />
+<br />
+Sautter's, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a>, <a href="#Page_506">506</a><br />
+<br />
+Schaumberg, Emily, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br />
+<br />
+School Board, <a href="#Page_259">259</a><br />
+<br />
+School of Industrial Arts, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_330">330</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+Schools, Public, <a href="#Page_335">335</a><br />
+<br />
+Schuylkill (river), <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_481">481</a>, <a href="#Page_496">496</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a><br />
+<br />
+Scott, Walter, <a href="#Page_59">59</a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">heroines of, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">novels of, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_427">427</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Second Street, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_517">517</a><br />
+<br />
+Second Street Market, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a><br />
+<br />
+Seminary at Villanova, <a href="#Page_198">198</a><br />
+<br />
+Senat, Prosper, <a href="#Page_395">395</a><br />
+<br />
+Seville (churches of), <a href="#Page_199">199</a><br />
+<br />
+Shakespeare Societies, <a href="#Page_352">352</a><br />
+<br />
+Shakespeare, William, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a><br />
+<br />
+Shelley, Percy Bysshe, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br />
+<br />
+Sheppard, J. B. &amp; Sons, <a href="#Page_125">125</a><br />
+<br />
+Shinn (apothecary), <a href="#Page_459">459</a><br />
+<br />
+Shippen, Edward, <a href="#Page_42">42</a><br />
+<br />
+Shippen, Peggy, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br />
+<br />
+"Shippen, Peggy," <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a><br />
+<br />
+Shippens, the, <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br />
+<br />
+Simses, the, <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br />
+<br />
+Sketch Club, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Sky-scrapers, <a href="#Page_355">355</a>, <a href="#Page_530">530</a><br />
+<br />
+Slavs (immigrants), <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_471">471</a><br />
+<br />
+Smarius, Father, <a href="#Page_193">193</a><br />
+<br />
+Smedley, William T., artist, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Smith, Albert, <a href="#Page_263">263</a><br />
+<br />
+Smith, Jessie Wilcox, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Smith, Lloyd, <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br />
+<br />
+Smith, Logan Pearsall, <a href="#Page_364">364</a><br />
+<br />
+Smith, Provost, house of, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+Society Hill, <a href="#Page_522">522</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Solon Shingle</i>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+Sons of Pennsylvania, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a><br />
+<br />
+Sothern, Edward Askew, <a href="#Page_68">68</a><br />
+<br />
+South Kensington, England, <a href="#Page_408">408</a><br />
+<br />
+South Street, <a href="#Page_472">472</a><br />
+<br />
+Southwark, <a href="#Page_522">522</a><br />
+<br />
+Southworth, Mrs. Emma D. E. Nevitt, <a href="#Page_59">59</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Souvenir, The</i>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a><br />
+<br />
+Springett, Guli, <a href="#Page_15">15</a><br />
+<br />
+Spruce Street, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a> sq., <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_460">460</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a><br />
+<br />
+State House, the, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>, <a href="#Page_382">382</a>, <a href="#Page_471">471</a>, <a href="#Page_514">514</a><br />
+<br />
+State in Schuylkill, <a href="#Page_443">443</a><br />
+<br />
+Station (Broad and Market), <a href="#Page_489">489</a><br />
+<br />
+Stations and terminals, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_481">481</a>, <a href="#Page_489">489</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a><br />
+<br />
+Stations (railroad), <a href="#Page_481">481</a>, <a href="#Page_489">489</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a><br />
+<br />
+Steadmans, the, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Steevens, George, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>, <a href="#Page_478">478</a><br />
+<br />
+Stenton, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_518">518</a><br />
+<br />
+Stephens (artist), <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+Stephens, Alice Barber, <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+Stephens, Charles H., <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+Stevenson, Mrs. Cornelius, <a href="#Page_364">364</a><br />
+<br />
+Stewardson, John, architect, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+Stewart, Jules, <a href="#Page_393">393</a><br />
+<br />
+Stock Exchange, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_486">486</a>, <a href="#Page_500">500</a><br />
+<br />
+Stockton, Frank R., <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_338">338</a><br />
+<br />
+Stockton, Louise, <a href="#Page_338">338</a><br />
+<br />
+Stokes, Frank W., artist, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Strawberry Mansion, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_430">430</a><br />
+<br />
+Strawbridge and Clothier, <a href="#Page_125">125</a><br />
+<br />
+Stuart, Gilbert, artist, <a href="#Page_389">389</a><br />
+<br />
+Stuart, Gilbert, picture of Washington by, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a><br />
+<br />
+Swarthmore (school), <a href="#Page_258">258</a><br />
+<br />
+Swedes (immigrants), <a href="#Page_471">471</a><br />
+<br />
+Swedes Church, Old, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_514">514</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i>Telegraph, Evening</i>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a><br />
+<br />
+Temple, the (London), <a href="#Page_324">324</a><br />
+<br />
+Tennyson's Poems, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a><br />
+<br />
+Terminals (railroad), <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_481">481</a>, <a href="#Page_489">489</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a><br />
+<br />
+Terry, Ellen, <a href="#Page_401">401</a><br />
+<br />
+Thackeray (William Makepeace), <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_422">422</a><br />
+<br />
+Thanksgiving Day, <a href="#Page_63">63</a><br />
+<br />
+Th&eacute;&acirc;tre Fran&ccedil;ais, <a href="#Page_68">68</a><br />
+<br />
+Theatres, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+Thiers' <i>French Revolution</i>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a><br />
+<br />
+Third Street, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_486">486</a><br />
+<br />
+Thomas, George C., <a href="#Page_307">307</a><br />
+<br />
+Thompson, "Aunt Ad," <a href="#Page_342">342</a><br />
+<br />
+Thouron, Henry, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Torresdale, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a> sq., <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_451">451</a><br />
+<br />
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Tourg&eacute;e'">Tourgee</ins>, Judge Albion W., <a href="#Page_338">338</a><br />
+<br />
+Traubel, Horace, <a href="#Page_364">364</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Traveller, The</i>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a><br />
+<br />
+Treaty with the Indians (Penn), <a href="#Page_375">375</a><br />
+<br />
+Tree, Beerbohm, <a href="#Page_68">68</a><br />
+<br />
+Trollope, Anthony, <a href="#Page_401">401</a><br />
+<br />
+Trotter, Mary, <a href="#Page_396">396</a><br />
+<br />
+Trumbauer, Horace, architect, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+Tuileries (Paris), <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a><br />
+<br />
+Twelfth and Market, <a href="#Page_489">489</a><br />
+<br />
+Twelfth Street Market, <a href="#Page_54">54</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Union League, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a><br />
+<br />
+University of Pennsylvania, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>, <a href="#Page_473">473</a>, <a href="#Page_496">496</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a>, <a href="#Page_529">529</a><br />
+<br />
+University, Provosts of, <a href="#Page_119">119</a><br />
+<br />
+University School (architecture), <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Van Rensselaer, Mrs. John King, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+Van Tromp, Miss, miniatures, <a href="#Page_395">395</a><br />
+<br />
+Vaux, Richard, <a href="#Page_342">342</a><br />
+<br />
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'Vieaire'">Vicaire</ins> (<i>Bibliographie</i>), <a href="#Page_424">424</a><br />
+<br />
+Vienna Caf&eacute;s (Centennial), <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a><br />
+<br />
+Villanova Seminary, <a href="#Page_198">198</a><br />
+<br />
+Villon, Fran&ccedil;ois, essay on, <a href="#Page_238">238</a><br />
+<br />
+Virginia Company, the first, <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br />
+<br />
+Virginia, early settlers in, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a><br />
+<br />
+Voltaire (author), <a href="#Page_428">428</a>, <a href="#Page_513">513</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Walnut Lane, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a><br />
+<br />
+Walnut Street, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_489">489</a>, <a href="#Page_494">494</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a><br />
+<br />
+Walnut Street Theatre, <a href="#Page_67">67</a><br />
+<br />
+Wanamaker's, <a href="#Page_530">530</a><br />
+<br />
+War, Civil, the, <a href="#Page_130">130</a><br />
+<br />
+Ward, Genevieve, <a href="#Page_348">348</a><br />
+<br />
+Wardle, Thomas (<ins title="Transcriber's Note: Both 'bookseller' and 'book-seller' were used in this text. This was retained.">bookseller</ins>), <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br />
+<br />
+Washington (city), <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_534">534</a><br />
+<br />
+Washington, George, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_482">482</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a><br />
+<br />
+Washington's Birthday, <a href="#Page_63">63</a><br />
+<br />
+Washington's household, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a><br />
+<br />
+Washington, statue of, <a href="#Page_386">386</a><br />
+<br />
+Waterloo (eve of), <a href="#Page_254">254</a><br />
+<br />
+<ins title="Transcriber's Note: 'Waterworks,' 'Water Works,' and 'Water-Works' were used in this text. This was retained.">Water-Works</ins> (Fairmount), <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a><br />
+<br />
+Watson, John, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_413">413</a><br />
+<br />
+Watts, Harvey M., <a href="#Page_362">362</a><br />
+<br />
+Waugh, Frederick J., marine painter, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Welsh, John, <a href="#Page_50">50</a><br />
+<br />
+West, Benjamin, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_389">389</a><br />
+<br />
+West Philadelphia, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>, <a href="#Page_529">529</a>, <a href="#Page_538">538</a><br />
+<br />
+Wharton, Anne Hollingsworth, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a><br />
+<br />
+Whartons, the, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a><br />
+<br />
+Whelans, the, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Whistler, James A. McNeill, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>, <a href="#Page_396">396</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>, <a href="#Page_534">534</a><br />
+<br />
+White, Ambrose, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a><br />
+<br />
+White, Bishop, <a href="#Page_290">290</a><br />
+<br />
+White, Dr. (dentist), <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br />
+<br />
+White, William, <a href="#Page_144">144</a><br />
+<br />
+White, Willie, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a><br />
+<br />
+Whitefield, George, <a href="#Page_177">177</a><br />
+<br />
+Whitman, Walt, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>-<a href="#Page_331">331</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_337">337</a>, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a><br />
+<br />
+Whittier, John G., <a href="#Page_320">320</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Wide, Wide World, The</i>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a><br />
+<br />
+Widener, Peter A. B., <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a><br />
+<br />
+Wilde, Oscar, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a><br />
+<br />
+Williams, Dr. Francis Howard, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>, <a href="#Page_362">362</a><br />
+<br />
+Williams, Dr. Talcott, <a href="#Page_364">364</a><br />
+<br />
+Willing's Alley, <a href="#Page_184">184</a><br />
+<br />
+Willings, the, <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br />
+<br />
+Willis, N. P., <a href="#Page_316">316</a><br />
+<br />
+Willow Grove, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+Wilstach Collection, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+Wise, Herbert C., <a href="#Page_361">361</a><br />
+<br />
+Wissahickon (creek), <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299</a><br />
+<br />
+Wistar House, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_521">521</a><br />
+<br />
+Wistar parties, <a href="#Page_146">146</a><br />
+<br />
+Wister, Mrs., authoress, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>, <a href="#Page_336">336</a><br />
+<br />
+Wister, Owen, <a href="#Page_363">363</a><br />
+<br />
+"Wister, Sally," <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_356">356</a><br />
+<br />
+Wisters, the, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br />
+<br />
+Woman in White (German mystics), <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br />
+<br />
+Woman's School of Design, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+Wood, Bishop, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a><br />
+<br />
+Woodland's, <a href="#Page_126">126</a><br />
+<br />
+Wren, Sir Christopher, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_533">533</a><br />
+<br />
+Wyck, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_521">521</a><br />
+<br />
+Wyeth's, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Yale (college), <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br />
+<br />
+Yearly Meeting, <a href="#Page_289">289</a><br />
+<br />
+<i>Yellow Buskin</i>, the, <a href="#Page_405">405</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Zantzinger, C. C., architect, <a href="#Page_407">407</a><br />
+<br />
+Zola, &Eacute;mile, <a href="#Page_259">259</a><br />
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<div class="blockquot">
+<h4>IN THE LAND OF TEMPLES</h4>
+
+<h4>By JOSEPH PENNELL</h4>
+
+<p>Reproductions of a series of lithographs by him, together
+with impressions and notes by the artist and an
+introduction by W. H. D. ROUSE, M.A., L.H.D.</p>
+
+<p><i>Crown Quarto, printed on dull finished
+paper, lithograph by Mr. Pennell
+on cover. $1.25 net.</i></p>
+
+<br />
+<h4>JOSEPH PENNELL'S PICTURES OF THE PANAMA CANAL</h4>
+
+<p>Reproductions of a series of twenty-eight lithographs
+made on the Isthmus of Panama, January-March,
+1912, with Mr. Pennell's introduction, giving his experiences,
+impressions, and full description of each picture.</p>
+
+<p><i>Volume 7&frac14; by 10 inches. Beautifully printed
+on dull finished paper. Lithograph by
+Mr. Pennell on cover. $1.25 net.</i></p>
+
+<br />
+<h4>LIFE OF JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER</h4>
+
+<h4>By ELIZABETH R. and JOSEPH PENNELL</h4>
+
+<p>The Pennells have thoroughly revised the material in
+their Authorized Life, and added much new matter,
+which for lack of space they were unable to incorporate
+in the elaborate two-volume edition now out of print.
+Fully illustrated with 96 plates reproduced from Whistler's
+works, more than half reproduced for the first time.</p>
+
+<p><i>Crown octavo. Fifth and revised edition.
+Whistler binding, deckle edge, $3.50 net.
+Three quarters grain levant, $7.50 net.</i></p>
+
+<h4>J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY<br />
+PUBLISHERS &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; PHILADELPHIA</h4></div>
+
+
+<div class='tnote'><h3>Transcriber's Notes:</h3>
+
+<p>Obvious punctuation errors repaired.</p>
+
+<p>Index page references that erroneously lead to pages without
+text (blank or illustration only) were removed.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the illustrations have been moved from their original positions
+to avoid paragraphs being truncated in this text. The List of
+Illustrations cites their original page numbers, however the hyperlinks
+will take the reader to the new position.</p>
+
+<p>Some advertisements for other books published by J. B. Lippincot were moved
+from page ii to the end of the text.</p>
+
+<p>The remaining corrections made are indicated by dotted lines under the corrections.
+Scroll the mouse over the word and the Transcriber's Note will
+<ins title="like this">appear</ins>.</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Our Philadelphia, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR PHILADELPHIA ***
+
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Our Philadelphia, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Our Philadelphia
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
+Illustrator: Joseph Pennell
+
+Release Date: November 21, 2011 [EBook #38076]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR PHILADELPHIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Wirawan, Suzanne Shell, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+  +----------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Notes:                                           |
+  |                                                                |
+  | Words surrounded by _ are italicized.                          |
+  |                                                                |
+  | A number of obvious errors have been corrected in this text.   |
+  | For a complete list, please see the bottom of this document.   |
+  |                                                                |
+  +----------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+OUR PHILADELPHIA
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: LOOKING UP BROAD STREET FROM SPRUCE STREET]
+
+
+
+
+OUR PHILADELPHIA
+
+DESCRIBED BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL
+ILLUSTRATED WITH ONE HUNDRED & FIVE
+LITHOGRAPHS BY JOSEPH PENNELL
+
+PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
+J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
+MCMXIV
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
+
+PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1914
+
+PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
+AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
+PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+To-day, when it is the American born in the Ghetto, or Syria, or some
+other remote part of the earth, whose recollections are prized, it may
+seem as if the following pages called for an apology. I have none to
+make. They were written simply for the pleasure of gathering together my
+old memories of a town that, as my native place, is dear to me and my
+new impressions of it after an absence of a quarter of a century. But
+now I have finished I add to this pleasure in my book the pleasant
+belief that it will have its value for others, if only for two reasons.
+In the first place, J.'s drawings which illustrate it are his record of
+the old Philadelphia that has passed and the new Philadelphia that is
+passing--a record that in a few years it will be impossible for anybody
+to make, so continually is Philadelphia changing. In the second, my
+story of Philadelphia, perfect or imperfect, may in as short a time be
+equally impossible for anybody to repeat, since I am one of those
+old-fashioned Americans, American by birth with many generations of
+American fore-fathers, who are rapidly becoming rare creatures among the
+hordes of new-fashioned Americans who were anything and everything else
+no longer than a year or a week or an hour ago.
+
+ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL 3 ADELPHI TERRACE HOUSE, LONDON May, 1914
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                           PAGE
+
+     I. AN EXPLANATION                                               1
+
+    II. A CHILD IN PHILADELPHIA                                     24
+
+   III. A CHILD IN PHILADELPHIA (Continued)                         48
+
+    IV. AT THE CONVENT                                              72
+
+     V. TRANSITIONAL                                               104
+
+    VI. THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE                                       130
+
+   VII. THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE: THE ASSEMBLY                         154
+
+  VIII. A QUESTION OF CREED                                        175
+
+    IX. THE FIRST AWAKENING                                        205
+
+     X. THE MIRACLE OF WORK                                        233
+
+    XI. THE ROMANCE OF WORK                                        268
+
+   XII. PHILADELPHIA AND LITERATURE                                304
+
+  XIII. PHILADELPHIA AND LITERATURE (Continued)                    332
+
+   XIV. PHILADELPHIA AND ART                                       368
+
+    XV. PHILADELPHIA AND ART (Continued)                           390
+
+   XVI. PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE                                      413
+
+  XVII. PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE (Continued)                          433
+
+ XVIII. PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY                  451
+
+   XIX. PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY (Continued)      477
+
+    XX. PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY (Continued)      509
+
+        INDEX                                                      543
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+LOOKING UP BROAD STREET FROM SPRUCE STREET              _Frontispiece_
+
+DELANCEY PLACE                                                       3
+
+"PORTICO ROW," SPRUCE STREET                                         7
+
+ARCH STREET MEETING HOUSE                                           13
+
+THE SCHUYLKILL SOUTH FROM CALLOWHILL STREET                         17
+
+FRIENDS' GRAVEYARD, GERMANTOWN                                      21
+
+IN RITTENHOUSE SQUARE                                               25
+
+THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM THE GROUNDS                          29
+
+"ELEVENTH AND SPRUCE"                                               33
+
+DRAWING ROOM AT CLIVEDEN                                            37
+
+BACK-YARDS, ST. PETER'S SPIRE IN THE DISTANCE                       45
+
+INDEPENDENCE SQUARE AND THE STATE HOUSE                             51
+
+CHRIST CHURCH INTERIOR                                              57
+
+CLASSIC FAIRMOUNT                                                   65
+
+DOWN PINE STREET                                                    69
+
+LOUDOUN, MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN                                    75
+
+ENTRANCE TO FAIRMOUNT AND THE WASHINGTON STATUE                     83
+
+MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN                                             89
+
+ARCH STREET MEETING                                                 95
+
+THE TRAIN SHED, BROAD STREET STATION                                99
+
+ST. PETER'S, INTERIOR                                              105
+
+THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM PINE STREET                         109
+
+SECOND STREET MARKET                                               115
+
+FOURTH AND ARCH STREETS MEETING HOUSE                              121
+
+JOHNSON HOUSE, GERMANTOWN                                          127
+
+THE CUSTOMS HOUSE                                                  131
+
+UNDER BROAD STREET STATION AT FIFTEENTH STREET                     135
+
+THE PHILADELPHIA CLUB, THIRTEENTH AND WALNUT STREETS               141
+
+THE NEW RITZ-CARLTON; THE FINISHING TOUCHES; THE WALNUT STREET
+  ADDITION HAS SINCE BEEN MADE                                     149
+
+THE HALL, STENTON                                                  155
+
+"PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND INTO ALL THE INHABITANTS
+  THEREOF"                                                         159
+
+BED ROOM, STENTON, THE HOME OF JAMES LOGAN                         163
+
+THE TUNNEL IN THE PARK                                             167
+
+THE BOAT HOUSES ON THE SCHUYLKILL                                  171
+
+THE PULPIT, ST. PETER'S                                            179
+
+THE CATHEDRAL, LOGAN SQUARE                                        185
+
+CHRIST CHURCH, FROM SECOND STREET                                  189
+
+FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SEVENTH STREET AND WASHINGTON SQUARE    195
+
+OLD SWEDES' CHURCH                                                 201
+
+INDEPENDENCE HALL: THE ORIGINAL DESK ON WHICH THE DECLARATION
+  OF INDEPENDENCE WAS SIGNED AND THE CHAIR USED BY THE PRESIDENT
+  OF CONGRESS, JOHN HANCOCK, IN 1776                               207
+
+PHILADELPHIA FROM BELMONT                                          211
+
+THE DINING ROOM, STENTON                                           217
+
+DOWN THE AISLE AT CHRIST CHURCH                                    223
+
+THE BRIDGE ACROSS MARKET STREET FROM BROAD STREET STATION          229
+
+STATE HOUSE YARD                                                   235
+
+THE PENITENTIARY                                                   247
+
+ON THE READING, AT SIXTEENTH STREET                                251
+
+LOCUST STREET EAST FROM BROAD STREET                               255
+
+BROAD STREET, LOOKING SOUTH FROM ABOVE ARCH STREET                 261
+
+CLINTON STREET, WITH THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL AT ITS END          265
+
+THE CHERRY STREET STAIRS NEAR THE RIVER                            269
+
+THE MORRIS HOUSE ON EIGHTH STREET                                  273
+
+THE OLD COACHING-INN YARD                                          279
+
+FRANKLIN'S GRAVE                                                   285
+
+ARCH STREET MEETING                                                291
+
+CLIVEDEN, THE CHEW HOUSE                                           295
+
+BARTRAM'S                                                          301
+
+CARPENTER'S HALL, INTERIOR                                         305
+
+MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN                                            311
+
+ARCH STREET MEETING--INTERIOR                                      317
+
+FRONT AND CALLOWHILL                                               321
+
+THE ELEVATED AT MARKET STREET WHARF                                327
+
+DR. FURNESS'S HOUSE, WEST WASHINGTON SQUARE, JUST BEFORE IT WAS
+  PULLED DOWN                                                      333
+
+THE GERMANTOWN ACADEMY                                             339
+
+THE STATE HOUSE FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE                           345
+
+"THE LITTLE STREET OF CLUBS," CAMAC STREET ABOVE SPRUCE STREET     349
+
+DOWN SANSOM STREET FROM EIGHTH STREET. THE LOW HOUSES AT
+  SEVENTH STREET HAVE SINCE BEEN TORN DOWN AND THE WESTERN
+  END OF THE CURTIS BUILDING NOW OCCUPIES THEIR PLACE              353
+
+THE DOUBLE STAIRWAY IN THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL                   359
+
+CARPENTER'S HALL, BUILT 1771                                       365
+
+INDEPENDENCE HALL--LENGTHWISE VIEW                                 369
+
+GIRARD COLLEGE                                                     377
+
+UPSALA, GERMANTOWN                                                 383
+
+THE HALL AT CLIVEDEN, THE CHEW HOUSE                               387
+
+THE OLD WATER-WORKS, FAIRMOUNT PARK                                391
+
+THE STAIRWAY, STATE HOUSE                                          397
+
+UPPER ROOM, STENTON                                                403
+
+WYCK--THE DOORWAY FROM WITHIN                                      409
+
+THE PHILADELPHIA DISPENSARY FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE               415
+
+MORRIS HOUSE, GERMANTOWN                                           419
+
+THE STATE HOUSE COLONNADE                                          425
+
+THE SMITH MEMORIAL, WEST FAIRMOUNT PARK                            431
+
+THE BASIN, OLD WATER-WORKS                                         435
+
+GIRARD STREET                                                      441
+
+THE UNION LEAGUE, FROM BROAD AND CHESTNUT STREETS                  415
+
+BROAD STREET STATION                                               453
+
+WANAMAKER'S                                                        457
+
+ST. PETER'S CHURCHYARD                                             461
+
+CITY HALL FROM THE SCHUYLKILL                                      465
+
+CHESTNUT STREET BRIDGE                                             469
+
+THE NARROW STREET                                                  475
+
+THE MARKET STREET ELEVATED AT THE DELAWARE END                     479
+
+THE RAILROAD BRIDGES AT FALLS OF SCHUYLKILL                        483
+
+THE PARKWAY PERGOLAS                                               487
+
+MARKET STREET WEST OF THE SCHUYLKILL                               491
+
+MANHEIM CRICKET GROUND                                             497
+
+DOCK STREET AND THE EXCHANGE                                       501
+
+THE LOCOMOTIVE YARD, WEST PHILADELPHIA                             507
+
+THE GIRARD TRUST COMPANY                                           511
+
+TWELFTH STREET MEETING HOUSE                                       515
+
+WYCK                                                               519
+
+THE MASSED SKY-SCRAPERS ABOVE THE HOUSETOPS                        523
+
+SUNSET. PHILADELPHIA FROM ACROSS THE DELAWARE                      527
+
+THE UNION LEAGUE BETWEEN THE SKY-SCRAPERS                          531
+
+UP BROAD STREET FROM LEAGUE ISLAND                                 535
+
+FROM GRAY'S FERRY                                                  539
+
+
+
+
+OUR PHILADELPHIA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I: AN EXPLANATION
+
+
+I
+
+I think I have a right to call myself a Philadelphian, though I am not
+sure if Philadelphia is of the same opinion. I was born in Philadelphia,
+as my Father was before me, but my ancestors, having had the sense to
+emigrate to America in time to make me as American as an American can
+be, were then so inconsiderate as to waste a couple of centuries in
+Virginia and Maryland, and my Grandfather was the first of the family to
+settle in a town where it is important, if you belong at all, to have
+belonged from the beginning. However, J.'s ancestors, with greater
+wisdom, became at the earliest available moment not only Philadelphians,
+but Philadelphia Friends, and how very much more that means
+Philadelphians know without my telling them. And so, as he does belong
+from the beginning and as I would have belonged had I had my choice, for
+I would rather be a Philadelphian than any other sort of American. I do
+not see why I cannot call myself one despite the blunder of my
+forefathers in so long calling themselves something else.
+
+I might hope that my affection alone for Philadelphia would give me the
+right, were I not Philadelphian enough to know that Philadelphia is, as
+it always was and always will be, cheerfully indifferent to whatever
+love its citizens may have to offer it. I can hardly suppose my claim
+for gratitude greater than that of its Founder or the long succession of
+Philadelphians between his time and mine who have loved it and been
+snubbed or bullied in return. Indeed, in the face of this Philadelphia
+indifference, my affection seems so superfluous that I often wonder why
+it should be so strong. But wise or foolish, there it is, strengthening
+with the years whether I will or no,--a deeper rooted sentiment than I
+thought I was capable of for the town with which the happiest memories
+of my childhood are associated, where the first irresponsible days of my
+youth were spent, which never ceased to be home to me during the more
+than a quarter of a century I lived away from it.
+
+[Illustration: DELANCEY PLACE]
+
+Besides, Philadelphia attracts me apart from what it may stand for in
+memory or from the charm sentiment may lend to it. I love its
+beauty--the beauty of tranquil streets, of red brick houses with white
+marble steps, of pleasant green shade, of that peaceful look of the past
+Philadelphians cross the ocean to rave over in the little old dead towns
+of England and Holland--a beauty that is now fast disappearing. I love
+its character--the calm, the dignity, the reticence with which it has
+kept up through the centuries with the American pace, the airs of a
+demure country village with which it has done the work and earned the
+money of a big bustling town, the cloistered seclusion with which it
+enjoys its luxury and hides its palaces behind its plain brick fronts--a
+character that also is fast going. I love its history, though I am no
+historian, for the little I know colours its beauty and accounts for its
+character.
+
+
+II
+
+It is not for nothing that I begin with this flourish of my birth
+certificate and public confession of love. I want to establish my right,
+first, to call myself a Philadelphian, and then, to talk about
+Philadelphia as freely as we only can talk about the places and the
+people and the things we belong to and care for. I would not dare to
+take such a liberty with Philadelphia if my references were not in
+order, for, as a Philadelphian, I appreciate the risk. Not that I have
+any idea of writing the history of Philadelphia. I hope I have the
+horror, said to be peculiar to all generous minds, of what are commonly
+called facts, and also the intelligence not to attempt what I know I
+cannot do. Another good reason is that the history has already been
+written more than once. Philadelphians, almost from their cave-dwelling
+period, have seemed conscious of the eye of posterity upon them. They
+had hardly landed on the banks of the Delaware before they began to
+write alarmingly long letters which they preserved, and elaborate
+diaries which they kept with equal care. And the letter-writing,
+diary-keeping fever was so in the air that strangers in the town caught
+it: from Richard Castleman to John Adams, from John Adams to Charles
+Dickens, from Charles Dickens to Henry James, every visitor, with
+writing for profession or amusement, has had more or less to say about
+it--usually more. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has gathered
+the old material together; our indispensable antiquary, John Watson, has
+gleaned the odds and ends left by the way; and no end of modern writers
+in Philadelphia have ransacked their stores of information: Dr. Weir
+Mitchell making novels out of them, Mr. Sydney Fisher and Miss Agnes
+Repplier, history; Mr. Hampton Carson using them as the basis of further
+research; Miss Anne Hollingsworth Wharton resurrecting Colonial life and
+society and fashions from them, Mr. Eberlein and Mr. Lippincott, the
+genealogy of Colonial houses; other patriotic citizens helping
+themselves in one way or another; until, among them all, they have
+filled a large library and prepared a sufficiently formidable task for
+the historian of Philadelphia in generations to come without my adding
+to his burden.
+
+
+III
+
+It is an amusing library, as Philadelphians may believe now they are
+getting over the bad habit into which they had fallen of belittling
+their town, much in their town's fashion of belittling them. I am
+afraid it was partly their fault if the rest of America fell into the
+same habit. As I recall my old feelings and attitude, it seems to me
+that in my day we must have been brought up to look down upon
+Philadelphia. The town surely cut a poor figure in my school books, and
+the purplest patches in Colonial history must have been there reserved
+for New England or New York, Virginia or the Carolinas, for any and
+every colony rather than the Province of Pennsylvania, or I would not
+have left school better posted in the legends of Powhatan and Pocahontas
+than in the life of William Penn, and more edified by the burning of
+witches and the tracking of Indians than by the struggles of Friends to
+give every man the liberty to go to Heaven his own way. The amiable
+contempt in which Philadelphians held William Penn revealed itself in
+their free-and-easy way of speaking of him, if they spoke of him at all,
+as Billy Penn, though Penn would have been the last to invite the
+familiarity. Probably few outside the Society of Friends could have said
+just what he had done for their town, or just what they owed to him. If
+I am not mistaken, the prevailing idea was that his chief greatness
+consisted in the cleverness with which he fooled the land out of the
+Indians for a handful of beads.
+
+[Illustration: "PORTICO ROW" SPRUCE STREET]
+
+The present generation could not be so ignorant if it wanted to. The
+statue of Penn, in full-skirted coat and broad-brimmed hat, dominating
+Philadelphia from the ugly tower of the Public Buildings, though it may
+not be a thing of beauty, at least suggests to Philadelphians that it
+would not have been put up there, the most conspicuous landmark from the
+streets and the surrounding country, if Penn had not been somebody, or
+done something, of some consequence. As for the rest of America, I doubt
+if it often comes so near to Philadelphia that it can see the statue.
+The last time I went to New York from London I met on the steamer a man
+from Michigan who had obviously been but a short time before a man from
+Cork, and who was so keen to stop in Philadelphia on his way West that I
+might have been astonished had I not heard so much of the miraculously
+rapid Americanization of the modern emigrant. Most people do not want to
+stop in Philadelphia unless they have business there, and he had none,
+and naturally I could not imagine any other motive except the desire to
+see the town which is of the greatest historic importance in the United
+States and which still possesses proofs of it. But the man from Michigan
+gave me to understand, and pretty quick too, that he did not know
+Philadelphia had a history and old buildings to prove it, and what was
+more, he did not care if it had. He guessed history wasn't in his line.
+What he wanted was to take the next train to Atlantic City; folks he
+knew had been there and said it was great. And I rather think this is
+the way most Americans, from America or from Cork, feel about
+Philadelphia.
+
+
+IV
+
+It is not my affair to enlighten them or anybody else. I have a more
+personal object in view. Philadelphia may mean to other people nothing
+at all--that is their loss; I am concerned entirely with what it means
+to me. In those wonderful Eighteen-Nineties, now written about with awe
+by the younger generation as if no less prehistoric than the period of
+the Renaissance, until it makes me feel a new Methusaleh to own that I
+lived and worked through them, we were always being told that art should
+be the artist's record of nature seen through a temperament, criticism
+the critic's story of his adventures among the world's masterpieces, and
+though I am neither artist nor critic, though I am not sure what a
+temperament is, much less if I have one, still I fancy this expresses in
+a way the end I have set myself in writing about Philadelphia. For I
+should like, if I can, to record my personal impressions of the town I
+love and to give my adventures among the beautiful things, the humorous
+things, the tragic things it contains in more than ample measure. My
+interest is in my personal experiences, but these have been coloured by
+the history of Philadelphia since I have dabbled in it, and have become
+richer and more amusing. I have learned, with age and reading and
+travelling, that Philadelphia as it is cannot really be known without
+some knowledge of Philadelphia as it was: also that Philadelphia, both
+as it is and as it was, is worth knowing. Americans will wander to the
+ends of the earth to study the psychology--as they call it of people
+they never could understand however hard they tried; they will shut
+themselves up in a remote town of Italy or Spain to master the secrets
+of its prehistoric past; they will squander months in the Bibliotheque
+Nationale or the British Museum to get at the true atmosphere of Paris
+or London; when, had they only stopped their journey at Broad Street
+Station in Philadelphia or, if they were Philadelphians, never taken the
+train out of it, they could have had all the psychology and secrets and
+atmosphere they could ask for, with much less trouble and expense.
+
+I have never been to any town anywhere, and I have been to many in my
+time, that has more decided character than Philadelphia, or to any where
+this character is more difficult to understand if the clue is not got
+from the past. For instance, people talk about Philadelphia as if its
+one talent was for sleep, while the truth is, taking the sum of its
+achievements, no other American town has done so much hard work, no
+other has accomplished so much for the country. Impressed as we are by
+the fact, it would be impossible to account for the reputation if it
+were not known that the people who made Philadelphia presented the same
+puzzling contradiction in their own lives--the only people who ever
+understood how to be in the world and not of it.
+
+[Illustration: ARCH STREET MEETING HOUSE]
+
+The usual alternative to not being of the world is to be in a cloister
+or to live like a hermit, to accept a role in common or to renounce
+social intercourse. But the Friends did not have to shut themselves up
+to conquer worldliness, they did not have to renounce the world's work
+and its rewards. For "affluence of the world's goods," Isaac Norris,
+writing from Philadelphia, could felicitate Jonathan Dickinson, "knowing
+both thyself and dear wife have hearts and souls fit to use them." That
+was better than shirking temptation in a monk's cell or a philosopher's
+tub. If George Fox wore a leather suit, it was because he found it
+convenient, but William Penn, for whom it would have been highly
+inconvenient, had no scruple in dressing like other men of his position
+and wearing the blue ribbon of office. Nor because religion was freed
+from all unessential ornament, was the house stripped of comfort and
+luxury. I write about Friends with hesitation. I have been married to
+one now for many years and can realize the better therefore that none
+save Friends can write of themselves with authority. But I hope I am
+right in thinking, as I always have thought since I read Thomas Elwood's
+_Memoirs_, that their attitude is excellently explained in his account
+of his first visit to the Penningtons "after they were become Quakers"
+when, though he was astonished at the new gravity of their look and
+behaviour, he found Guli Springett amusing herself in the garden and the
+dinner "handsome." For the world's goods never being the end they were
+to the World's People, Friends were as undisturbed by their possession
+as by their absence and, as a consequence, could meet and accept life,
+whether its gifts were wealth and power or poverty and obscurity, with
+the serenity few other men have found outside the cloister. Moreover,
+they could speak the truth, calling a spade a spade, or their enemy the
+scabbed sheep, or smooth silly man, or vile fellow, or inhuman monster,
+or villain infecting the air with a hellish stench, he no doubt was, and
+never for a moment lose their tempers. This serenity--this "still
+strength"--is as the poles apart from the phlegmatic, constitutional
+slowness of the Dutch in New York or, on the other hand, from the
+tranquillity Henry James traces in progressive descent from taste,
+tradition, and history, even from the philosopher's calm of achieved
+indifference, and Friends, having carried it to perfection in their own
+conduct, left it as a legacy to their town.
+
+[Illustration: THE SCHUYLKILL SOUTH FROM CALLOWHILL STREET]
+
+The usual American town, when it hustles, lets nobody overlook the fact
+that it is hustling. But Philadelphia has done its work as calmly as the
+Friends have done theirs, never boasting of its prosperity, never
+shouting its success and riches from the house-top, and its dignified
+serenity has been mistaken for sleep. Whistler used to say that if the
+General does not tell the world he has won the battle, the world will
+never hear of it. The trouble with Philadelphia is that it has kept its
+triumph to itself. But we have got so far from the old Friends that no
+harm can be done if Philadelphians begin to interpret their town's
+serenity to a world capable of confusing it with drowsiness. If America
+is ready to forget, if for long Philadelphians were as ready, it is high
+time we should remember ourselves and remind America of the services
+Philadelphia has rendered to the country, and its good taste in
+rendering them with so little fuss that all the country has done in
+return is to laugh at Philadelphia as a back number.
+
+
+V
+
+Philadelphians have grown accustomed to the laugh. We have heard it
+since we were in our cradles. We are used to have other Americans come
+to our town and,--in the face of our factory chimneys smoking along the
+Schuylkill and our ship-building yards in full swing on the Delaware,
+and our locomotives pouring out over the world by I do not know how many
+thousands from the works in Broad Street, and our mills going at full
+pressure in the "Little England" of Kensington, in Frankford and
+Germantown,--in the face of our busy schools and hospitals and
+academies,--in the face of our stores and banks and charities,--that is,
+in the face of our industry, our learning, and our philanthropy that
+have given tips to the whole country,--see only our sleep-laden eyes and
+hear only our sluggish snores. We know the foolish stories they tell. We
+have heard many more times than we can count of the Bostonian who
+retires to Philadelphia for complete intellectual rest, and the New
+Yorker who when he has a day off comes to spend a week in Philadelphia,
+and the Philadelphian who goes to New York to eat the snails he cannot
+catch in his own back-yard. We have heard until we have it by heart
+that Philadelphia is a cemetery, and the road to it, the Road to
+Yesterday. We are so familiar with the venerable _cliche_ that we can
+but wonder at its gift of eternal youth. Never was there a jest that
+wore so well with those who make it. The comic column is rarely complete
+without it, and it is forever cropping up where least expected. In the
+last American novel I opened Philadelphia was described as hanging on to
+the last strap of the last car to the sound of Gabriel's horn on
+Judgment Day; in the last American magazine story I read the
+Philadelphia heroine by her Philadelphia calm conquered the cowboys of
+the west, as Friends of old disarmed their judges in court. In the
+general Americanization of London, even the London papers have seized
+upon the slowness of Philadelphia as a joke for Londoners to roar at. Li
+Hung Chang couldn't visit Philadelphia without dozing through the
+ceremonies in his honour and noting the appropriateness of it in his
+diary. And so it goes on, the witticism to-day apparently as fresh as it
+was in the Stone Age from which it has come down to us.
+
+[Illustration: FRIENDS' GRAVEYARD, GERMANTOWN]
+
+If Philadelphians laugh, that is another matter--every man has the right
+to laugh at himself. But we have outlived our old affectation of
+indifference to our town, I am not sure that we are not pushing our
+profession of pride in it too far to the other extreme. I remember the
+last time I was home I went to a public meeting called to talk about the
+world's waterways, and no Philadelphian present, from the Mayor down,
+could talk of anything but Philadelphia and its greatness. But whatever
+may be our pose now, or next year, or the year after, there is always
+beneath it a substantial layer of affection, for we cannot help knowing,
+if nobody else does, what Philadelphia is and what Philadelphia has
+done. Certainly, it is because I know that I, for one, would so much
+rather be the Philadelphian I am, and my ancestors were not, than any
+other sort of American, that, as I have grown older, my love for my town
+has surprised me by its depth, and makes my confession of it now seem
+half pleasure, half duty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II: A CHILD IN PHILADELPHIA
+
+
+I
+
+If I made my first friendships from my perambulator, or trundling my
+hoop and skipping my rope, in Rittenhouse Square, as every Philadelphian
+should, they were interrupted and broken so soon that I have no memory
+of them.
+
+[Illustration: IN RITTENHOUSE SQUARE]
+
+It was my fate to be sent to boarding-school before I had time to lay in
+a store of the associations that are the common property of happier
+Philadelphians of my generation. I do not know if I was ever taken, as
+J. and other privileged children were, to the Pennsylvania Hospital on
+summer evenings to see William Penn step down from his pedestal when he
+heard the clock strike six, or to the Philadelphia Library to wait until
+Benjamin Franklin, hearing the same summons, left his high niche for a
+neighbouring saloon. I cannot recall the firemen's fights and the cries
+of negroes selling pop-corn and ice-cream through the streets that fill
+some Philadelphia reminiscences I have read. I cannot say if I ever went
+anywhere by the omnibus sleigh in winter, or to West Philadelphia by the
+stage at any time of the year. I never coasted down the hills of
+Germantown, I never skated on the Schuylkill. When my contemporaries
+compare notes of these and many more delightful things in the amazing,
+romantic, incredible Philadelphia they grew up in, it annoys me to find
+myself out of it all, sharing none of their recollections, save one and
+that the most trivial. For, from the vagueness of the remote past, no
+event emerges so clearly as the periodical visit of "Crazy Norah," a
+poor, harmless, half-witted wanderer, who wore a man's hat and top
+boots, with bits of ribbon scattered over her dress, and who, on her
+aimless rounds, drifted into all the Philadelphia kitchens to the
+fearful joy of the children; and my memory may be less of her personally
+than of much talk of her helped by her resemblance, or so I fancied, to
+a picture of Meg Merrilies in a collection of engravings of Walter
+Scott's heroines owned by an Uncle, and almost the first book I can
+remember.
+
+
+II
+
+But great as was my loss, I fancy my memories of old Philadelphia gain
+in vividness for being so few. One of the most vivid is of the
+interminable drive in the slow horse-car which was the longest part of
+the journey to and from my Convent school,--which is the longest part of
+any journey I ever made, not to be endured at the time but for the
+chanting over and over to myself of all the odds and ends of verse I had
+got by heart, from the dramas of _Little Miss Muffett_ and _Little Jack
+Horner_ to Poe's _Bells_ and Tennyson's _Lady of Shalott_--but in memory
+a drive to be rejoiced in, for nothing could have been more
+characteristic of Philadelphia as it was then. The Convent was in
+Torresdale on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Pennsylvania
+Depot--Philadelphia had as yet no Stations and Terminals--was in the
+distant, unknown quarter of Frankford. I believe it is used as a freight
+station now and I have sometimes thought that, for sentiment's sake, I
+should like to make a pilgrimage to it over the once well-travelled
+road. But the modern trolley has deserted the straight course of the
+unadventurous horse-car of my day and I doubt if ever again I could find
+my way back. The old horse-car went, without turn or twist, along Third
+Street. I started from the corner of Spruce, having got as far as that
+by the slower, more infrequent Spruce Street car, and after I had passed
+the fine old houses where Philadelphians--not aliens--lived, a good part
+of the route lay through a busy business section. But there has stayed
+with me as my chief impression of the endless street a sense of eternal
+calm. No matter how much solid work was being done, no matter how many
+fortunes were being made and unmade, it was always placid on the
+surface, uneventful and unruffled. The car, jingling along in leisurely
+fashion, was the one sign of animation.
+
+[Illustration: THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM THE GROUNDS]
+
+Or often, in spring and summer, I went by boat, from--so false is
+memory--I cannot say what wharf, up the Delaware. This was a pleasanter
+journey and every bit as leisurely and as characteristic in its way of
+Philadelphia life. For though I might catch the early afternoon boat, it
+was sure to be full of business men returning from their offices to
+their houses on the river. Philadelphians did not wait for the Main Line
+to be invented to settle in the suburbs. They have always had a fancy
+for the near country ever since Penn lived in state at Pennsbury, and
+Logan at Stenton; ever since Bartram planted his garden on the banks of
+the Schuylkill, and Arnold brought Peggy Shippen as his bride to Mount
+Pleasant; ever since all the Colonial country houses we are so proud of
+were built. I have the haziest memory of the places where the boat
+stopped between Philadelphia and Torresdale and of the people who got
+out there. But I cannot help remembering Torresdale for it was as
+prominent a stopping-place in my journey through youth as it is in the
+journey up the Delaware. The Convent was my home for years, and I had
+many friends in the houses down by the riverside and scattered over the
+near country. Their names are among the most familiar in my youthful
+recollections: the Macalisters, the Grants--one of my brothers named
+after the father--the Hopkins--another of my brothers marrying in the
+family--the Fishers, Keatings, Steadmans, Kings, Bories, Whelans. It was
+not often I could go or come without meeting somebody I knew on board. I
+am a cockney myself, I love the town, but I can understand that
+Philadelphians whose homes were in the country, especially if that
+country lay along the shores of the Delaware, liked to get back early
+enough to profit by it; that, busy and full of affairs as they might be,
+they not only liked but managed to, shows how far hustling was from the
+old Philadelphia scheme of things. Nowadays the motor brings the country
+into town and town into the country. But the miles between town and
+country were then lengthened into leagues by the leisurely boat and the
+leisurely horse-car which, as I look back, seem to set the pace of life
+in Philadelphia when I was young.
+
+
+III
+
+At first my holidays were spent mostly at the Convent. My Father, with
+the young widower's embarrassment when confronted by his motherless
+children, solved the problem the existence of my Sister and myself was
+to him by putting us where he knew we were safe and well out of his way.
+I do not blame him. What is a man to do when he finds himself with two
+little girls on his clumsy masculine hands? But the result was he had no
+house of his own to bring us to when the other girls hurried joyfully
+home at Christmas and Easter and for the long summer holiday. It hurt as
+I used to watch them walking briskly down the long path on the way to
+the station. And yet, I scored in the end, for Philadelphia was the more
+marvellous to me, visiting it rarely, than it could have been to
+children to whom it was an everyday affair.
+
+[Illustration: "ELEVENTH AND SPRUCE"]
+
+For years my Grandfather's house was the scene of the occasional visit.
+He lived in Spruce Street above Eleventh--the typical Philadelphia
+Street, straight and narrow, on either side rows of red brick houses,
+each with white marble steps, white shutters below and green shutters
+above, and along the red brick pavement rows of trees which made
+Philadelphia the green country town of Penn's desire, but the
+Philadelphian's life a burden in the springtime before the coming of the
+sparrows. Philadelphia, as I think of it in the old days at the season
+when the leaves were growing green, is always heavy with the odour of
+the evil-smelling ailantus and full of measuring worms falling upon me
+from every tree. My fear of "Crazy Norah" is hardly less clear in my
+early memories than the terror these worms were to the dear fragile
+little Aunt who had cared for me in my first motherless years, and who
+still, during my holidays, kept a watchful eye on me to see that I put
+my "gums" on if I went out in the rain and that I had the money in my
+pocket to stop at Dexter's for a plate of ice-cream. I can recall as if
+it were yesterday, her shrieks one Easter Sunday when she came home from
+church and found a green horror on her new spring bonnet and another on
+her petticoat, and her miserable certainty all through the early Sunday
+dinner that many more were crawling over her somewhere. But, indeed, the
+Philadelphians of to-day can never know from what loathsome creatures
+the sparrows have delivered them.
+
+My Grandfather's house was as typical as the street--one of the quite
+modest four-story brick houses that were thought unseemly sky-scrapers
+and fire-traps when they were first built in Philadelphia. I can never
+go by the old house of many memories--for sale, alas! the last time I
+passed and still for sale according to the last news to reach me even as
+I correct my proofs--without seeing myself as I used to be, arriving
+from the Convent, small, plain, unbecomingly dressed and conscious of
+it, with my pretty, always-becomingly-dressed because nothing was
+unbecoming to her, not-in-the-least-shy Sister, both standing in the
+vestibule between the inevitable Philadelphia two front doors, the outer
+one as inevitably open all day long. And I see myself, when, in answer
+to our ring, the servant had opened the inner one as well, entering in a
+fresh access of shyness the wide lofty hall, with the front and back
+parlours to the right; Philadelphians had no drawing-rooms then but were
+content with parlours, as Penn had been who knew them by no other name.
+Compared to the rich Philadelphian's house to-day, my Grandfather's
+looks very unpretending, but when houses like it, with two big parlours
+separated by folding doors, first became the fashion in Philadelphia,
+they passed for palaces with Philadelphians who disapproved of display,
+and the "tradesmen" living soberly in them were rebuked for aspiring to
+the luxury of princes. I cannot imagine why, for the old Colonial houses
+are, many of them, as lofty and more spacious, though it was the simple
+spaciousness of my Grandfather's and the loftiness of its ceilings that
+gave it charm.
+
+[Illustration: DRAWING ROOM AT CLIVEDEN]
+
+My Grandfather's two parlours, big as they were, would strike nobody
+to-day as palatial. It needs the glamour time throws over them for me to
+discover princely luxury in the rosewood and reps masterpieces of a
+deplorable period with which they were furnished, or in their decoration
+of beaded cushions and worsted-work mats and tidies, the lavish gifts of
+a devoted family. But I cannot remember the parlours and forget the
+respect with which they once inspired me. I own to a lingering affection
+for their crowning touch of ugliness, an ottoman with a top of the
+fashionable Berlin work of the day--a white arum lily, done by the
+superior talent of the fancy store, on a red ground filled in by the
+industrious giver. It stood between the two front windows, so that we
+might have the additional rapture of seeing it a second time in the
+mirror which hung behind it. Opposite, between the two windows of the
+back parlour, was a "Rogers Group" on a blue stand; and a replica, with
+variations, of both the ottoman and the "Rogers Group" could have been
+found in every other Philadelphia front and back parlour. I recall also
+the three or four family portraits which I held in tremendous awe,
+however I may feel about them now; and the immensely high vases, unique
+creations that could not possibly have been designed for any purpose
+save to ornament the Philadelphia mantelpiece; and the transparent
+lamp-shade, decorated with pictures of cats and children and landscapes,
+that at night, when the gas was lit, helped to keep me awake until I
+could escape to bed; and the lustre chandeliers hanging from the
+ceiling--what joy when one of the long prisms came loose and I could
+capture it and, looking through it, walk across the parlours and up the
+stairs straight into the splendid dangers of Rainbow Land!
+
+I had no time for these splendours on my arrival, nor, fortunately for
+me, was I left long to the tortures of my shyness. At the end of the
+hall, facing me, was the wide flight of stairs leading to the upper
+stories, and on the first landing, at their turning just where a few
+more steps led beyond into the back-building dining-room, my
+Grandmother, in her white cap and purple ribbons, stood waiting. In my
+memory she and that landing are inseparable. Whenever the door bell
+rang, she was out there at the first sound, ready to say "Come right up,
+my dear!" to whichever one of her innumerable progeny it might he. To
+her right, filling an ample space in the windings of the back stairs,
+was the inexhaustible pantry which I knew, as well as she, we should
+presently visit together. Though there could not have been in
+Philadelphia or anywhere quite such another Grandmother, even if most
+Philadelphians feel precisely the same way about theirs, she was typical
+too, like the house and the street. She belonged to the generation of
+Philadelphia women who took to old age almost as soon as they were
+mothers, put on caps and large easy shoes, invented an elderly dress
+from which they never deviated for the rest of their lives, except to
+exchange cashmere for silk, the everyday cap for one of fine lace and
+wider ribbons, on occasions of ceremony, and who as promptly forgot the
+world outside of their household and their family. I do not believe my
+Grandmother had an interest in anybody except her children, or in
+anything except their affairs; though this did not mean that she gave up
+society when it was to their advantage that she should not. In her stiff
+silks and costly caps, she presided at every dinner, reception, and
+party given at home, as conscientiously as, in her sables and demure
+velvet bonnet, she made and returned calls in the season.
+
+My other memories are of comfortable, spacious rooms, good, solid,
+old-fashioned furniture, a few more old and some better-forgotten new
+family portraits on the walls, the engraving of Gilbert Stuart's
+Washington over the dining-room mantelpiece, the sofa or couch in almost
+every room for the Philadelphia nap before dinner, the two cheerful
+kitchens where, if the servants were amiable, I sometimes played, and,
+above all, the most enchanting back-yard that ever was or could be--we
+were not so elegant in those days as to call it a garden.
+
+
+IV
+
+Since it has been the fashion to revive everything old in Philadelphia,
+most Philadelphians are not happy until they have their garden, as their
+forefathers had, and very charming they often make it in the suburbs.
+But in town my admiration has been asked for gardens that would have
+been lost in my Grandfather's back-yard, and for a few meagre plants
+springing up about a cold paved square that would have been condemned
+as weeds in his luxuriant flower beds.
+
+The kindly magnifying glasses of memory cannot convert the Spruce Street
+yard into a rival of Edward Shippen's garden in Second Street where the
+old chronicles say there were orchards and a herd of deer, or of
+Bartram's with its trees and plants collected from far and wide, or of
+any of the old Philadelphia gardens in the days when in Philadelphia no
+house, no public building, almost no church, could exist without a green
+space and great trees and many flowers about it, and when Philadelphians
+loved their gardens so well, and hated so to leave them, that there is
+the story of one at least who came back after death to haunt the shady
+walks and fragrant lawns that were fairer to her than the fairest
+Elysian Fields in the land beyond the grave. Much of the old beauty had
+gone before I was born, much was going as I grew from childhood to
+youth. My Uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, has described the Philadelphia
+garden of his early years, "with vines twined over arbours, where the
+magnolia, honeysuckle and rose spread rich perfume of summer nights, and
+where the humming bird rested, and scarlet tanager, or oriole, with the
+yellow and blue bird flitted in sunshine or in shade." Though I go back
+to days before the sparrows had driven away not only the worms but all
+others of their own race, I recall no orioles and scarlet tanagers, no
+yellow and blue birds. Philadelphia's one magnolia tree stood in front
+of the old Dundas house at Broad and Walnut.
+
+All the same, my Grandfather's was a back-yard of enchantment. A narrow
+brick-paved path led past the kitchens; on one side, close to the wall
+dividing my Grandfather's yard from the next door neighbour's, was a
+border of roses and Johnny-jump-ups and shrubs--the shrubs my
+Grandmother used to pick for me, crush a little in her fingers, and tie
+up in a corner of my handkerchief, which was the Philadelphia way--the
+most effective way that ever was--to make them give out their sweetness.
+Beyond the kitchens, where the yard broadened into a large open space,
+the path enclosed, with a wider border of roses, two big grass plots
+which were shaded by fruit trees, all pink and white in the springtime.
+Wistaria hung in purple showers over the high walls. I am sure lilacs
+bloomed at the kitchen door, and a vine of Isabella grapes--the very
+name has an old Philadelphia flavour and fragrance--covered the verandah
+that ran across the entire second story of the back-building. If
+sometimes this delectable back-yard was cold and bare, in my memory
+it is more apt to be sweet and gay with roses, shrubs and
+Johnny-jump-ups,--summer and its pleasures oftener waiting on me there:
+probably because my visits to my Grandfather's were more frequent in the
+summer time. But I have vague memories of winter days, when the rose
+bushes were done up in straw, and wooden steps covered the marble in
+front, and ashes were strewn over the icy pavement, and snow was piled
+waist-high in the gutter.
+
+
+V
+
+From the verandah there was a pleasant vista, up and down, of the same
+back-yards and the same back buildings, just as from the front windows
+there was a pleasant vista, up and down, of the same red-brick fronts,
+the same white marble steps, the same white and green shutters,--only
+one house daring upon originality, and this was Bennett's, the
+ready-made clothes man, whose unusually large garden filled the opposite
+corner of Eleventh and Spruce with big country-like trees over to which
+I looked from my bedroom window. As a child, instinctively I got to know
+that inside every house, within sight and beyond, I would find the same
+front and back parlours, the same back-building dining-room, the same
+number of bedrooms, the same engraving of George Washington over the
+dining-room mantelpiece, the same big red cedar chest in the third story
+hall and, in summer, the same parlours turned into cool grey cellars
+with the same matting on the floor, the same linen covers on the chairs,
+the same curtainless windows and carefully closed shutters, the same
+white gauze over mirrors and chandeliers--to light upon an item for
+gauze "to cover pictures and glass" in Washington's household accounts
+while he lived in Philadelphia is one of the things it is worth
+searching the old archives for.
+
+[Illustration: BACK-YARDS, ST. PETER'S SPIRE IN THE DISTANCE]
+
+Instinctively, I got to know too that, in every one of these
+well-regulated interiors where there was a little girl, she must, like
+me, be striving to be neither seen nor heard all the long morning, and
+sitting primly at the front window all the long afternoon, and that, if
+she ever played at home it was, like me, with measured steps and
+modulated voice: at all times cultivating the calm of manner expected of
+her when she, in her turn, would have just such a red brick house and
+just such a delectable back-yard of her own. Thus, while the long months
+at the Convent kept me busy cultivating every spiritual grace, during
+the occasional holiday at Eleventh and Spruce I was well drilled in the
+Philadelphia virtues.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III: A CHILD IN PHILADELPHIA--CONTINUED
+
+
+I
+
+Naturally, I could not live in Spruce Street and not believe, as every
+Philadelphian should and once did, that no other kind of a house except
+the Spruce Street house was fit for a Philadelphian to live in. The
+Philadelphian, from infancy, was convinced by his surroundings and
+bringing-up that there was but one way of doing things decently and
+respectably and that was the Philadelphia way, nor can my prolonged
+exile relieve me from the sense of crime at times when I catch myself
+doing things not just as Philadelphians used to do them.
+
+I was safe from any such crime in my Grandfather's house. All
+Philadelphia might have been let in without fear. Had skeletons been
+concealed in the capacious cupboards, they would have been of the
+approved Philadelphia pattern. My Grandfather was not at all of
+Montaigne's opinion that order in the management of life is sottish, but
+looked upon it rather as "Heaven's first law." His day's programme was
+the same as in every red brick house with white marble steps and a
+back-yard full of roses and shrubs and Johnny-jump-ups. Everything at
+Eleventh and Spruce was done according to the same Philadelphia rules
+at the same hour, from the washing of the family linen on Monday, when
+Sunday's beef was eaten cold for dinner, to the washing of the front on
+Saturday morning, when Philadelphia streets from end to end were all
+mops and maids, rivers and lakes.
+
+When my Grandfather, with his family on their knees around him, began
+the day by reading morning prayers in the back-building dining-room, he
+could have had the satisfaction of knowing that every other Philadelphia
+head of a family was engaged in the same edifying duty, but I hope, for
+every other Philadelphia family's sake, with a trifle less awe-inspiring
+solemnity. After being present once at my Grandfather's prayers, nobody
+needed to be assured that life was earnest.
+
+He did not shed his solemnity when he rose from his knees, nor when he
+had finished his breakfast of scrapple and buckwheat cakes and left the
+breakfast table. He was as solemn in his progress through the streets to
+the Philadelphia Bank, at Fourth and Chestnut, of which he was
+President, and having said so much perhaps I might as well add his name,
+Thomas Robins, for in his day he was widely known and it is a
+satisfaction to remember, as widely appreciated both in and out of
+Philadelphia. His clothes were always of the most admirable cut and fit
+and of a fashion becoming to his years, he carried a substantial cane
+with a gold top, his stock was never laid aside for a frivolous modern
+cravat, his silk hat was as indispensable, and his slow walk had a
+dignity royalty might have envied. He was a handsome old man and a
+noticeable figure even in Philadelphia streets at the hour when John
+Welsh from the corner, and Biddles and Cadwalladers and Whartons and
+Peppers and Lewises and a host of other handsome old Philadelphians with
+good Philadelphia names from the near neighborhood, were starting
+downtown in clothes as irreproachable and with a gait no less dignified.
+The foreigner's idea of the American is of a slouchy, free-and-easy man
+for ever cracking jokes. But slouchiness and jokes had no place in the
+dictionary or the deportment of my Grandfather and his contemporaries,
+at a period when Philadelphia supplied men like John Welsh for its
+country to send as representatives abroad and there carry on the
+traditions of Franklin and John Adams and Jefferson. My Father--Edward
+Robins--inherited more than his share of this old-fashioned Philadelphia
+manner, making a ceremony of the morning walk to his office and the
+Sunday walk to church. But it has been lost by younger generations,
+more's the pity. In memory I would not have my Grandfather a shade less
+solemn, though at the time his solemnity put me on anything but easy
+terms with him.
+
+
+II
+
+The respectful bang of the front door upon my Grandfather's dignified
+back after breakfast was the signal for the family to relax. The cloth
+was at once cleared, my Grandmother and my Aunts--like all Philadelphia
+mothers and daughters--brought their work-baskets into the dining-room
+and sat and gossiped there until it was time for my Grandmother to go
+and see the butcher and the provision dealer, or for my Aunts to make
+those formal calls for which the morning then was the unpardonable hour.
+
+[Illustration: INDEPENDENCE SQUARE AND THE STATE HOUSE]
+
+It seems to me, in looking back, as if my Grandmother could never have
+gone out of the house except on an errand to the provision man, such an
+important part did it play in her daily round of duties. She never went
+to market. That was not the Philadelphia woman's business, it was the
+Philadelphia man's. My Grandfather, at the time of which I write, must
+have grown too old for the task, which was no light one, for it meant
+getting up at unholy hours every Wednesday and every Saturday, leaving
+the rest of the family in their comfortable beds, and being back again
+in time for prayers and eight o'clock breakfast. I cannot say how this
+division of daily labour was brought about. The century before, a short
+time as things go in Philadelphia, it was the other way round and the
+young Philadelphia woman at her marketing was one of the sights
+strangers in the town were taken to see. But in my time it was so much
+the man's right that as a child I believed there was something
+essentially masculine in going to market, just as there was in making
+the mayonnaise for the salad at dinner. A Philadelphia man valued his
+salad too highly to trust its preparation to a woman. It was almost a
+shock to me when my Father allowed my motherly little Aunt to relieve
+him of the responsibility in the Spruce Street house. And later on, when
+he re-married and again lived in a house of his own, and my Step-Mother
+made a mayonnaise quite equal to his or to any mere man's, not even to
+her would he shift the early marketing,--his presence in the Twelfth
+Street Market as essential on Wednesday and Saturday mornings as in the
+Stock Exchange every day--and his conscientiousness was the more
+astonishing as his genius was by no means for domesticity. Philadelphia
+women respected man's duties and rights in domestic, as in all, matters.
+I remember an elderly Philadelphian, who was stopping at Blossom's Hotel
+in Chester, where all Americans thirty years ago began their English
+tour, telling me the many sauces on the side table had looked so good
+she would have liked to try them and, on my asking her why in the world
+she had not, saying they had not been offered to her and she thought
+perhaps they were for the gentlemen. Only a Philadelphian among
+Americans could have given that answer.
+
+Towards three o'clock in the Spruce Street house, my Grandmother would
+be found, her cap carefully removed, stretched full-length upon the sofa
+in the dining-room. The picture would not be complete if I left out my
+Father's rage because the dining-room was used for her before-dinner nap
+as for almost every purpose of domestic life by the women of the family.
+I have often wondered where he got such an un-Philadelphia idea. In
+every house where there was a Grandmother, she was taking her nap at
+the same hour on the same sofa in the same dining-room. I could never
+see the harm. It was the most comfortable room in the house, without the
+isolation of the bedroom or the formality of the parlours.
+
+At four, my Grandfather returned from his day's work, the family
+re-assembled, holding him in sufficient awe never to be late, and dinner
+was served. The hour was part of the leisurely life of Philadelphia as
+ordered in Spruce Street. Philadelphians had dined at four during a
+hundred years and more, and my Grandfather, who rarely condescended to
+the frivolity of change, continued to dine at four, as he continued to
+wear a stock, until the end of his life. It was no doubt because of the
+contrast with Convent fare that the dinner in my recollection remains
+the most wonderful and elaborate I have ever eaten, though I rack my
+brains in vain to recall any of its special features except the figs and
+prunes on the high dessert dishes, altogether the most luscious figs and
+prunes ever grown and dried, and the decanter at my Grandfather's place
+from which he dropped into his glass the few drops of brandy he drank
+with his water while everybody else drank their water undiluted. When
+friends came to dinner, I recall also the Philadelphia decanter of
+Madeira, though otherwise no greater ceremony. Dinner was always as
+solemn an affair in my Grandfather's house as morning prayers or any act
+of daily life over which he presided, the whole house, at all times when
+he left it, relapsing into dressing-gown and slippered ease after the
+full-dress decorum his presence required of it.
+
+The eight o'clock tea is a more definite function in my memory, perhaps
+because the hours of waiting for it crept by so slowly. After dinner,
+the Aunts, my Father, the one Uncle who lived at home, vanished I never
+knew where, though no doubt Philadelphia supplied some amusement or
+occupation for the forlorn wreck four o'clock dinner made of the
+afternoon. But the interval was spent by my Grandfather and Grandmother
+at one of the front parlour windows, the old-fashioned Philadelphia
+afghan over their knees, their hands folded, while I, alone, my Sister
+having had the independence to vanish with the grown-ups, sat at the
+other, not daring to break the silence in which they looked out into the
+drowsy street for the people who seldom came and the events that never
+happened; nothing disturbing the calm of Spruce Street save the Sunday
+afternoon invasion of the colored people in their Sunday clothes from
+every near alley. It gives me a pang now to pass and see the window
+empty that once was always filled, in the hour before twilight, by those
+two dear grey heads.
+
+
+III
+
+As I grew a little older, I had the courage to bring a book to the
+window. It was there I read _The Lamplighter_ which I confuse now with
+the memory of our own lamplighter making his rounds; and _The Initials_
+with a haughty Hilda for heroine--she must have been haughty for all
+real heroines then were; and _Queechy_ and _The Wide, Wide World_ and
+_Faith Gartney's Girlhood_, against whose sentiment I am glad to say I
+revolted. And mixed up with these were Mrs. Southworth's _Lost Heiress_
+and the anonymous _Routledge_, light books for whose presence I cannot
+account in my Grandfather's serious house. Does anybody read _Routledge_
+now? Has anybody now ever heard of it? What trash it was, but, after the
+improving romances with a religious moral of the Convent Library, after
+Wiseman's edifying _Fabiola_ and Newman's scholarly--beyond my
+years--_Callista_, how I revelled in it, with what a choking throat I
+galloped through the lovesick chapters! I could recite pages of it to
+myself to relieve the dreariness of those long drives in the Third
+Street car, or the long waiting in the dreary station. To this day I
+remember the last sentence--"with his arm around my waist and my face
+hidden on his shoulder, I told him of the love, folly and pride that had
+so long kept me from him." Could _Queechy_, could _Faith Gartney's
+Girlhood_ have been more sentimental than that? I dare not look up the
+old books to see, lest their charm as well as their sentiment should
+fade in the light of a more critical age. Then Scott and Dickens, Miss
+Edgeworth, more often _Holiday House_, filled the hours before tea.
+After all, the old division of the day, the young generation would be
+ashamed to go back to, had its uses.
+
+[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH INTERIOR]
+
+
+IV
+
+The tea, when announced, was worth waiting, or putting down the most
+entrancing book, for. Had I my way I would make Philadelphia dine again
+at four o'clock for the sake of the tea--of the frizzled beef that only
+Philadelphia ever frizzled to a turn, the smoked salmon that only
+Philadelphia ever smoked as an art, the Maryland biscuits that ought to
+be called Philadelphia biscuits for they were never half so good in
+their native land, the home-made preserves put up in that sunshiny
+kitchen where lilacs bloomed at the door. After all this long quarter of
+a century, the smell of beef frizzling would take me back to Eleventh
+and Spruce on a winter evening as straight as the fragrance of the
+flowering bean carries me to Pompeii in the early springtime, or of
+garlic to the little sunlit towns of Provence at any season of the year.
+The tea was a triumph of simplicity, but when there were guests it
+became a feast. As a rule, it was the meal to which the children and
+grandchildren who did not live in the Spruce Street house were invited,
+and loved best to be invited. For on these occasions my Grandmother
+could be relied upon to provide stewed oysters, the masterpiece of
+Margaret, her old grey-haired cook; and oyster croquettes from
+Augustine's--my Grandfather would as soon have begun the day without
+prayers as my Grandmother have given a feast without the help of
+Augustine, that caterer of colour who was for years supreme in
+Philadelphia; brandy peaches that, like the preserves, had been put up
+at home, the brandy poured in with unexpected lavishness for so
+temperate a household; and little round cakes with white icing on
+top--what dear little ghosts from out a far past they seemed when, after
+a quarter of a century in a land where people know nothing of the
+delights of little round cakes with white icing on top, I ate them again
+at Philadelphia feasts. If the solemn, dignified Grandfather at one end
+of the table kept our enjoyment within the bounds of ceremony, we felt
+no restraint with the little old Grandmother who beamed upon us from the
+other, as she poured out the tea and coffee with hands trembling so
+that, in her later years, the man servant,--usually coloured and not to
+Philadelphia as yet known as butler or footman,--always stood close by
+to catch the tea or coffee pot when it fell, which it never did.
+
+
+V
+
+I recall more formal family reunions, above all the Golden Wedding, as
+impressive as a court function, the two old people enthroned at the far
+end of the front parlour, the sons and daughters and grandchildren
+approaching in a solemn line--an embarrassed line when it came to the
+youngest, always shy in the awful presence of the Grandfather--and
+offering, each in turn, their gifts. We were by no means a remarkable
+family, to the unprejudiced we may have seemed a commonplace one, my
+forefathers evidently having decided that leaving England for America
+was a feat remarkable enough to satisfy the ambitions of any one family
+and having then proceeded to rest comfortably on their respectable
+laurels, but we took each other with great seriousness. The oldest Aunt,
+who was married and lived in New York, received on her annual visit to
+Spruce Street the homage due to a Princess Royal, and no King or Emperor
+could have caused more of a flutter than my Grandfather when he honoured
+one of his children with a visit. Family anniversaries were scrupulously
+observed, the legend of family affection was kept up as conscientiously,
+whatever it cost us in discomfort, and there were times when we paid
+heavily. I would have run many miles to escape one Uncle who, when he
+met me in the street, would stop to ask how I was, and how we all were
+at home, and then would stand twisting his moustache in visible agony,
+trying to think what the affectionate intimacy between us that did not
+exist required him to say, while I thanked my stars that we were in the
+street and not in a house where he would have felt constrained to kiss
+me. We were horribly exact in this matter of kissing. There was a family
+legend of another Uncle from New York who once, when he came over for
+some family meeting, was so eager to do his duty by his nieces that he
+kissed not only all of them--no light task--but two or three neighbours'
+little girls into the bargain. I think, however, that every Philadelphia
+family took itself as seriously and that our scruples were not a
+monopoly brought with us from Virginia and Maryland. In a town where
+family names are handed down from generation to generation, so that a
+family often will boast, as ours did, not only a "Jr." but a "3d," and
+lose no opportunity to let the world know it, family feeling is not
+likely to be allowed to wilt and die.
+
+Every public holiday also was a family affair to be observed with the
+rigours of the family feast. Christmas for me, when I did not celebrate
+it at the Convent with Midnight Mass and a _Creche_ in the chapel and
+kind nuns trying to make me forget I had not gone home like other little
+girls, took me to the Spruce Street house in time to look on at the
+succession of Uncles and Aunts who dropped in on Christmas Eve and went
+away laden with bundles, and carrying in some safe pocket a collection
+of envelopes with a crisp new greenback in each, the sum varying from
+one hundred dollars to five according to the age of the child or
+grandchild whose name was on the envelope--my Grandfather gave with the
+fine patriarchal air he maintained in all family relations. The family
+appropriation of Thanksgiving Day and Washington's Birthday I did not
+grasp until after I left school, for while I was at the Convent they
+were both spent there, where they dwindled into insignificance compared
+to Reverend Mother's feast and its glories. As a rule, I must have been
+at the Convent as well for the Fourth of July, though I retain one
+jubilant vision of myself and a bag of torpedoes in the back-yard,
+solemnizing a little celebration among the roses. And I have larger
+visions of military parades in broiling sunshine and of the City Troop
+filling the quiet streets with their gorgeousness which awed me long
+before the knowledge of their historic origin and uniform inspired me
+with reverence.
+
+
+VI
+
+Other duties and pleasures and observances that for most Philadelphia
+children were scattered through the interminable year, were crowded into
+my short holiday: visits to the dentist, to Dr. Hopkins, Dr. White's
+assistant, it being a test of Philadelphia respectability to have one's
+teeth seen to by Dr. White or one of his assistants or students, and the
+regular appointment was as much of obligation for me as Mass on Sunday;
+visits to the Academy of Fine Arts in the old Chestnut Street building,
+as I remember set back at the end of a court that made of it a place
+apart, a consecrated place which I entered with as little anticipation
+of amusement as St. Joseph's Church hidden in Willing's Alley, and was
+the more surprised therefore to be entertained, as I must have been, by
+Benjamin West, for of no other painter there have I the faintest
+recollection; visits to the Academy of Natural Sciences, where I liked
+the rows upon rows of stuffed birds, and the strange things in bottles,
+and the colossal skeletons that filled me with the same delicious
+shivers as the stories of afreets and genii in _The Arabian Nights_;
+visits to Fairmount Park, leagues away, houses left behind before it
+was reached, where the mysterious machinery of the Waterworks was as
+terrifying as the skeletons, and I thought it much pleasanter outside
+under the blue sky; visits to the theatre--the most wonderful visits of
+all, for they took me out into the night that I knew only from stolen
+vigils in the Convent dormitory, or glimpses from the Spruce Street
+windows. Romance was in the dimly-lit streets, in the stars above, in
+the town after dark, which I was warned I was never to brave alone until
+I can laugh now to think how terrified I was the first time I came home
+late by myself, in my terror jumping into a street-car and claiming the
+protection of a contemptuous young woman whom work had not allowed to
+draw a conventional line between day and night.
+
+[Illustration: CLASSIC FAIRMOUNT]
+
+I have never got rid of that suggestion of romance, not so much in the
+theatre itself as in the going to it, and, to this day, a matinee in
+broad daylight will bring back a little of the old thrill. But nothing
+can bring back to any theatre the glitter, the brilliancy, the splendour
+of the old Chestnut, the old Walnut, the old Arch, then already dingy
+with age I have no doubt, but transfigured by my childhood's ecstasies
+in them. Nothing can persuade me that any plays have been, or could be,
+written to surpass in beauty, pathos and humour, _Solon Shingle_, and
+_Arrah-na-Pogue_, and _Our American Cousin_, and _The Black Crook_, and
+_Ours_, though I have forgotten all but their names; that in opera Clara
+Louise Kellogg ever had a rival; that in gaiety and wit _La Grande
+Duchesse_ and _La Belle Helene_ could be eclipsed; or that any actors
+could compete with Sothern and Booth and Mrs. Drew and the Davenports,
+and Charlotte Cushman as _Meg Merrilies_--there was a bit of good old
+melodramatic acting to make a small Convent girl's flesh creep!
+Shakespeare was redeemed by Booth from the dulness of the Convent
+reading-book and entered gloriously into my Convent life. For one happy
+winter, it was not I who led the long procession down to the refectory,
+though nobody could have suspected it, but the Ghost of Hamlet's Father,
+with, close behind me, in gloom absorbed, the Prince of Denmark,
+mistaken by the unknowing for the little girl, my friend, whose father,
+with more than the usual father's amiable endurance, had taken me with
+her and her sister to see the play of _Hamlet_ during the Christmas
+holidays.
+
+[Illustration: DOWN PINE STREET]
+
+The theatre has become part of the modern school course. If an actor
+like Forbes-Robertson gives a farewell performance of _Hamlet_, or a
+manager like Beerbohm Tree produces a patriotic melodrama, or the
+company from the Theatre Francais perform one of the rare classics that
+the young person may be taken to, I have seen a London theatre filled
+with school girls and boys. From what I hear I might imagine the theatre
+and the opera to be the most serious studies of every Philadelphia
+school. At the Convent I should have envied the modern students could I
+have foreseen their liberty, but they have more reason to envy me. The
+gilt has been rubbed too soon off their gingerbread, too soon has the
+tinsel of their theatre been tarnished. My Spartan training gave me a
+theatre that can never cease to be a Wonderland, just as it endowed me
+with a Philadelphia that will endure, until this world knows me no more,
+as a beautiful, peaceful town where roses bloom in the sunny back-yards,
+and people live with dignity behind the plain red brick fronts of its
+long, straight streets.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV: AT THE CONVENT
+
+
+I
+
+As the theatre, in my memory, still gives the crowning glory to my
+holiday in Philadelphia, so, in looking back, the brief holiday seems
+the spectacle, the romance, the supreme moment, of my early years. The
+scene of my every-day life was that Convent of the Sacred Heart at
+Torresdale which was the end of the interminable ride in the Third
+Street horse-car and the shorter ride in the Pennsylvania Railroad
+train.
+
+The Philadelphian who did not live in the Convent would have seen it the
+other way round, for the Convent was unlike enough to Philadelphia to
+suggest the romance of the unusual. Only in one or two respects did it
+provide me with facts that every proper Philadelphian was brought up to
+know, and let me say again that because I had to find out the
+others--the more characteristically Philadelphia facts--for myself, I
+think they probably made a stronger impression upon me than upon the
+Philadelphian guiltless of ever straying, or of ever having been allowed
+to stray, from the approved Philadelphia path.
+
+
+II
+
+When the Ladies of the Sacred Heart decided to open a Convent in
+Philadelphia, an uncertain enterprise if it is considered how
+un-Catholic Philadelphia was, they began in a fairly modest way by
+taking a large house at Torresdale, with lawns and gardens and woods and
+a great old-fashioned barn, the country seat of a Philadelphian whose
+name I have forgotten. It stood to the west of the railroad, at a
+discreet distance from the little cluster of houses by the riverside
+that alone meant Torresdale to the Philadelphians who lived in them.
+
+The house, I can now see, was typical as I first knew it, the sort the
+Philadelphian built for himself in the suburbs at a period too removed
+from Colonial days for it to have the beauty of detail and historic
+interest of the Colonial house, and yet near enough to them for dignity
+of proportion and spaciousness to be desirable, if not essential to a
+Philadelphian's comfort. A wide, lofty hall ran from the front door to
+the back, on either side were two large airy rooms with space between
+for the broad main stairway, a noble structure, and the carefully
+concealed back stairway--half-way up which in my time was the little
+infirmary window where, at half past ten every morning, Sister Odille
+dispensed pills and powders to those in need of them. Along the entire
+front of the house was a broad porch,--the indispensable Philadelphia
+piazza--its roof supported by a row of substantial columns over which
+roses and honeysuckle clambered fragrantly and luxuriantly in the June
+sunshine. The house was painted a cheerful yellow that went well with
+the white of the woodwork about the windows and the porch: not a very
+beautiful type of house, but pleasant, substantial, luxurious, and
+making as little outward show of its luxury as the plain red brick town
+house of the wealthy Philadelphian.
+
+How comfortable a type of house it was to live in, I know from
+experience of another, not a school, within sight, a ten minutes' walk
+across the fields, and like it in design and arrangement and even
+colour, in everything except size,--which my Father took one summer: to
+me a most memorable summer as it was the first I spent outside the
+Convent limits from the beginning to the end of the long holiday. The
+jerry-builder had had no part in putting up the solid, well-constructed
+walls which stood firm against winter storms and winds, and were no less
+a protection from the torrid heat of a Philadelphia summer. But fashion
+can leave architecture no more alone than dress. Already, the newer
+group of houses down by the Delaware were built of the brown stone
+which, to my mind, dates the beginning of the Philadelphian's fall from
+architectural grace, the beginning of his distrust in William Penn's
+plans for his well-being and of his foolish hankering after the
+fleshpots of New York.
+
+[Illustration: LOUDOUN, MAIN STREET GERMANTOWN]
+
+The Convent, before I came to it, had been a victim to the brown stone
+fashion. With success, the pleasant old country house had grown too
+small for the school into which it had been converted, and a southern
+wing had been added: a long, low building with the Chapel at the far
+end, all built in brown stone and in a style that passed for Gothic and
+that a thousand times I could have wished based upon any other model.
+For the upper room in the wing, ambitiously christened by somebody
+Gothic Hall, had a high pointed roof that made it an ice-house in winter
+and, for our sins, it was used as the Dormitory of the Sacred Heart
+where I slept. I can recall mornings when the water was frozen in our
+pitchers while the big stove, in the middle of the high-pitched room,
+burned red hot as if to mock at us as, with numbed fingers, we struggled
+to make our beds and wash ourselves and button and hook on our clothes.
+And the builders had so contrived that summer turned our fine Gothic
+Dormitory into a fiery furnace. How many June nights, contrary to all
+the rules, have I hung out of the little, horribly Gothic window at the
+head of my alcove, gasping in the warm darkness that was so sweet and
+stifling with the fragrance of the flowers in Madame Huguet's garden
+just below.
+
+I had not been long at the Convent before another brown stone wing
+extended to the north and two stories were added to the main building
+which, for the sake of harmony, was now painted brown from top to
+bottom. In a niche on this new facade, a statue of the Sacred Heart was
+set, and all semblance to the old country house was gone, except for the
+broad porch without and the well-proportioned rooms within. But these,
+and later improvements, additions and alterations cannot make me forget
+the Convent as it was when I first came to it, growing up about the
+simple, solidly-built, spacious yellow house that was once the
+Philadelphian's ideal of suburban comfort and so like the house where I
+spent my most memorable summer, so like, save for the size and the
+colour, my Great-Grandfather Ambrose White's old house on the Turnpike
+at Chestnut Hill, so like innumerable other country houses of the same
+date where I visited.
+
+
+III
+
+The Convent rule and discipline could not alter the changing of the
+seasons as Philadelphia ordered them. They might appear to us mainly
+regulated by feasts and fasts--All Saints and All Souls, the milestones
+on the road to Christmas; Lent and the month of St. Joseph heralding the
+approach of spring; the month of Mary and the month of the Sacred Heart,
+Ascension and Corpus-Christi, as ardent and splendid as the spring and
+summer days they graced. But, all the same, each season came laden with
+the pleasures held in common by all fortunate Philadelphia children who
+had the freedom of the country or the countrified suburbs.
+
+The school year began with the fall, when any night might bring the
+first frost and the first tingle in the air--champagne to quicken the
+blood in a school girl's veins, and make the sitting still through the
+long study and class hours a torture. The woods shone with gold; the
+Virginia creeper flamed on the front porch; sickel pears fell, ripe and
+luscious, from the tree close to the Chapel where it was against the law
+to go and pick them up but where no law in the world could have barred
+the way; chestnuts and hickory nuts and the walnuts that stained my
+fingers black to open offered a substantial dessert after as substantial
+a dinner as ever children were served with. But those were the joyful
+years when hunger never could be satisfied and digestion was equal to
+any surfeit of raw chestnuts--or raw turnips for that matter, if the
+season supplied no lighter dainties, or of next to anything that could
+be picked up and eaten. I know I drew the line only at the huge, white,
+oversweet mulberries strewing the grass by the swings in Mulberry Lane,
+that favourite scene of the war to the knife we waged under the name of
+Old Man and Bands, primitive games not to be outdone by the Tennis and
+Hockey of the more sophisticated modern school girl.
+
+The minute the Refectory was left for the noonday hour of recreation on
+a brisk autumn day, there was a wild scamper to the woods where, just
+beyond the gate that led into them, the hoary old chestnut trees spread
+their shade and dropped their fruit on either side the hill between the
+Poisonous Valley, a thrill in its deadly name, and the graveyard, few
+crosses then in the green enclosure which now, alas! is too well filled.
+The shadow of death lay so lightly upon us that I recall to-day only the
+delicious rustle of eager feet through the fallen leaves, and the
+banging of stone upon stone as hickory nuts cracked between them, I feel
+only the delicious pricking of the chestnut burrs in the happy, hardened
+fingers of the school girl. And these, anyway, are memories I share with
+every Philadelphian who, as a child, wandered in the suburbs or the
+near country when the woods were gold and scarlet, and the way through
+them was carpeted with leaves hiding rich stores of nuts for the seeker
+after treasure.
+
+But no Philadelphia child in the shelter of her own house could know the
+meaning of the Philadelphia winter as I knew it in the Convent, half
+frozen in that airy dormitory of the Sacred Heart, shivering in shawl
+and hood through early Mass in the icy Chapel, still huddled in my shawl
+at my desk or scurrying as fast as discipline would wink at through the
+windy passages. The heating arrangements, somehow, never succeeded in
+coping with the extreme cold of a severe winter in the large rooms and
+halls of the new wings, and I must confess that we were often most
+miserably uncomfortable. I cannot but wonder what the pampered school
+girls of the present generation in the same Convent would say to such
+discomfort. But it did us no harm. Indeed, though I shiver at the
+memory, I am sure it did us good. We came out the healthier and hardier
+for it, much as the Englishman does from his cold house, the coldest in
+the world. The old conditions of a hardier life, that either killed or
+cured, did far more to make a vigorous people than all the new-fangled
+eugenics ever can.
+
+If I had little of the comfort of the Philadelphia child in the
+Philadelphia house, I shared with him the outdoor pleasures which winter
+provided by way of compensation--the country white under snow for weeks
+and weeks, snowballs to be made and snow houses built, sliding to be
+had on the frozen lake, and coasting down the long hill just beyond the
+gate into the woods, when there were sleds to coast on. And what
+excitement in the marvellous snow-storms that have vanished with other
+marvels of my youth--the storms that put the new blizzard to shame, when
+the snow drifts were mountains high, and it took all the men on the
+farm, with Big John at their head, to clear a way through the near paths
+and roads. I recall one storm in particular when my Father, who had been
+making his periodical visit to my Sister and myself, left the Convent at
+six, was snowed up in his train, and never reached the dingy Depot in
+Frankford until three the next morning, and when for days we got out of
+the house only for a solemn ten minutes' walk each noon on the wide
+front porch, where it was a shocking breach of discipline to be seen at
+all other times except on Thursday and Sunday, the Convent visiting
+days. Of the inspiriting rigours of a Philadelphia winter I was never in
+ignorance.
+
+In the snow drifts and storms of winter Big John and his men were not
+more helpless than in the floods and slush that began with the first
+soft breath of the Philadelphia spring. Wearing our big shapeless
+overshoes, we waded through the puddles and jumped over the streams in
+the Convent paths and roads as, in town, Philadelphia children, with
+their "gums" on, jumped over the streams and waded through the puddles
+in the abominably paved streets. But then hope too began when the first
+spaces of green were uncovered by the melting snow. The first
+spring-beauty in the sunny spaces of the woods, the first flowery frost
+in the orchard, the first blooming of the tulip trees, were among the
+great events of the year. And what joy now in the new hunt!--what
+treasure of spring-beauties everywhere in the woods as the sun grew
+warmer, of shyer, retired hepaticas, of white violets running wild in
+the swampy fields beyond the lake, of sweet trailing arbutus, of
+Jacks-in-the-pulpit flourishing best in the damp thickets of the
+Poisonous Valley into which I never wandered without a tremor not merely
+because it was a forbidden adventure, but because, though I passed
+through it unscathed, I had seen so often the horrible and unsightly red
+rash one whiff from over its bushes and trees could bring out on the
+faces and hands of my schoolmates with a skin more sensitive than mine.
+Games lost their charm in the spring sunshine and our one pleasure was
+in the hunt, no longer for chestnuts and walnuts and hickory nuts, but
+solely for flowers, bringing back great bunches wilting in our hot
+little hands, to place before the shrine that aroused the warmest
+fervours of our devotion or was tended by the nun of our special
+adoration.
+
+[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO FAIRMOUNT AND THE WASHINGTON STATUE]
+
+And before we knew it, the spring-beauties and hepaticas and white
+violets and Jacks-in-the-pulpit disappeared from the woods, and the
+flowery frost from the orchard, and the great blossoms from the tulip
+trees, and summer was upon us--blazing summer when we lay perspiring on
+our little beds up there in Gothic Hall where a few months before we
+shivered and shook, perspiration streamed from our faces on our school
+books at the study hour, more a burden than ever as we drooped and
+drowsed in the heat;--blazing summer when the fragrance of the roses
+hung heavy over Madame Huguet's garden and mingled with the too sweet
+fragrance of the honeysuckle about the columns of the porch and over
+every door;--blazing summer when all day long meadows and gardens and
+lawns swooned under the pitiless sunshine and we, who had braved the
+winter cold undismayed, never put as much as our noses out of doors
+until the hour of sunset;--blazing summer when for many years I saw the
+other girls going home, the gaiety of sea and mountain and change
+awaiting them, while my Sister and I stayed on, desolate at heart
+despite the efforts of the nuns to help us forget, feeling forlornly
+forsaken as we watched the green burnt up into brown and the summer
+flowers wilt and die, and the drought turn the roads to dust, and all
+Nature parched as we parched with it. The holiday dragged terribly and,
+reversing the usual order of things, I counted the days until school
+would begin again. However, at least I can say that I saw the
+Philadelphia summer in its full terrors as every Philadelphia child ever
+born, for whom wealth or chance opens no gate of escape, must see it and
+did see it of old.
+
+And so for me in the Convent the seasons were the same as for the child
+in Philadelphia and its suburbs. And I learnt how cold Philadelphia can
+be, and how hot--if Penn, safe in England, was grateful for the greater
+nearness of his town to the sun, not a Philadelphian on the spot,
+sweltering through its midsummer heat, has ever yet shared his
+gratitude. And I learnt how beautiful Philadelphia is as it grows mild
+again after winter has done its worst, or as it cools off in the
+friendlier autumn sun. And not to know these facts is not to know
+Philadelphia.
+
+
+IV
+
+In the Convent regulation of daily life lay the unconquerable
+difference. Philadelphia has its laws and traditions that guide the
+Philadelphian through every hour and duty of the day, and the
+Philadelphian, who from the cradle does not obey these traditions and
+laws, can never be quite as other Philadelphians. The Sacred Heart is a
+French order, and the nuns imported their laws and traditions from
+France, qualified, modified, perhaps, on the way, but still with an
+unmistakable foreign flavour and tendency that could not pass
+unquestioned in a town where the first article of faith is that
+everybody should do precisely what everybody else does.
+
+I remember when the Rhodes scholars were first sent from America to
+Oxford a friend of mine professed serious concern for the future of the
+University should they introduce buckwheat cakes on Oxford breakfast
+tables. And, really, he was not as funny as he thought. A man is a good
+deal what his food makes him. The macaroni-fed Italian is not as the
+sausage-and-sauerkraut-fed German, nor the Hindu who thrives on rice as
+the Irishman bred upon potatoes. Never was a town more concerned with
+the Question of Food than Philadelphia and I now see quite plainly that
+I, beginning my day at the Convent on coffee and rolls, could not have
+been as the correct Philadelphia child beginning the day in Philadelphia
+or the suburbs on scrapple and buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. Thus,
+the line of separation was drawn while I was still in short skirts with
+my hair cropped close.
+
+The Convent day continued, as it began, with differences. I sat down at
+noon to the substantial French breakfast which at the Convent, as a
+partial concession to American ideals, became dinner. At half past
+three, like a little French girl, I had my _gouter_, for which even the
+French name was retained--how well I remember the big, napkin-lined
+basket, full of hunks of good gingerbread, or big crackers, or sweet
+rolls, passed round by Sister Duffy, probably the most generous of all
+generous Irishwomen, who would have slipped an extra piece into every
+little hand if she could, but who was so shockingly cross-eyed that we
+got an idea of her as a disagreeable old thing, an ogress, always
+watching to see if we took more than our appointed share. Quite recently
+I argued it all out again with the few old Sisters left to greet me on
+my first and only visit to the Convent during thirty years and, purely
+for the sake of the sentiment of other days. I refused to believe them
+when they insisted that Sister Duffy, who now lies at peace in the
+little graveyard on the hillside in the woods, wasn't cross at all, but
+as tender as any Sister who ever waited on hungry little girls! I would
+have given a great deal could she have come back, cross-eyes and all,
+with her big basket of gingerbread to make me feel at home again, as I
+could not in the Visitors' dining-room where my _gouter_ was set out on
+a neatly spread table, even though on one side of me was "Marie" of _Our
+Convent Days_, my friend who had been Prince of Denmark in our
+Booth-stricken period, and on the other Miss Repplier, the chronicler of
+our childish adventures. It was the first time we three had sat there
+together since more years than I am willing to count, and I think we
+were too conscious that youth now was no longer of the company not to
+feel the sadness as keenly as the pleasure of the reunion in our old
+home.
+
+_Gouter_, with its associations, has sent me wandering far from the
+daily routine which ended, in the matter of meals, with a supper of meat
+and potatoes and I hardly know what, at half past six, when little
+Philadelphia girls were probably just finishing their cambric tea and
+bread-and-butter, and even the buns from Dexter's when these had been
+added as a special treat or reward. How could we, upon so much heavier
+fare, have seen things, how could we have looked upon life, just as
+those other little girls did?
+
+
+V
+
+We did not play, any more than we ate, like the child in Philadelphia or
+its suburbs. One memory of our playtime I have common to all
+Philadelphia children of my generation: the memory of Signor Blitz, on
+a more than usually blissful Reverend Mother's Feast, taking rabbits out
+of our hats and bowls of gold-fish out of his sleeve, and holding a long
+conversation with the immortal Bobby, the most prodigious puppet that
+ever conversed with any professional ventriloquist. But this was a rare
+ecstasy never repeated.
+
+[Illustration: MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN]
+
+What games the children in Rittenhouse Square and the Lanes of
+Germantown had, I cannot record, but of one thing I am sure: they did
+not go to the tune and the words of "_Sur le pont d'Avignon_," or "_Qu'
+est-ce qui passe ici si tard_," or "_Il etait un avocat_." Nor, I fancy,
+were "_Malbrough s'en va-t'en guerre_" and "_Au clair de la lune, mon
+ami Pierrot_," the songs heard in the Philadelphia nursery. Nor is it
+likely that "_C'est le mois de Marie_," which we sang as lustily all
+through May as the devout in France sing it in every church and every
+cathedral from one end of their land to the other, was the canticle of
+pious little Catholic children celebrating the month of Mary at St.
+Joseph's or St. Patrick's. Nor outside the Convent could the Bishop on
+his pastoral rounds have been welcomed with the "_Vive! Vive! Vive!
+Monseigneur au Sacre Coeur, Quel Bonheur!_" which, the title
+appropriately changed, was our form of welcome to every distinguished
+visitor. And, singing these songs and canticles, how could the
+associations and memories we were laying up for ourselves be the same as
+those of Philadelphia children whose ears and voices were trained on
+"Juanita" and "Listen to the Mocking Bird," or, it may be, "Marching
+through Georgia" and "Way down upon the Swanee River"? These things may
+make subtle distinctions, but they are distinctions that can never be
+overcome or outgrown.
+
+In study hours, as in playtime and at meals, we were seldom long out of
+this French atmosphere. French class was only shorter than English. If
+we were permitted to talk at breakfast, it was not at all that we might
+amuse ourselves, but that we might practise our French which did not
+amuse us in the least. Many of the nuns were French, often, it is true,
+French from Louisiana or Canada, but their English was not one bit more
+fluent on that account. Altogether, there was less of Philadelphia than
+of France in the discipline, the devotions, and the relaxations of the
+Convent.
+
+
+VI
+
+But, of all the differences, the most fundamental, I think, came from
+the fact that the Convent was a Convent and taught us to accept the
+conventual, the monastic interpretation of life. We were there in, not
+only a French, but a cloistered atmosphere--the atmosphere that
+Philadelphia least of all towns could understand. The Friends had
+attained to peace and unworldliness by staying in their own homes and
+fulfilling their duty as fathers and mothers of families, as men and
+women of business. But the nuns saw no way to achieve this end except
+by shutting themselves out of the world and avoiding its temptations.
+The Ladies of the Sacred Heart are cloistered. They leave the Convent
+grounds only to journey from one of their houses to another, for care is
+taken that they do not, by staying over long in one school, form too
+strong an attachment to place or person. Where would be the use of being
+a nun if you were not made to understand the value of sacrifice? Their
+pupils are, for the time, as strictly cloistered. Not for us were the
+walks abroad by which most girls at boarding school keep up with the
+times--or get ahead of them. We were as closely confined to the Convent
+grounds as the nuns, except during the holidays or when a friend or
+relation begged for us a special outing. It was not a confinement
+depending on high stone walls and big gates with clanging iron chains
+and bars. But the wood fences running with the board walk above the
+railroad and about the woods and the fields and the gardens made us no
+less prisoners--willing and happy prisoners as we might be, and were.
+This gave us, or gave me at any rate, a curious idea of the Convent as a
+place entirely apart, a place that had nothing to do with the near town
+or the suburb in which it stood--a blessed oasis in the sad wilderness
+of the world.
+
+There is no question that, as a result, I felt myself in anticipation a
+stranger in the wilderness into which I knew I must one day go from the
+oasis, and in which I used to imagine I should be as much of an exile
+as the Children of Israel in the desert. Of course I was not quite that
+when the time came, but that for an interval I was convinced I must be
+explains how unlike in atmosphere the Convent was to Eleventh and
+Spruce.
+
+In all sorts of little ways I was confirmed in this belief by life and
+its duties at the Convent. For all that concerned me nearly, for all
+that was essential to existence here below, Philadelphia seemed to me as
+remote as Timbuctoo. I got insensibly to think of myself first not as a
+Philadelphian, not as an American, but as a "Child of the Sacred
+Heart,"--the first question under all circumstances was what I should
+do, not as a Philadelphian, but as a Child of the Sacred Heart.
+
+[Illustration: ARCH STREET MEETING]
+
+I cannot say how much the mere name of the thing represented--the honour
+and the privilege--and there was not a girl who had been for any time a
+pupil who did not prize it as I did. And we were not given the chance to
+forget or belittle it. We were impressed with the importance of showing
+our appreciation of the distinction Providence had reserved for us--of
+showing it not merely by our increased faith and devotion, but by our
+bearing and conduct. We might be slack about our lessons. That was all
+right at a period when slackness prevailed in girls' schools and it was
+unfeminine, if not unladylike, to be too learned. But we were not let
+off from the diligent cultivation of our manners. Our faith and devotion
+were attended to in a daily half hour of religious instruction. But
+Sunday was not too holy a day for the Politeness Class that was held
+every week as surely as Sunday came round, in which we were taught all
+the mysteries of a Deportment that might have given tips to the great
+Turveydrop himself,--how to sit, how to walk, how to carry ourselves
+under all circumstances, how to pick up a handkerchief a passer-by might
+drop--an unspeakable martyrdom of a class when each unfortunate student,
+in turn, went through her paces with the eyes of all the school upon her
+and to the sound of the stifled giggles of the boldest. We never met one
+of our mistresses in the corridors that we did not drop a laboured
+curtsey--a shy, deplorably awkward curtsey when I met the Reverend
+Mother, Mother Boudreau, a large, portly, dignified nun from Louisiana
+and a model of deportment, who inspired me with a respectful fear I
+never have had for any other mortal. We could not answer a plain "Yes"
+or "No" to our mistresses, but the "Madam" must always politely follow.
+"Remember" was a frequent warning, "remember that wherever, or with
+whom, you may be, to behave like children of the Sacred Heart!" A Child
+of the Sacred Heart, we were often told, should be known by her manners.
+And so impressed were we with this precept that I remember a
+half-witted, but harmless, elderly woman whom the nuns, in their
+goodness, had kept on as a "parlour boarder" after her school days were
+over, telling us solemnly that when she was in New York and went out
+shopping with her sister, the young men behind the counter at Stewart's
+would all look at her with admiring eyes and whisper to each other, "Is
+it not easy to see that Miss C. is a Child of the Sacred Heart?"
+
+[Illustration: THE TRAIN SHED, BROAD STREET STATION]
+
+Seriously, the training did give something that nothing else could, and
+an admirable training it was for which girls to-day might exchange more
+than one brain-bewildering course at College and be none the worse for
+it. In my own case, I admit, I should not mind having had more of the
+other training, as it has turned out that my work in life is of the sort
+where a quick intelligence counts for more than an elegant deportment.
+But I can find no fault with the Convent for neglect. Girls then were
+not educated to work. If you had asked any girl anywhere what was
+woman's mission, she would have answered promptly--had she been
+truthful--"to find a husband as soon as possible;" if she were a Convent
+girl,--a Child of the Sacred Heart--she would have added, "or else to
+become a nun." Her own struggles to fit herself for any other career the
+inconsiderate Fates might drive her into, so far from doing her any
+harm, were the healthiest and most bracing of tonics. Granted an average
+mind, she could teach herself through necessity just the important
+things school could not teach her through a routine she didn't see the
+use of. She emerged from the ordeal not only heroically but
+successfully, which was more to the point. A young graduate from Bryn
+Mawr said to me some few days ago that when she looked at her mother and
+the women of her mother's generation and realized all they had
+accomplished without what is now called education, she wondered whether
+the girls of her generation, who had the benefit of all the excess of
+education going, would or could accomplish more, or as much. To tell the
+truth, I wonder myself. But then it may be said that I, belonging to
+that older generation, am naturally prejudiced.
+
+
+VII
+
+There are moments when, reflecting on all I lost as a Philadelphian, I
+am half tempted to regret my long years of seclusion, busy about my soul
+and my manners, at the Convent. A year or so would not have much
+mattered one way or the other. I led, however, no other life save the
+Convent life until I was seventeen. I knew no other standpoint save the
+Convent standpoint.
+
+But the temptation to regret flies as quickly as it comes. I loved the
+life too well at the time, I love it too well in the retrospect, to have
+wanted then, or to want now, to do without it. It was a happy life to
+live, though I would not have been a school girl had I not, with the
+school girl's joy in the morbid, liked nothing better than to pose as
+the unhappiest of mortals--to be a school girl was to be misunderstood I
+would have vowed, had I, in my safe oasis, ever heard the expression or
+had the knowledge to guess at its meaning. I loved every stone in the
+house, brown and ugly as every stone might be, I loved every tree in
+the woods whether or no it dropped pleasant things to devour, I loved
+every hour of the day whatever might be its task. I had a quick memory,
+study was no great trouble to me, and I enjoyed every class and
+recitation. I enjoyed getting into mischief--I wore once only the Ribbon
+for Good Conduct--and I enjoyed being punished for it. In a word, I got
+a good deal out of my life, if it was not exactly what a girl was sent
+to school to get. And it is as happy a life to remember, with many
+picturesque graces and absurdities, joys and sorrows, that an
+uninterrupted existence at Eleventh and Spruce could not have given.
+
+I have no desire to talk sentimental nonsense about my school days
+having been my happiest. That sort of talk is usually twaddle. It was
+not as school that I loved the Convent, though as school it had its
+unrivalled attractions; it was as home. When the time came to go from it
+I suffered that sharp pang felt by most girls on leaving home for
+school. I remember how I, who affected a sublime scorn for the cry-baby,
+blubbered like one myself when I was faced with the immediate prospect
+of life in Philadelphia. How well I recall my despair--how vividly I see
+the foolish scene I made in the empty Refectory, shadowy in the dusk of
+the June evening, where I was rehearsing the valedictory of the
+Graduating Class which I had been chosen to recite, and where, after the
+first few lines I broke down to my shame, and sniffled and gurgled and
+sobbed in the lap of the beloved mistress who was doing her best to
+comfort me, and also to keep me from disgracing her, as I should have
+done by any such scene on the great day itself.
+
+If the Convent stands for so much in my memory, it would be ungrateful
+to regret the years I spent in it. The sole reason would be my loss, not
+as a student, but as a Philadelphian, for this loss was the price I
+paid. But the older I grow, the better I realize that to the loss I owe
+an immeasurable gain. For as a child I never got so accustomed to
+Philadelphia as not to see it at all. The thing we know too well is
+often the thing we see least clearly, or we should not need the
+philosopher to remind us that that is best which nearest lieth. All
+through my childhood and early youth I saw Philadelphia chiefly from the
+outside, and so saw it with more awe and wonder and lasting delight than
+those Philadelphians who, in childhood and early youth, saw it only from
+the inside,--too near for it to come together into the picture that
+tells.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V: TRANSITIONAL
+
+
+I
+
+And so it was with a great fear in my heart that, in the course of time
+and after I had learned as little as it was decent for Philadelphia
+girls to learn in the days before Bryn Mawr, I left the Convent
+altogether for Philadelphia. I can smile now in recalling the old fear,
+but it was no smiling matter at seventeen: a weeping matter rather, and
+many were the tears I shed in secret over the prospect before me. My
+holidays had not revealed Philadelphia to me as a place of evil and many
+dangers. But as I was to live there, it represented the world,--the
+sinful world, worse, the unknown world, to battle with whose temptations
+my life and training at the Convent had been the preparation.
+
+[Illustration: ST PETER'S, INTERIOR]
+
+It added to the danger that sin could wear so peaceful an aspect and
+temptation keep so comfortably out of sight. During an interval, longer
+than I cared to have it, for I did not "come out" at once as a
+Philadelphia girl should and at the Convent I had made few Philadelphia
+friends, my personal knowledge of Philadelphia did not go much deeper
+than its house fronts. For the most part they bore the closest family
+resemblance to those of Eleventh and Spruce, with the same suggestion of
+order and repose in their well-washed marble steps and neatly-drawn
+blinds. My Father had then moved to Third Street near Spruce, and there
+rented a red brick house, one-half, or one-third, the size of my
+Grandfather's, but very like it in every other way, to the roses in the
+tiny back-yard and to the daily family routine except that, with a
+courageous defiance of tradition I do not know how we came by, we dined
+at the new dinner hour of six and said our prayers in the privacy of our
+bedrooms. The Stock Exchange was only a minute away, and yet, at our
+end, Third Street had not lost its character as a respectable
+residential street. We had for neighbours old Miss Grelaud and the
+Bullitts and, round the corner in Fourth Street, the Wisters and Bories
+and Schaumbergs,--with what bated breath Philadelphia talked of the
+beauty and talents of Miss Emily Schaumberg, as she still was!--and many
+other Philadelphia families who had never lived anywhere else. Life went
+on as silently and placidly and regularly as at the Convent. I seemed
+merely to have exchanged one sort of monastic peace for another and the
+loudest sound I ever heard, the jingling of my old friend the horse-car,
+was not so loud as to disturb it.
+
+If I walked up Spruce Street, or as far as Pine and up Pine, silence and
+peace enfolded me. Peace breathed, exuded from the red brick houses with
+their white marble steps, their white shutters below and green above,
+their pleasant line of trees shading the red brick pavement. The
+occasional brown stone front broke the uniformity with such brutal
+discord that I might have imagined the devil I knew was waiting for me
+somewhere lurked behind it, and have seen in its pretentious aping of
+New York fashion the sin in which Philadelphia, as the Sinful World,
+must abound. I cannot say why it seemed to me, and still seems, so
+odious, for there were other interruptions to the monotony I delighted
+in--the beautiful open spaces and great trees about the Pennsylvania
+Hospital and St. Peter's; the old Mint which, with its severe classical
+facade, seemed to reproach the frivolity of the Chestnut Street store
+windows on every side of it; General Paterson's square grey house with
+long high-walled garden at Thirteenth and Locust; the big yellow Dundas
+house at Broad and Walnut, with its green enclosure and the magnolia for
+whose blossoming I learnt to watch with the coming of spring; that other
+garden with wide-spreading trees opposite my Grandfather's at Eleventh
+and Spruce: old friends these quickly grew to be, kindly landmarks on
+the way when I took the walks that were so solitary in those early days,
+through streets where it was seldom I met anybody I knew, for the
+Convent had made me a good deal of a stranger in my native town,--where
+it was seldom, indeed, I met anybody at all.
+
+
+II
+
+When I went out, I usually turned in the direction of Spruce and Pine,
+for to turn in the other, towards Walnut, was to be at once in the
+business part of the town where Philadelphia women preferred not to be
+seen, having no desire to bridge over the wide gulf of propriety that
+then yawned between the sex and business. Except for the character of
+the buildings and the signs at the doors, I might not have been
+conscious of the embarrassing difference between this and my more
+familiar haunts. Bankers' and stock-brokers' offices were on every side,
+but the Third Street car did not jingle any louder as it passed, my way
+was not more crowded, peace still enveloped me. I gathered from my
+Father, who was a broker, that the Stock Exchange, when buying and
+selling had to be done on the spot and not by telephone as in our
+degenerate days, was now and then a scene of animation, and it might be
+of noise and disorder, more especially at Christmas, when a brisker
+business was done in penny whistles and trumpets than in stocks and
+shares. But the animation overflowed into Third Street only at moments
+of panic, to us welcome as moments of prosperity for they kept my Father
+busy--we thrived on panics--and then, once or twice, I saw staid
+Philadelphians come as near running as I ever knew them to in the open
+street.
+
+[Illustration: THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL FROM PINE STREET]
+
+Now and then youth got the better of me and I sought adventure in the
+unadventurous monotony of Walnut Street where the lawyers had their
+offices, the courts not having as yet migrated up to Broad Street. It
+was usually lost in heavy legal slumber and if my intrusion was bold, at
+least nobody was about to resent it. Nor could there be a doubt of the
+eminent respectability into which I intruded. The recommendation to
+Philadelphia of its lawyers was not the high esteem in which they were
+held throughout the country, but their social standing at home--family
+gave distinction to the law, not the law to family. Approved
+Philadelphia names adorned the signs at almost every office door and not
+for some years was the evil day to dawn when the well-known Philadelphia
+families who inherited the right of the law would be forced to fight for
+it with the alien and the Jew. For me, I think I am at an age when I may
+own that the irreproachable names on the signs were not the principal
+attraction. Sometimes, from one of the somnolent offices, a friendly
+figure would step into the somnolent street to lighten me on my way, and
+it was pleasanter to walk up Walnut in company than alone. When I went
+back the other day, after many years and many changes for Philadelphia
+and myself, I found most of the familiar signs gone, but at one door I
+was met by a welcome ghost--but, was it the ghost of that friendly
+figure or of my lonely youth grasping at romance or its shadow? How many
+years must pass, how many experiences be gone through, before a question
+like that can be asked!
+
+If I followed Third Street beyond Walnut to Chestnut, I was in the
+region of great banks and trust companies and newspaper offices and the
+old State House and the courts. I had not had the experience, or the
+training, to realize what architectural monstrosities most of the new,
+big, heavy stone buildings were, nor the curiosity to investigate what
+went on inside of them, but after the quiet red brick houses they
+seemed to have business written all over them and the street, compared
+to Spruce and Walnut, appeared to my unsophisticated eyes so thronged
+that I did not have to be told it was no place for me. It was plain that
+most women felt as I did, so careful were they to efface themselves. I
+remember meeting but few on Chestnut Street below Eighth until Mr.
+Childs began to devote his leisure moments and loose change to the
+innocent amusement of presenting a cup and saucer to every woman who
+would come to get it, and as most women in Philadelphia, or out of it,
+are eager to grab anything they do not have to pay for, many visited him
+in the _Ledger_ office at Sixth and Chestnut.
+
+[Illustration: SECOND STREET MARKET]
+
+As I shrank from doing what no other woman did, and, as the business end
+of Chestnut Street did not offer me the same temptation as Walnut, I
+never got to know it well,--in fact I got to know it so little that my
+ignorance would seem extraordinary in anybody save a Philadelphian, and
+it remained as strange to me as the street of a foreign town. I could
+not have said just where my Grandfather's Bank was, not once during that
+period did I set my foot across the threshold of the State House,
+unwilling as I am to confess it. But perhaps I might as well make a full
+confession while I am about it, for the truth will have to come out
+sooner or later. Let me say then, disgraceful as I feel it to be, that
+though I spent two years at least in the Third Street house, with so
+much of the beauty of Philadelphia's beautiful past at my door, it was
+not until some time afterwards, when we had gone to live up at
+Thirteenth and Spruce, that I began to appreciate the beauty as well as
+my folly in not having appreciated it sooner. St. Peter's Church and the
+Pennsylvania Hospital I could not ignore, many of my walks leading me
+past them. But I was several years older before I saw Christ Church,
+inside or out. The existence of the old Second Street Market was unknown
+to me; had I been asked I no doubt would have said that the Old Swedes
+Church was miles off; I was unconscious that I was surrounded by houses
+of Colonial date; I was blind to the meaning and dignity of great gables
+turned to the street, and stately Eighteenth Century doorways, and
+dormer windows, and old ironwork, and a patchwork of red and black
+brick; I was indifferent to the interest these things might have given
+to every step I took at a time when, too often, every step seemed
+forlornly barren of interest or its possibility. Into the old
+Philadelphia Library on Fifth Street I did penetrate once or twice, and
+once or twice sat in its quiet secluded alcoves dipping into musty
+volumes: a mere accident it must have been, my daily reading being
+provided for at the easy-going, friendly, pleasantly dingy, much more
+modern Mercantile Library in Tenth Street. But the memory of these
+visits, few as they were, is one of the strongest my Third Street days
+have left with me, and I think, or I hope, I must have felt the charm of
+the old town if I may not have realized that I did, for I can never look
+back to myself as I was then without seeing it as the background to all
+my comings and goings--a background that lends colour to my colourless
+life.
+
+
+III
+
+I can understand my ignorance and blindness and indifference, if I
+cannot forgive them. All my long eleven years at the Convent I had had
+the virtue of obedience duly impressed upon me, and, though there custom
+led me easily into the temptation of disobedience, when I returned to
+Philadelphia I was at first too frightened and bewildered to defy
+Philadelphia's laws written and especially unwritten, for in these I was
+immediately concerned. I was the more bewildered because I had come away
+from the Convent comfortably convinced of my own importance, and it was
+disconcerting to discover that Philadelphia, so far from sharing the
+conviction, dismissed me as a person of no importance whatever. I had
+also my natural indolence and moral cowardice to reckon with. I have
+never been given to taking the initiative when I can avoid it and it is
+one of my great grievances that, good and thorough American as I am, I
+should have been denied my rightful share of American go. Anyway, I did
+not have to stay long in Philadelphia to learn for myself that the
+Philadelphia law of laws obliged every Philadelphian to do as every
+other Philadelphian did, and that every Philadelphian was too much
+occupied in evading what was not the thing in the present to bother to
+cultivate a sentiment for the past. Moreover, I had to contend against
+what the Philadelphians love to call the Philadelphia inertia, while all
+the time they talk about it they keep giving substantial proofs of how
+little reason there is for the talk. The Philadelphia inertia only means
+that it is not good form in Philadelphia to betray emotion on any
+occasion or under any circumstance. The coolness, or indifference, of
+Philadelphians at moments and crises of great passion and excitement has
+always astonished the outsider. If you do not understand the
+Philadelphia way, as I did not then, you take the Philadelphian's talk
+literally and believe the beautiful Philadelphia calm to be more than
+surface deep, as I did who had not the sense as yet to see that, even if
+this inertia was real, it was my business to get the better of it and to
+develop for myself the energy I imagined my town and its people to be
+without. I have often thought that the Philadelphia calm is a little
+like the London climate that either conquers you or leaves you the
+stronger for having conquered it.
+
+
+IV
+
+If one of Philadelphia's unwritten laws closed my eyes to what was most
+worth looking at when I took my walks abroad, another, no less
+stringent, limited those walks to a small section of the town. On the
+map Philadelphia might stretch over a vast area with the possibility of
+spreading indefinitely, but for social purposes it was shut in to the
+East and the West by the Delaware and the Schuylkill, to the North and
+the South by a single line of the old rhyming list of the streets:
+"Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine." I have not the antiquarian
+knowledge to say who drew that rigid line, or when what had been all
+right for Washington and Provosts of the University and no end of
+distinguished people became all wrong for ordinary mortals--I have heard
+the line ridiculed, but never explained. No geographical boundary has
+been, or could be, more arbitrary, but there it was, there it is, and
+the Philadelphian who crosses it risks his good name. Nor can the
+stranger, though unwarned, disregard it with impunity. I remember when I
+met Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist, the first friend I made in London, and she
+told me the number of the house away out North Twenty-second Street
+where she lived for two years in Philadelphia, I had a moment of
+Philadelphia uncertainty as to whether her literary distinction could
+outbalance her social indiscretion. Philadelphia never had a doubt, but
+was serenely unconscious of her presence during her two years there. And
+yet she had then edited and published, with the help of the Rossettis,
+her husband's _Life of Blake_ which had brought her fame in England, and
+her up-town house must have been one of the most interesting to visit.
+Walt Whitman was a daily guest and few American men of letters passed
+through Philadelphia without finding their way to it. Philadelphia,
+however, would scruple going to Heaven were Heaven north of Market
+Street.
+
+It is an absurd prejudice, but I am not sure if I have got rid of it
+now or if I ever shall get rid of it, and when I was too young to see
+its absurdity I would as soon have questioned the infallibility of the
+Pope. It was decreed that nobody should go north of Market or south of
+Pine; therefore I must not go; the reason, probably, why I never went to
+Christ Church--a pew had not been in my family for generations to excuse
+my presence in North Second Street--why I never, even by accident,
+passed the Old Swedes or the Second Street Market. It was bad enough to
+cross the line when I could not help myself. I am amused now--though my
+sensitive youth found no amusement in it--when I think of my annoyance
+because my Great-Grandfather, on my Mother's side, old Ambrose White
+whose summer home was in Chestnut Hill, lived not many blocks from the
+Meeting House and the Christ Church Burial Ground where Franklin lies,
+in one of those fine old Arch Street houses in which Friends had lived
+for generations since there had been Arch Street houses to live in.
+Besides, Mass and Vespers in the Cathedral led me to Logan Square, to my
+dismay that religion should lead where it was as much as my reputation
+was worth to be met. I have wondered since if it was as compromising for
+the Philadelphian from north of Market Street to be found in Rittenhouse
+Square.
+
+[Illustration: FOURTH AND ARCH STREETS MEETING HOUSE]
+
+Outwardly I could see no startling difference between the forbidden
+Philadelphia and my Philadelphia--"there is not such great odds, Brother
+Toby, betwixt good and evil as the world imagines," I might have said
+with Mr. Shandy had I known that Mr. Shandy said it or that there was a
+Mr. Shandy to say anything so wise. The Philadelphia rows of red brick
+houses, white marble steps, white shutters below and green above, rows
+of trees shading them, were much the same north of Market Street and
+south of Pine, except that south of Pine the red brick houses shrank and
+the white marble and white shutters grew shabby, and north of Market
+their uniformity was more often broken by brown stone fronts which,
+together with the greater width of many of the streets, gave a richer
+and more prosperous air than we could boast down our way. But it was not
+for Philadelphians, of all people, to question why, and it must have
+been two or three years later, when I was less awed by Philadelphia,
+that I went up town of my own free will and out of sheer defiance. I can
+remember the time when an innocent visit to so harmless a place as
+Girard College appeared to me in the light of outrageous daring. That is
+the way in my generation we were taught and learned our duty in
+Philadelphia.
+
+My excursions to the suburbs, except to Torresdale, were few, which was
+my loss for no other town's suburbs are more beautiful, and they were
+not on Philadelphia's Index. Time and the alien had not yet driven the
+Philadelphian out to the Main Line as an alternative to "Chestnut,
+Walnut, Spruce and Pine," but many had country houses there; Germantown
+was popular, Chestnut Hill and Torresdale were beyond reproach. My
+Father, however, who cultivated most of Philadelphia's prejudices, was
+unexpectedly heterodox in this particular. He could not stand the
+suburbs--poor man, he came to spending suburban summers in the end--and
+of them all he held Germantown most sweepingly in disfavour. I cannot
+remember that he gave a reason for his dislike. It may be that its
+grey-stone houses offended him as an infidelity to Philadelphia's red
+brick austerity. But he could never speak of it with patience and from
+him I got the idea that it was the abyss of the undesirable. One of the
+biggest surprises of my life was, when I came to look at it with my own
+eyes, to find it as desirable a place as beauty and history can make.
+
+
+V
+
+The shopping I had not the money to do would have kept me within a more
+exclusive radius, for a shopping expedition restricted the Philadelphian
+who had any respect for herself to Chestnut Street between Eighth and
+Fifteenth. Probably I was almost the only Philadelphian who knew there
+were plenty of cheap stores in Second Street, but that I bought the
+first silk dress I ever possessed there was one of the little
+indiscretions I had the sense to keep to myself. A bargain in Eighth
+Street might be disclosed as a clever achievement, if not repeated too
+often. The old Philadelphia name and the historic record of
+Lippincott's, for generations among the most successful Philadelphia
+publishers, would have permitted a periodical excursion into Market
+Street, even if unlimited latitude, anyway, had not been granted to
+wholesale houses in the choice of a street. The well-known reliability
+of Strawbridge and Clothier might warrant certain purchases up-town and
+a furniture dealer as reliable, whose name and address I regret have
+escaped me, sanction the housekeeper's penetrating still further north.
+But it was safer, everything considered, to keep to Chestnut Street, and
+on Chestnut Street to stores approved by long patronage--you were
+hall-marked "common" if you did not, and the wrong name on the inside of
+your hat or under the flap of your envelope might be your social
+undoing. The self-respecting Philadelphian would not have bought her
+needles and cotton anywhere save at Mustin's, her ribbons anywhere save
+at Allen's. She would have scorned the visiting card not engraved by
+Dreka. She would have gone exclusively to Bailey's or Caldwell's for her
+jewels and silver; to Darlington's or Homer and Colladay's for her
+gloves and dresses; to Sheppard's for her linen; to Porter and Coates,
+after Lippincott's, for her books; to Earle's for her pictures;--prints
+were such an exotic taste that Gebbie and Barrie could afford to hide in
+Walnut Street, and the collector of books such a rarity that Tenth, or
+was it Ninth? was as good as any other street for the old book store
+where I had so unpleasant an experience that I could not well forget it
+though I have forgotten its proprietor's name. A sign in the window said
+that old books were bought, and one day, my purse as usual empty but my
+heart full of hope, I carried there two black-bound, gilt-edged French
+books of the kind nobody dreams of reading that I had brought home
+triumphantly as prizes from the Convent: but I and my poor treasures
+were dismissed with such contempt and ridicule that my spirit was broken
+and I could not summon up pluck to carry them to Leary's, in Ninth
+Street, who were more liberal even than Charles Lamb in their
+definition, and to whom anything printed and bound was a book to be
+bought and sold.
+
+If hunger overtook the shopper, she would have eaten her oyster stew
+only at Jones's on Eleventh Street or Burns's on Fifteenth; or if the
+heat exhausted her, she would have cooled off on ice-cream only at
+Sautter's or Dexter's, on soda-water only at Wyeth's or Hubbell's. The
+hours for shopping were as circumscribed as the district. To be seen on
+Chestnut Street late in the afternoon, if not unpardonable, was
+certainly not quite the thing.
+
+
+VI
+
+Shopping without money had no charm and could never help to dispose of
+my interminable hours. The placid beauty of the shopless streets was of
+a kind to appeal more to age than youth. I wonder to this day at the
+time I allowed to pass before I shook off my respect for Philadelphia
+conventions sufficiently to relieve the dulness of my life by straying
+from the Philadelphia beaten track. The most daring break at first was a
+stroll on Sunday afternoon over to West Philadelphia and to Woodland's.
+Later, when, with a friend, I went on long tramps through the Park, by
+the Wissahickon, to Chestnut Hill, it was looked upon as no less
+unladylike on our part than the new generation's cigarette and demand
+for the vote on theirs. But if I did my duty, I was sadly bored by it.
+Often I turned homeward with that cruel aching of the heart the young
+know so well, longing for something, anything, to happen on the way to
+interrupt, to disorganize, to shatter to pieces the daily routine of
+life. I still shrink from the sharp pain of those cool, splendid October
+days when Philadelphia was aglow and quiveringly alive, and with every
+breath of the brisk air came the desire to be up and away and doing--but
+away where in Philadelphia?--doing what in Philadelphia? I still shrink
+from the sharp pain of the first langourous days of spring when every
+Philadelphia back-yard was full of perfume and every Philadelphia street
+a golden green avenue leading direct to happiness could I have found the
+way along its bewildering straightness.
+
+[Illustration: JOHNSON HOUSE, GERMANTOWN]
+
+If youth only knew! There was everywhere to go, everything to do, every
+happiness to claim. Philadelphia waited, the Promised Land of action and
+romance, had I not been hide-bound by Philadelphia conventions, absorbed
+in Philadelphia ideals, disdaining all others with the intolerance of my
+years. According to these conventions and ideals, there was but one
+adventure for the Philadelphia girl who had finished her education and
+arrived at the appointed age--the social adventure of coming out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI: THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE
+
+
+I
+
+Let me say at once that I know no adventure is more important for the
+Philadelphian, and that mine was scarcely worth the name as these things
+go in Philadelphia.
+
+It is the one adventure that should be roses all the way, but for me it
+was next to no roses at all. To begin with, I was poor. My Father had
+lost his money in the years of upheaval following the Civil War and had
+never got it back again. Nowadays this would not matter. A girl of
+seventeen, when she comes home from school, can turn round, find
+something to do, and support herself. She could in the old days too, if
+she was thrown on her own resources. I had friends no older than myself
+who taught, or were in the Mint--that harbour of refuge for the young or
+old Philadelphia lady in reduced circumstances. But my trouble was that
+I was not supposed to be thrown on my own resources. A Philadelphia
+father would have felt the social structure totter had he permitted his
+daughter to work as long as he was alive to work for her. When he had
+many daughters and luck went against him, the advantage of this attitude
+was less obvious to them than to him. Exemplary as was the theory, which
+I applaud my Father for acting up to since it happened to be his, it
+had its inconvenience when put into practice. To be guarded from the
+hardship of labour by the devoted father did not always put money into
+the daughter's pocket.
+
+[Illustration: THE CUSTOMS HOUSE]
+
+Had I been more at home in Philadelphia, my poverty might not have stood
+so much in my light. A hundred years before Gouverneur Morris had
+praised Philadelphia, which in its respect for "virtuous poverty" he
+thought so much more generous than other capitals where social splendour
+was indispensable, and in this the town had not changed. It was to
+Philadelphia's credit that a girl's social success did not depend on the
+length of her dressmaker's bill or the scale of her entertaining. More
+than one as poor as I would have a different story to tell. But I
+suffered from having had no social training or apprenticeship. The
+Convent had been concerned in preparing me for society in the next
+world, not in this, and I had stayed in the Convent too long to make the
+many friendships that do more than most things to launch a girl on her
+social career--too long, for that matter, to know what society meant.
+
+It was a good thing that I did not know, did not realize what was ahead
+of me, that I allowed myself to be led like a Philadelphian to the
+slaughter, for a little experience of society is good for everybody.
+Unless men are to live like brutes--or like monks--they must establish
+some sort of social relations, and if the social game is played at all,
+it should be according to the rules. Nowhere are the rules so rigorous
+as in Philadelphia, nowhere in America based upon more inexorable, as
+well as dignified, traditions, and I do not doubt that because of the
+stumbling blocks in my path, I learned more about them than the
+Philadelphia girl whose path was rose-strewn. Were history my mission,
+it would be amusing to trace these traditions to their source--first
+through the social life of the Friends who, however, are so exclusive
+that should this part of the story ever be told, whether as romance or
+history, it must come from the inside; and then, through the gaieties of
+the World's People who flatter themselves they are as exclusive, and who
+have the name for it, and whose exclusiveness is wholesale license
+compared to that of the Friends:--through the two distinct societies
+that have lived and flourished side by side ever since Philadelphia was.
+But my concern is solely with the gaieties as I, individually, shared in
+them. Now that I have outlived the discomforts of the experience, I can
+flatter myself that, in my small, insignificant fashion, I was helping
+to carry on old and fine traditions.
+
+
+II
+
+The most serious of these discomforts arose from the question of
+clothes, a terrifying question under the existing conditions in the
+Third Street house, involving more industrious dress-making upstairs in
+the third story front bedroom than I cared about, and a waste of
+energies that should have been directed into more profitable channels. I
+sewed badly and was conscious of it. At the Convent, except for the
+necessity of darning my stockings, I had been as free from this sort of
+toiling as a lily of the field, and yet I too had gone arrayed, if
+hardly with the same conspicuous success, and, in my awkward hands, the
+white tarlatan--who wears tarlatan now?--and the cheap silk from Second
+Street, which composed my coming out trousseau, were not growing into
+such things of beauty as to reconcile me to my new task.
+
+[Illustration: UNDER BROAD STREET STATION AT FIFTEENTH STREET]
+
+As unpleasant were the preliminary lessons in dancing forced upon me by
+my family when, in my pride of recent graduation with honours, it
+offended me to be thought by anybody in need of learning anything. One
+evening every week during a few months, two or three friends and cousins
+joined me in the Third Street parlour to be drilled into dancing shape
+for coming out by Madame Martin, the large, portly Frenchwoman who, in
+the same crinoline and heelless, sidelaced shoes, taught generations of
+Philadelphia children to dance. Even the Convent could not do without
+her, though there, to avoid the sinfulness of "round dances," we had,
+under her tuition, waltzed and polkaed hand in hand, a method which my
+family feared, if not corrected, might lead to my disgrace.
+
+I seem rather a pathetic figure as I see myself obediently stitching and
+practising my steps without an idea of the true meaning and magnitude of
+the adventure I was getting ready for, or a chance of being set about it
+in the right way. That right way would have been for somebody to give a
+party or a dance or a reception especially for me to come out at. But
+nobody among my friends and relations was obliging enough to accept the
+responsibility, and at home my Father could not get so far as to think
+of it. He would have needed too disastrous a panic in Third Street to
+provide the money. Madame Martin's lessons were already an extravagance
+and when, on top of them, he had gone so far as to pay for my
+subscription to the Dancing Class, and, in a cabless town, for the
+carriage, fortunately shared with friends, to go to it in, he had done
+all his bank account allowed him to do to start me in life.
+
+It would be as useful to explain that the sun rises in the east and sets
+in the west as to tell a Philadelphian that the Dancing Class to which I
+refer was not of the variety presided over by Madame Martin, but one to
+which Philadelphians went to make use of just such lessons as I had been
+struggling with for weeks. The origin of its name I never knew, I never
+asked, the Dancing Class being one of the Philadelphia institutions the
+Philadelphian took for granted: then, as it always had been and still
+is, I believe, a distinguished social function of the year. To belong to
+it was indispensable to the Philadelphian with social pretensions. It
+was held every other Monday, if I remember--to think I should have a
+doubt on a subject of such importance!-and the first of the series was
+given so early in the winter that with it the season may be said to have
+opened. Perhaps this fact helped my family to decide that it was at the
+Dancing Class I had best make my first appearance.
+
+
+III
+
+Youth is brave out of sheer ignorance. When the moment came, it never
+occurred to me to hesitate or to consider the manner of my introduction
+to the world. I was content that my Brother should be my sole chaperon.
+I rather liked myself in my home-made white tarlatan, feeling very much
+dressed in my first low neck. I entertained no misgivings as to the fate
+awaiting me, imagining it as inevitable for a girl who was "out" to
+dance and have a good time as for a bird to fly once its wings were
+spread. If there were men to dance with, what more was needed?--it never
+having entered into my silly head that it was the girl's sad fate to
+have to wait for the man to ask her, and that sometimes the brute
+didn't.
+
+I had to go no further than the dressing-room at the Natatorium, where
+the Dancing Class then met, to learn that society was not so simple as I
+thought. I have since been to many strange lands among many strange
+people, but never have I felt so much of a stranger as when I, a
+Philadelphian born, doing conscientiously what Philadelphia expected of
+me, was suddenly dropped down into the midst of a lot of Philadelphia
+girls engaged in the same duty. There was a freemasonry among them I
+could not help feeling right away--the freemasonry that went deeper than
+the chance of birth and the companionship of duty--the freemasonry that
+came from their all having grown up together since their perambulator
+days in Rittenhouse Square, having learned to dance together, gone to
+children's parties together, studied at Miss Irwin's school together,
+spent the summer by the sea and in the mountains together, in a word,
+from their having done everything together until they were united by
+close bonds, the closer for being undefinable, that I, Convent bred,
+with not an idea, not a habit, not a point of view, in common with them,
+could not break through. I never have got quite over the feeling, though
+time has modified it. There is no loneliness like the loneliness in a
+crowd, doubly so if all the others in the crowd know each other. In the
+dressing-room that first evening it was so overwhelming to discover
+myself entirely out of it where I should have been entirely in, that,
+without the stay and support of my friend, of old the Prince of Denmark
+to my Ghost of Hamlet's Father, and her sister, who had come out under
+more favourable conditions, I do not think I could have gone a step
+further in the great social adventure.
+
+As it was, with my heart in my boots, my hand trembling on my Brother's
+arm, to the music of Hassler's band, I entered the big bare hall of the
+Natatorium, and was out with no more fuss and with nobody particularly
+excited about it save myself.
+
+[Illustration: THE PHILADELPHIA CLUB, THIRTEENTH AND WALNUT STREETS]
+
+Things were a little better once away from the dressing-room. My Brother
+was gay, had been out for two or three years, knew everybody. If he
+could not introduce me to the women he could introduce the men to me,
+and the freemasonry existing among them from their all having gone to
+the Episcopal Academy and the University of Pennsylvania together, from
+their all having played cricket and baseball and football, or gone
+hunting together, from their all belonging to the same clubs, was not
+the kind from which I need suffer. Besides, those were the days when it
+was easy for the Philadelphia girl to get to know men, to make friends
+of them, without the Philadelphia gossip pouncing upon her and the
+Philadelphia father asking them their intentions--they could call upon
+her as often as they liked and the Philadelphia father would retreat
+from the front and back parlours, she could go out alone with them and
+the Philadelphia father would not interfere, knowing they had been
+brought up to see in themselves her protectors, especially appointed to
+look out for her. Some signs of change I might have discerned had I been
+observant. More than the five o'clock tea affectation was to come of the
+new coquetting with English fashions. Enough had already come for me to
+know that if my Brother now and then asked me to go to the theatre, it
+was not for the pleasure of my company, but because a girl he wanted to
+take would not accept if he did not provide a companion for the sake of
+the proprieties. I am sure the old Philadelphia way was the most
+sensible. Certainly it was the most helpful if you happened to be a girl
+coming out with next to no friends among the women in what ought to have
+been your own set, with no chaperon to see that you made them, and, at
+the Dancing Class, with no hostess to keep a protecting eye on you but,
+instead, patronesses too absorbed in their triumphs to notice the less
+fortunate straggling far behind.
+
+Well, anyway, if honesty forbids me to call myself a success, it is a
+satisfaction to remember that I did not have to play the wall-flower,
+which I would have thought the most terrible disaster that could befall
+me. To have to sit out the German alone would have been to sink to such
+depths of shame that I never afterwards could have held up my head. It
+was astonishing what mountains of despair we made of these social
+molehills! I can still see the sad faces of the girls in a row against
+the wall, with their air of announcing to all whom it might concern:
+"Here we are, at your service, come and rescue us!" But there was
+another dreadful custom that did give me away only too often. When a man
+asked a girl beforehand to dance the German, Philadelphia expected him
+to send her a bunch of roses: always the same roses--Boston buds,
+weren't they called?--and from Pennock's on Chestnut Street if he knew
+what was what. To take your place roseless was to proclaim that you had
+not been asked until the eleventh hour. It was not pleasant. However, if
+I went sometimes without the roses, I always had the partner. I had even
+moments of triumph as when, one dizzy evening before the assembled
+Dancing Class, I danced with Willie White.
+
+It is not indiscreet to mention so great a person by name and, in doing
+so, not presuming to use it so familiarly--he was the Dancing Class, as
+far as I know, he had no other occupation; and his name was _Willie_,
+not _William_, not _Mr._ White. Willie, as Philadelphians said it, was
+a title of honour, like the Coeur de Lion or the Petit Caporal bestowed
+upon other great men--the measure of the estimate in which social
+Philadelphia held him. Bean Nash in the Pump Room at Bath was no
+mightier power than Willie White in the Dancing Class at the Natatorium.
+He ruled it, and ruled it magnificently: an autocrat, a tyrant, under
+whose yoke social Philadelphia was eager to thrust its neck. What he
+said was law, whom he approved could enter, whom he objected to was
+without redress, his recognition of the Philadelphian's claims to
+admission was a social passport. He saw to everything, he led the
+German, and I do not suppose there was a girl who, at her first Dancing
+Class her first winter, did not, at her first chance, take him out in
+the German as her solemn initiation. That is how I came to enjoy my
+triumph, and I do not remember repeating it for he never condescended to
+take me out in return. But still, I can say that once I danced with
+Willie White at the Dancing Class--And did I once see Shelley plain?
+
+
+IV
+
+There were other powers, as I was made quickly to understand--not only
+the powers that all Biddles, Cadwalladers, Rushes, Ingersolls, Whartons,
+in a word all members of approved Philadelphia families were by
+Philadelphia right, but a few who had risen even higher than that
+splendid throng and were accepted as their leaders. It was not one of
+the most brilliant periods in the social history of Philadelphia. Mrs.
+Rush had had no successor, no woman presided over what could have been
+given the name of Salon as she had. Even the Wistar parties, exclusively
+for men, discontinued during the upheaval of the Civil War, had not yet
+been revived. But, notwithstanding the comparative quiet and depression,
+there were a few shining social lights.
+
+Had I been asked in the year of my coming out who was the greatest woman
+in the world, I should have answered, without hesitation, Mrs. Bowie.
+She, too, may be mentioned by name without indiscretion for she, too,
+has become historical. She was far from beautiful at the date to which I
+refer, she was no longer in her first youth, was inclined to stoutness
+and I fear had not learned how to fight it as women who would be in the
+fashion must learn to-day. She was not rich and the fact is worth
+recording, so characteristic is it of Philadelphia. The names of leaders
+of society in near New York usually had millions attached to them, those
+there allowed to lead paid a solid price for it in their entertaining.
+But Mrs. Bowie's power depended upon her personal fascination--with
+family of course to back it--which was said to be irresistible. And yet
+not to know her was to be unknown. Intimacy with her was to have
+arrived. At least a bowing acquaintance, an occasional invitation to her
+house, was essential to success or its dawning. She entertained modestly
+as far as I could gather from my experience,--as far as I can now
+depend on my memory--gave no balls, no big dinners; if there were
+select little dinners, I was too young and insignificant to hear of
+them. I never got farther than the afternoon tea to which everybody was
+invited once every winter, a comfortless crush in her small house, with
+next to nothing to eat and drink as things to eat and drink go according
+to the lavish Philadelphia standard. But that did not matter. Nothing
+mattered except to be there, to be seen there. I was tremendously
+pleased with myself the first time the distinction was mine, though of
+my presence in her house Mrs. Bowie was no doubt amiably unconscious. I
+never knew her to recognize me out of it, though I sometimes met her
+when she came informally to see one of my Aunts who was her friend, or
+to give me the smile at the Dancing Class that would have raised my
+drooping spirits. The only notice she ever spared me there was to
+express to my Brother--who naturally, brother-like, made me
+uncomfortable by reporting it to me--her opinion of my poor,
+unpretentious, home-made, Second Street silk as an example of the
+absurdity of a long train to dance in, which shows how completely she
+had forgotten who I was.
+
+Her chief rival, if so exalted a personage could have a rival, was Mrs.
+Connor, from whom also a smile, a recognition, was equivalent to social
+promotion. Her fascination did not have to be explained. She was an
+unqualified beauty, though the vision I have retained is of beauty in
+high-necked blue velvet and chinchilla, which I could not have enjoyed
+at the Dancing Class or any evening party. I realise as I write that in
+the details of Philadelphia's social history I would come out badly from
+too rigid an examination.
+
+
+V
+
+To Mrs. Connor's I was never asked with or without the crowd. But other
+houses were opened to me, other invitations came, for, if I had not
+friends, my family had. My white tarlatan and my Second Street silk had
+grown shabby before the winter was half over. At many parties I got to
+know what a delightful thing a Philadelphia party was, and if I had gone
+to one instead of many I should have known as well. Philadelphia had a
+standard for its parties as for everything, and to deviate from this
+standard, to attempt originality, to invent the "freak" entertainments
+of New York, would have been excessively bad form. The same card printed
+by Dreka requested the pleasure of your company to the same Philadelphia
+house--the Philadelphia hostess would not have stooped to invite you to
+the Continental or the Girard, the LaPierre House or the Colonnade,
+which were the Bellevue and the Ritz of my day--where you danced in the
+same spacious front and back parlours, with the same crash on the floor,
+to the same music by Hassler's band: where you ate the same Terrapin,
+Croquettes, Chicken Salad, Oysters, Boned Turkey, Ice cream, little
+round Cakes with white icing on top, and drank the same Fish-House Punch
+provided by the same Augustine; where the same Cotillon began at the
+same hour with the same figures and the same favours and the same
+partners; where there was the same dressing-room in the second story
+front and the same Philadelphia girls who froze me on my arrival and on
+my departure. There was no getting away from the same people in
+Philadelphia. That was the worst of it. The town was big enough for a
+chance to meet different people in different houses every evening in the
+week, but by that arbitrary boundary of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and
+Pine," it has made itself socially into a village with the pettiness and
+limitations of village life. I have never wondered that Philadelphians
+are as cordial to strangers as everybody who ever came to Philadelphia
+knows them to be--that Philadelphia doors are as hospitable as Thackeray
+once described them. Philadelphians have reason to rejoice and make the
+most of it when occasionally they see a face they have not been seeing
+regularly at every party they have been to, and hear talk they have not
+listened to all their lives.
+
+[Illustration: THE NEW RITZ-CARLTON; THE FINISHING TOUCHES; THE WALNUT
+STREET ADDITION HAS SINCE BEEN MADE]
+
+Sometimes it was to the afternoon reception the card engraved by Dreka
+invited me, and then again it was to meet the same people and--in the
+barbarous mode of the day--to eat the same Croquettes, Chicken Salad,
+Terrapin, Boned Turkey, Ice-cream, and little round Cakes with white
+icing on top, and to drink the same Punch from Augustine's at five
+o'clock in the afternoon, and at least risk digestion in a good cause.
+But rarely did the card engraved by Dreka invite me to dinner, and I
+could not have been invited to anything I liked better. I have always
+thought dinner the most civilized form of entertainment. It may have
+been an entertainment Philadelphia preferred to reserve for my elders,
+and, if I am not mistaken, the most formal dinners, or dinners with any
+pretence to being public, were then usually men's affairs, just as the
+Saturday Club, and the Wistar parties had been, and the Clover Club, and
+the Fish-House Club were: from them women being as religiously excluded
+as from the dinners of the City Companies in London, or from certain
+monasteries in Italy and the East. Indeed, as I look back, it seems to
+me that woman's social presence was correct only in private houses and
+at private gatherings. Nothing took away my breath so completely on
+going back to Philadelphia after my long absence as the Country Clubs
+where men and women now meet and share their amusements, if it was not
+the concession of a dining-room to women by a Club like the Union League
+that, of old, was in my esteem as essentially masculine as the
+Philadelphia Lady thought the sauces at Blossom's Hotel in Chester.
+
+But there were plenty of other things to do which I did with less rather
+than more thoroughness. I paid midday visits, wondering why duty should
+have set me so irksome a task. I received with friends on New Year's
+Day--an amazing day when men paid off their social debts and made, at
+some houses, their one call of the year, joining together by twos and
+threes and fours to charter a carriage, or they would never have got
+through their round, armed with all their courage either to refuse
+positively or to accept everywhere the glass of Madeira or Punch and the
+usual masterpiece from Augustine's. It was another barbarous custom, but
+an old Philadelphia custom, and Philadelphia has lost so many old
+customs that I could have wished this one spared. I went to the concerts
+of the Orpheus Club. I went to the Opera and the Theatre when I was
+asked, which was not often. I passed with the proper degree of
+self-consciousness the Philadelphia Club at Thirteenth and Walnut, the
+same row of faces always looking out over newspapers and magazines from
+the same row of windows. And I did a great many things that were
+pleasant and a great many more that were unpleasant, conscientiously
+rejecting nothing social I was told to do when the opportunity to do it
+came my way. But it all counted for nothing weighed in the balance with
+the one thing I did not do--I never went to the Assembly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII: THE SOCIAL ADVENTURE: THE ASSEMBLY
+
+
+I
+
+I am too good a Philadelphian to begin to talk about the Assembly in the
+middle of a chapter. It holds a place apart in the social life of
+Philadelphia of which annually it is the supreme moment, and in my
+record of my experiences of this life, however imperfect, I can treat it
+with no less consideration. It must have a chapter apart.
+
+To go to the Assembly was the one thing of all others I wanted to do,
+not only on the general principle that the thing one wants most is the
+thing one cannot have, but because to go to the Assembly was the thing
+of all others I ought to have done. There could be no question of that.
+You were not really out in Philadelphia if you did not go; only the
+Friends could afford not to. And Americans from other towns felt much
+the same way about it, they felt they were not anybody if they were not
+invited, and they moved heaven and earth for an invitation, and prized
+it, when received, as highly as a pedigree. A few honoured guests were
+always at the Assembly.
+
+[Illustration: THE HALL, STENTON]
+
+Philadelphians who are not on the Assembly list may pretend to laugh at
+it, to despise it, to sneer at the snobbishness of people who endeavour
+to draw a social line in a country where everybody is as good as
+everybody else and where those on the right side may look down but those
+on the wrong will not be induced to look up. And not one among those who
+laugh and sneer would not jump at the chance to get in, were it given
+them, at the risk of being transformed into snobs themselves. For the
+Assembly places the Philadelphian as nothing else can. It gives him what
+the German gets from his quarterings or the Briton from an invitation to
+Court. The Dancing Class had its high social standard, it required
+grandfathers as credentials before admission could be granted, the
+archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania supplied no more
+authoritative assurance of Philadelphia respectability than its
+subscription list, but the Dancing Class was lax in its standard
+compared to the Assembly. I am not sure what was the number, what the
+quality, of ancestors the Assembly exacted, but I know that it was as
+inexorable in its exactions as the Council of Ten. It would have been
+easier for troops of camels to pass through the eye of a needle than for
+one Philadelphian north of Market Street to get through the Assembly
+door. I am told that matters are worse to-day when Philadelphia society
+has increased in numbers until new limits must be set to the Assembly
+lest it perish of its own unwieldiness. The applicants must produce not
+only forefathers but fathers and mothers on the list, and the
+Philadelphian whose name was there more than a century and a half ago
+cannot make good his rights if his parents neglected to establish
+theirs. And to be refused is not merely humiliation, but humiliation
+with Philadelphia for witness, and the misery and shame that are the
+burden of the humiliated.
+
+It is foolish, I admit, society is too light a matter to suffer for; it
+is cruel, for the social wound goes deep. But were it ten times more
+foolish, ten times more cruel, I would not have it otherwise.
+Philadelphians preserve their State House, their Colonial mansions and
+churches; why should they not be as careful of their Assembly, since it
+has as historic a background and as fine Colonial and Revolutionary
+traditions? They are proud of having their names among those who signed
+the Declaration of Independence; why should they not take equal--or
+greater--pride in figuring among the McCalls and Willings and Shippens
+and Sims and any number of others on the first Assembly lists, since
+these are earlier in date? Besides, to such an extremity have the
+changes of the last quarter of a century driven the Philadelphian that
+he must make a good fight for survival in his own town. When I think of
+how mere wealth is taking possession of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and
+Pine," how uptown is marrying into it, how the Jew and the alien are
+forcing their way in, I see in loyalty to the traditions of the Assembly
+of Philadelphian's strongest defence of the social rights which are his
+by inheritance. Should he let go, what would there be for him to catch
+on to again?
+
+[Illustration: "PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE
+INHABITANTS THEREOF"]
+
+It would be different if what Philadelphia was getting in exchange were
+finer, or as fine. But it is not. The old exclusiveness, with its
+follies, was better, more amusing, than the new tendency to do away with
+everything that gave Philadelphia society its character. It was the
+charm and the strength of Philadelphia society that it had a character
+of its own and was not just like Boston or New York or Baltimore
+society. Nobody, however remote was their mission from social matters,
+could visit Philadelphia without being impressed by this difference,
+whether it was to discover, with John Adams, that Philadelphians had
+their particular way of being a happy, elegant, tranquil, polite people,
+or, with so unlikely an observer as Matthew Arnold, that "the leading
+families in Philadelphia were much thought of," and that Philadelphia
+names saying nothing to an Englishman said everything to every American.
+Who you were counted in Philadelphia, as what you knew in Boston, or
+what you were worth in New York, and there was not an American of old
+who did not accept the fact and respect it. Philadelphia society clung
+to the Philadelphia surface of tranquillity, of untroubled repose
+whatever might be going on beneath it, and in my time I would not like
+to say how disturbing and agitating were the scandals and intrigues that
+were said to be going on. They were rarely made public. It was not in
+Philadelphia as in London where next to everybody you meet has been or
+is about to be divorced, though it might be that next to everybody you
+met was not making it a practice to keep to the straight and narrow
+path, to be as innocent as everybody looked. Logan Square could have
+told tales, if the Divorce Court could not.
+
+[Illustration: BED ROOM, STENTON, THE HOME OF JAMES LOGAN]
+
+But now Philadelphia has strayed from its characteristic exclusiveness;
+gone far to get rid of even the air of tranquillity. With the modern
+"Peggy Shippen" and "Sally Wister" alert to give away its affairs in the
+columns of the daily paper, it could not keep its secrets to itself if
+it wanted to. And it does not seem to want to--that is the saddest part
+of the whole sad transformation. It rather likes the world outside to
+know what it is doing and, worse, it takes that world as its model. Its
+aim apparently is to show that it can be as like every other town as two
+peas, so that, drinking tea to music at the Bellevue, dancing at the
+Ritz, lunching and dining and playing golf and polo at the Country
+Clubs, the visitor can comfortably forget he is not at home but in
+Philadelphia. The youth of Philadelphia have become eager to desert the
+Episcopal Academy and the University for Groton or St. Paul's, Harvard
+or Yale, in order that they may be trained to be not Philadelphians but,
+as they imagine, men of the world, forgetting the distinction there has
+hitherto been in being plain Philadelphians. At the moment when in far
+older towns of Europe people are striving to recover their character by
+reviving local costumes, language, and customs, Philadelphians are
+deliberately throwing theirs away with their old traditions. The
+Assembly is one of their few rare possessions left, and strict as they
+are with it in one way, in another they are playing fast and loose with
+it, holding it, as if it were a mere modern dance, at a fashionable
+hotel.
+
+
+II
+
+If I now regret, as I do, never having gone to the Assembly, it is
+because of all that it represents, all that makes it a classic. But at
+the time, my regret, though as keen, was because of more personal
+reasons. I could have borne the historic side of my loss with
+equanimity, it was the social side of it that broke my heart. I have had
+many bad quarters of an hour in my life, but few as poignant as that
+which followed the appearance at our front door of the coloured man who
+distributed the cards for the Assembly--far too precious to be trusted
+to the post--and who came to leave one for my Brother. It was an
+injustice that oppressed me with a sense of my wrongs as a woman and
+might have set me window-smashing had window-smashing as a protest been
+invented. Why should the Assembly be so much easier for men? My Brother
+had but to put on the dress suit he had worn it did not matter how many
+years, and as he was, like every other American young man, at work and
+an independent person altogether--a millionaire I saw in him--the price
+of the card in an annual subscription was his affair and nobody else's.
+But, in my case the price was not my affair. I had not a cent to call my
+own, I was not at work, I was denied the right to work, and, the
+Assembly coming fairly late in the season, my white tarlatan and Second
+Street silk showed wear and tear that unfitted them for the most
+important social function of the winter. Philadelphia women dressed
+simply, it is true; that used to be one of the ways the Quaker influence
+showed itself; they boasted then that their restraint in dress
+distinguished them from other American women. But simplicity does not
+mean cheapness or indifference. The Friends took infinite pains with
+their soft brown and silvery grey silks, with their delicate fichus and
+Canton shawls. The well-dressed Philadelphia woman knows what she has to
+pay for the elegance of her simplicity. And the Assembly has always
+called for the finest she could achieve, from the day when Franklin was
+made to feel the cost to him if his daughter was to have what she needed
+to go out "in decency" with the Washingtons in Philadelphia.
+
+[Illustration: THE TUNNEL IN THE PARK]
+
+I had the common sense to understand my position and not to be misled by
+the poverty-stricken, but irresistible Nancies and Dollies who were
+enjoying a vogue in the novels of the day and who encircled empty bank
+accounts and big families with the halo of romance. To read about the
+struggles with poverty of the irresistible young heroine might be
+amusing, but I had no special use for them as a personal experience. It
+would have been preposterous for me to think for a moment that, without
+a decent gown, I could go to the Assembly and, to do myself justice, I
+did not think it. But by this time I knew what coming out and being out
+meant and, therefore, I appreciated the social drawback it must be for
+me not to be able to go. It explained, as nothing hitherto had, how far
+I was from being caught up in the whirl, and it is only the whirl that
+keeps one going in society--that makes society a delightful profession,
+and I think I realized this truth better than the people so
+extravagantly in the Philadelphia whirl as to have no time to think
+about it. All that winter I never got to the point of being less
+concerned as to where the next invitation was to come from than as to
+how I was to accept all that did come. There is no use denying that I
+was disappointed and suffered from the disappointment. One pays a
+heavier price for the first foolish illusion lost than for all the
+others put together, no matter how serious they are.
+
+
+III
+
+When the season was over, I had as little hope of keeping up in other
+essential ways. If society then adjourned from Philadelphia because the
+heat made it impossible to stay at home, it was only to start a new
+Philadelphia on the porch of Howland's Hotel at Long Branch or, as it
+was just then beginning to do, at Bar Harbor and in the camps of the
+Adirondacks, or, above all, at Narragansett. "It may be accepted as an
+incontrovertible truth," Janvier says in one of his Philadelphia
+stories, "that a Philadelphian of a certain class who missed coming to
+the Pier for August would refuse to believe, for that year at least, in
+the alternation of the four seasons; while an enforced absence from that
+damply delightful watering-place for two successive summers very
+probably would lead to a rejection of the entire Copernican system." If
+Philadelphians went abroad, which was much more exceptional then than
+now, it was to meet each other. I know hotels in London to-day where, if
+you go in the afternoon, it is just like an afternoon reception in
+Philadelphia, and hotels in Paris where at certain seasons you find
+nobody but Philadelphians talking Philadelphia, though the Philadelphian
+has not disappeared who does not want to travel because he finds
+Philadelphia good enough for him. And it has always been like that.
+
+But I could not follow Philadelphia society in the summer time any more
+than I could go with it to the Assembly in the winter. I had reason to
+consider myself fortunate if I travelled as far as Mount Airy or
+Chestnut Hill out of the red brick oven Philadelphia used to be--is now
+and ever shall be!--from June to September. It was an event if I got off
+with the crowd--the linen-dustered, wilting-collared crowds; surely we
+are not so demoralized by the heat nowadays?--to Cape May or Atlantic
+City, to enjoy the land breeze blowing, from over the Jersey swamps,
+clouds of mosquitoes before it so that nobody could stir out of doors
+without gloves and a veil. These, however, were not the summer joys
+society demanded of me. The further I went into the social game, the
+less I got from it, and I had decided that for the poor it was not
+worth the candle at the end of the first year, or was it the second?
+That I should be uncertain shows how little my heart was in the business
+of going out.
+
+[Illustration: THE BOAT HOUSES ON THE SCHUYLKILL]
+
+I did not necessarily give up every amusement because I did not go out.
+In fact, I cannot recall a dance that amused me as much as many a
+boating party on the Schuylkill in the gold of the June afternoon, or
+many a walking party through the Park in the starlit summer night. There
+also remained, had I chosen, the staid entertainment of the women who,
+for one reason or other, had retired from the gayer round, and whose
+amusements consisted of more intimate receptions, teas, without number,
+sewing societies. And it was the period when Philadelphia was waking up
+to the charms of the higher education for women,--to the dissipations of
+"culture." I had friends who filled their time by studying for the
+examinations Harvard had at last condescended to allow them to pass, or
+try to pass; others found their sober recreation by qualifying
+themselves as teachers and teaching in a large society formed to impart
+learning by correspondence: all these women keeping their occupation to
+themselves as much as possible, not wishing to make a public scandal in
+Philadelphia which had not accustomed itself to the spectacle of women
+working unless compelled to;--all this quite outside of the University
+set, which must have existed, if I did not know it, as the Bryn Mawr set
+exists to-day, but which, as far as my experience went, was then never
+heard of except by the fortunate and privileged few who belonged to it.
+
+But this new amusement required effort, and experience had not made me
+in love with the amusement that had to be striven for, that had to be
+paid for by exertion of any kind. There was an interval when
+Philadelphia would have been searched in vain for another idler as
+confirmed as I. Having found nothing to do, I proceeded to do it with
+all my might. I stood in no need of the poet's command to lean and loaf
+at my ease, though I am afraid I leaned and loafed so well as to neglect
+the other half of his precept and to forget to invite my soul. To those
+years I now look back as to so much good time lost in a working life all
+too short at the best.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII: A QUESTION OF CREED
+
+
+I
+
+I may not have understood at the time, but I must have been vaguely
+conscious that if so often I felt myself a stranger in my native town,
+it was not only because of the long years I had been shut up in
+boarding-school, but because that boarding-school happened to be a
+Convent.
+
+There were schools in Philadelphia and schools out of it as useful as
+Rittenhouse Square in laying the foundation for profitable friendships.
+Miss Irwin's furnished almost as good social credentials as a Colonial
+Governor in the family. But a Philadelphia Convent did the other thing
+as successfully. It was not the Convent as a Convent that was objected
+to. In Paris, it could lend distinction: the fact that, at the mature
+age of six, I spent a year at Conflans, might have served me as a social
+asset. In Louisiana, or Maryland, a Philadelphia girl could see its door
+close upon her, and not despair of social salvation. Everything depended
+upon where the Convent was. In some places, it had a social standing, in
+others it had none, and Philadelphia was one of the others. In France,
+in Louisiana, in Maryland, to be a Catholic was to be at the top of the
+social scale, approved by society; in Pennsylvania, it was to be at the
+bottom, despised by society.
+
+This was another Philadelphia fact I accepted on faith. It was not until
+I began to think about Philadelphia that I saw how consistent
+Philadelphians were in their inconsistency. Their position in the matter
+was what their past had made it, and the inconsistency is in their
+greater liberality to-day. For Pennsylvania has never been Catholic, has
+never had an aristocratic Catholic tradition like England: to the
+Friends there, all the aristocracy of the traditional kind belongs. The
+people--the World's People--who rushed to Pennsylvania to secure for
+themselves the religious liberty William Penn offered indiscriminately
+to everybody, found they could not enjoy it if Catholics were to profit
+by it with them. They had not been there any time when, as one of the
+early Friends had the wit to see and to say, they "were surfeited with
+liberty," and the Friends, who refused to all sects alike the privilege
+of expressing their religious fervour in wood piles for witches and
+prison cells for heretics, could not succeed in depriving them of their
+healthy religious prejudice which, they might not have been able to
+explain why, concentrated itself upon the Catholic. Episcopalians
+approved of a doctrine of freedom that meant they could build their own
+churches where they would. Presbyterians and Baptists objected so little
+to each other that, for a while, they could share the same pulpit.
+Moravians put up their monasteries where it suited them best. Mennonites
+took possession of Germantown. German mystics were allowed to search in
+peace for the Woman in White and wait hopefully for the Millennium on
+the banks of the Wissahickon. Later on Whitefield set the whole town of
+Philadelphia to singing psalms, and Philadelphia refrained from
+interfering with what must have been an intolerable nuisance. Even Jews
+were welcome--their names are among early legislators and on early
+Assembly lists. Catholics, alone, they all agreed, had no right to any
+portion of Penn's gift, and popular opinion is often stronger than the
+law. Whatever ill will they had to spare from the Catholics, they
+reserved for the Friends to whom they owed everything--if Pennsylvania
+was "a dear Pennsylvania" to Penn, a good part of the blame lay with the
+"drunken crew of priests" and the "turbulent churchmen" whom he
+denounced in one of those letters to Logan, which are among the saddest
+ever written and published to the world.
+
+After religious passions had run their course, the religious prejudice
+against the Catholic was handed down as social prejudice, which was all
+it was in my day when Philadelphians, who would question the social
+standing of a Catholic in Philadelphia simply because he was a Catholic,
+could accept him without question in the Catholic town of Baltimore or
+New Orleans simply because he was one. The Catholic continued to pay a
+heavy price socially for his religion in Philadelphia where it was not
+the thing to be a Catholic, where it never had been the thing, where it
+got to be less the thing as successive Irish emigrations crowded the
+Catholic churches. I fancy at the period of which I am writing
+Philadelphians, if asked, would have said that Catholicism was for
+Irish servants--for the illiterate. I remember a book called _Kate
+Vincent_ I used to read at a Protestant Uncle's, where it may purposely
+have been placed in my way. Does anybody else remember it?--a story of
+school life with a heroine of a school girl who, in the serene
+confidence of her sixteen or seventeen summers, refuted all the learned
+Doctors of the Church by convicting a poor little Irish slavey of
+ignorance for praying to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints. I think I
+must have forgotten it with many foolish books for children read in my
+childhood had not Kate Vincent been so like Philadelphians in her calm
+superiority, though, fortunately, Philadelphians did not share her
+proselytising fervour. They went to the other extreme of lofty
+indifference and for them the Catholic churches in their town did not
+exist any more than the streets of little two-story houses south of
+Pine, a region into which they would not have thought of penetrating
+except to look up somebody who worked for them.
+
+
+II
+
+I might have learned as much during my holidays at my Grandfather's had
+I been given to reflection during my early years. My Father was a
+convert with the convert's proverbial ardour. He had been baptised in
+the Convent chapel with my Sister and myself--I was eight years old at
+the time--and many who were present declared it the most touching
+ceremony they had ever seen. However, to the family, who had not seen
+it, it was anything but touching. They were all good members of the
+Episcopal Church and had been since they landed in Virginia; moreover,
+one of my Father's brothers was an Episcopal clergyman and Head Master
+of the Episcopal Academy, Philadelphia's bed-rock of religious
+respectability. The baptism was only conditional, for the Catholic
+Church baptizes conditionally those who have been baptized in any church
+before, but even so it must have been trying to them as a precaution
+insolently superfluous. I do not remember that anything was ever said,
+or suggested, or hinted. But there was an undercurrent of disapproval
+that, child as I was, I felt, though I could not have put it into words.
+One thing plain was that when we children went off to our church with my
+Father, we were going where nobody else in my Grandfather's house went,
+except the servants, and that, for some incomprehensible reason, it was
+rather an odd sort of thing for us to do, making us different from most
+people we knew in Philadelphia.
+
+[Illustration: THE PULPIT, ST. PETER'S]
+
+Nor had I the chance to lose sight of this difference at the Convent.
+The education I was getting there, when not devoted to launching my soul
+into Paradise, was preparing me for the struggle against the temptations
+of the world which, from all I heard about it, I pictured as a horrible
+gulf of evil yawning at the Convent gate, ready to swallow me up the
+minute that gate shut behind me. To face it was an ordeal so alarming in
+anticipation that there was an interval when I convinced myself it would
+be infinitely safer, by becoming a nun, not to face it at all. If I
+stopped to give the world a name, it was bound to be Philadelphia, the
+place in which I was destined to live upon leaving the Convent. I knew
+that it was Protestant, as we often prayed for the conversion of its
+people, I the harder because they included my relations who if not
+converted could, my catechism taught me, be saved only so as by the
+invincible ignorance with which I hardly felt it polite to credit them.
+To what other conclusion could I come, arguing logically, than that
+Philadelphia was the horrible gulf of evil yawning for me, and that in
+this gulf Protestants swarmed, scattering temptation along the path of
+the Catholic who walked alone among them?--an idea of Philadelphia that
+probably would have surprised nobody more than the nuns who were
+training me for my life of struggle in it.
+
+The gulf of the world did not seem so evil once it swallowed me up, but
+that socially the Catholic walked in it alone, there could be no
+mistake. When eventually I left school and began going out on my modest
+scale, I could not fail to see that the people I met in church were not,
+as a rule, the people I met at the Dancing Class, or at parties, or at
+receptions, or on that abominable round of morning calls, and this was
+the more surprising because Philadelphians of the "Chestnut, Walnut,
+Spruce and Pine" set were accustomed to meeting each other wherever they
+went. Except for the small group of those Philadelphia families of
+French descent with French names who were not descendants of the
+Huguenots, and here and there a convert like my Father, and an
+occasional native Philadelphian who, unaccountably, had always been a
+Catholic, the congregation, whether I went to the Cathedral or St.
+John's, to St. Joseph's or St. Patrick's, was chiefly Irish, as also
+were the priests when they were not Italians.
+
+Fashion sent the Philadelphian to the Episcopal Church. It could not
+have been otherwise in a town as true to tradition as Philadelphia had
+not ceased to be in my young days. No sooner had Episcopalians settled
+in Philadelphia than, by their greater grandeur of dress and manner,
+they showed the greater social aspirations they had brought with them
+from the other side--the Englishman's confidence in the social
+superiority of the Church of England to all religion outside of it.
+Presbyterians are said to have had a pretty fancy in matters of wigs and
+powdered and frizzled hair, which may also have been symbolic, for they
+followed a close fashionable second. Baptists and Methodists, on the
+contrary, affected to despise dress and, while I cannot say if the one
+fact has anything to do with the other, I knew fewer Baptists and
+Methodists than Catholics. By my time the belief that no one could be "a
+gentleman" outside the Church of England, or its American offshoot, was
+stronger than ever, and fashion required a pew at St. Mark's or Holy
+Trinity or St. James's, if ancient lineage did not claim one at St.
+Peter's or Christ Church; though old-fashioned people like my
+Grandfather and Grandmother might cling blamelessly to St. Andrew's
+which was highly respectable, if not fashionable, and new-fashioned
+people might brave criticism with the Ritualists at St. Clement's. As
+for Catholics, a pew down at St. Joseph's in Willing's Alley or, worse
+still, up town at the Cathedral in Logan Square, put them out of the
+reckoning, at a hopeless disadvantage socially, however better off they
+might be for it spiritually. That the Cathedral was in Logan Square was
+in itself a social offence of a kind that society could not tolerate. At
+the correct churches every function, every meeting, every Sunday-school,
+every pious re-union, as well as every service, became a fashionable
+duty; and at the church door after service on Sunday, a man with whom
+one had danced the night before might be picked up to walk on Walnut
+Street with, which was a social observance only less indispensable than
+attendance at the Assembly and the Dancing Class.
+
+[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, LOGAN SQUARE]
+
+I recall the excitement of girls of my age, their feeling that they had
+got to the top of everything, the first time they took this sacramental
+walk, if not with a man which was the crowning glory, at least with a
+woman who was prominent, or successful, in society. But I believe I
+could count the times I joined in the Walnut Street procession on Sunday
+morning. As long as I lived in Third Street, my usual choice of a church
+lay between St. Joseph's, the Jesuit church in Willing's Alley with its
+air of retirement, and St. Mary's on Fourth Street, where the orphans
+used to come from Seventh and Spruce and sometimes sing an anthem that,
+for any save musical reasons, I delighted in, and where we had a pew.
+After we moved from Third Street, our pew was at the Cathedral, more
+distinguished from the clerical standpoint, for there we sat under the
+Bishop. No matter which our church, High Mass was long: I could not have
+got to the appointed part of Walnut Street in time, had I found at the
+door the companion to go there with me. There was nothing to do but to
+walk home alone or sedately at my Father's side, and one's Father,
+however correct he might be under other circumstances, was not the right
+person for these occasions. On Sundays I could not conceal from myself
+that I was socially at a discount. The reflection that this was where I,
+as a Catholic, scored, should have consoled me, for if the Episcopalian
+was performing a social duty when he went to church, I, as a Catholic,
+was making a social sacrifice, and sacrifice of some sort is of the
+essence of religion.
+
+
+III
+
+If I could but have taken the trouble to be interested, it must also
+have occurred to me to wonder why St. Joseph's, where I went so often,
+was hidden in an obscure alley. In Philadelphia, the town of straight
+streets crossing each other at right angles, it is not easy for a
+building of the kind to keep out of sight. But not one man in a hundred,
+not one in a thousand, who, passing along Third Street, looked up
+Willing's Alley, dreamt for a minute that somewhere in that alley,
+embedded in a network of brokers' and railroad offices, carefully
+concealing every trace of itself, was a church with a large
+congregation. Most churches in Philadelphia, as everywhere, like to
+display themselves prominently with an elaborate facade, or a lofty
+steeple, or a green enclosure, or a graveyard full of monuments. St.
+Peter's, close by, fills a whole block. Christ Church stands flush with
+the pavement. The simplest Meeting-House, by the beautiful trees that
+overshadow it or the high walls that enclose it or the bit of green at
+its door, will not let the passer-by forget it. But St. Joseph's,
+evidently, did not want to be seen, did not want to be remembered;
+evidently hesitated to show that its doors were wide and hospitably open
+to all the world in the beautiful fashion of the Catholic Church. There
+was something furtive about it, an air of mystery, it was almost as if
+one were keeping a clandestine appointment with religion when one turned
+from the street into the humble alley, and from the alley into the
+silence of the sanctuary.
+
+[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH, FROM SECOND STREET]
+
+Perhaps I thought less about this mysterious aloofness because, once in
+the church, I felt so much at home. I do not mind owning now, though I
+would not have owned it then for a good deal, that after my return from
+the Convent, I had the uncomfortable feeling of being a stranger not
+only in my town, but in my family. I had been in the Convent eleven
+years and until this day when I look back to my childhood, it is the
+Convent I remember as home. St. Joseph's seemed a part of the Convent,
+therefore of home, that had strayed into the town by mistake. In some
+ways it was not like the Convent, greatly to my discomfort. The chapel
+there was dainty in detail, exquisitely kept, the altars fresh with
+flowers from the Convent garden, and for congregation the nuns and the
+girls modestly and demurely veiled. But nothing was dainty about St.
+Joseph's,--men are as untidy in running a church as in keeping a
+house--it was not well kept, the flowers were artificial and tawdry, and
+the congregation was largely made up of shabby old Irishwomen. The
+priests--Jesuits--were mostly Italian, with those unpleasant habits of
+Italian priests that are a shock to the convent-bred American when she
+first goes to Italy. They had, however, the virtue of old friends, their
+faces were familiar, I had known them for years at the Convent which
+they had frequently visited and where, by special grace, they had
+refrained from some of the unpleasant habits that offended me at St.
+Joseph's.
+
+There was Father de Maria, tall, thin, with a wonderful shock of white
+hair, a fine ascetic face and a kindly smile, not adapted to shine in
+children's society--too much of a scholar I fancied though I may have
+been wrong--and with an effect of severity which I do not think he
+meant, but which had kept me at a safe distance when he came to see us
+at Torresdale. But he had come, I could not remember the time when I had
+not known him, and that was in his favour.
+
+There was Father Ardea, a small, shrinking, dark man, from whom also it
+was more comfortable to keep at a safe distance, so little had he to
+say and such a trick of looking at you with an "Eh? Eh?" of expectation,
+as if he relied upon you to supply the talk he had not at his own
+command. But I could have forgiven him worse, so pleasant a duty did he
+make of confession. His penances were light and his only comment was
+"Eh? Eh? my child? But you didn't mean it! You didn't mean it!" until I
+longed to accuse myself of the Seven Deadly Sins with the Unpardonable
+Sin thrown in, just to see if he would still assure me that I didn't
+mean it.
+
+There was Father Bobbelin--our corruption I fancy of Barbelin--a
+Frenchman, short and fat, sandy-haired, with a round smiling face: the
+most welcome of all. He was always very snuffy, and always ready to hand
+round his snuff-box if talk languished when he went out to walk with us,
+which I liked better than Father Ardea's embarrassing "Eh? Eh?" It was
+to Father Bobbelin an inexhaustible joke, and the only other I knew him
+to venture upon resulted in so unheard-of a breach of discipline that
+ever after we saw less of him and his snuff-box. He was walking with us
+down Mulberry Avenue one afternoon, the little girls clustered about him
+as they were always sure to be, and the nun in charge a little behind
+with the bigger, more sedate girls. When we got to the end of the
+Avenue, the carriage gate leading straight out into the World was open
+as it had never been before, as it never was again. Father Bobbelin's
+fat shoulders shook with laughter. He opened the gate wider. "Now,
+children," he said, "here's your chance. Run for it!" And we did, we ran
+as if for our lives, though no children could have loved their school
+better or wanted less to get away from it. One or two ran as far as the
+railroad, the most adventurous crossed it, and were making full tilt for
+the river before all were caught and brought back and sent to bed in
+disgrace. After that Father Bobbelin visited us only in our class-room.
+
+And there were other priests whose names escape me, but not their
+home-like faces. Now and then Jesuits who gave Missions and who had
+conducted the retreats at the Convent, appeared at St. Joseph's,--Father
+Smarius, the huge Dutchman, so enormous they used to tell us at the
+Convent that he had never seen his feet for twenty years, who had
+baptized my Father and his family in the Convent chapel; and Father
+Boudreau, the silent, shy little Louisianian, whom I remember so well
+coming with Father Smarius one June day to bless, and sprinkle Holy
+Water over that big yellow and white house close to the Convent which my
+Father had taken for the summer; and Father Glackmeyer, and Father
+Coghlan, and with them others whose presence helped the more to fill St.
+Joseph's with the intimate convent atmosphere.
+
+
+IV
+
+These old friends and old associations took away from the uneasiness it
+might otherwise have given me to find the church, for which I had
+exchanged the Convent chapel, hidden up an alley as if its existence
+were a sin. But overlook it as I might, this was the one important fact
+about St. Joseph's which, otherwise, had no particular interest. It did
+not count as architecture, it boasted of no beauty of decoration: an
+inconspicuous, commonplace building from every point of view, of which I
+consequently retain but the vaguest memory. As I write, I can see, as if
+it were before me, the Convent chapel, its every nook and corner, almost
+its every stone, this altar here, that picture there, the confessional
+in the screened-off space where visitors sat, the dark step close to the
+altar railing where I carried my wrongs and my sorrows. But try as I
+may, I cannot see St. Joseph's as it was, cannot see any detail, nothing
+save the general shabbiness and untidiness that shocked my convent-bred
+eyes. Could it have appealed by its beauty, like the old Cathedrals of
+Europe, or, for that matter, like the old churches of Philadelphia, no
+doubt I should be able to recall it as vividly as the Convent chapel.
+Because I cannot, because it impressed me so superficially, I regret the
+more that I had not the sense to appreciate the interest it borrowed
+from the romance of history and the beauty of suffering--the history of
+the Catholic religion in Philadelphia which I might have read in this
+careful hiding of its temple; the suffering of the scapegoat among
+churches, obliged to keep out of sight, atoning for their intolerance in
+a desert of secrecy, letting no man know where its prayers were said or
+its services held. Catholics had to practise their religion like
+criminals skulking from the law. Members of a Protestant church might
+dispute among themselves to the point of blows, but they never thought
+of interfering with the members of any other church, except the
+Catholic, against which they could all cheerfully join. There were times
+when the Friends, most tolerant of men, were influenced by this general
+hostility, and I rather think the worst moment in Penn's life was when
+he was forced to protest against the scandal of the Mass in his town of
+Brotherly Love.
+
+[Illustration: FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, SEVENTH STREET AND WASHINGTON
+SQUARE]
+
+The marvel is that Catholics ventured out of their hiding-places as soon
+as they did. They had emerged so successfully by Revolutionary times
+that the stranger in Philadelphia could find his way to "the Romish
+chapel" and enjoy the luxury of knowing that he was not as these poor
+wretches who fingered their beads and chanted Latin not a word of which
+they understood. The Jesuits have the wisdom of their reputation. When
+they built their church the Colonies had for some years been the United
+States, and hatred was less outspoken, and persecution was more
+intermittent, but they believed discretion to be the better part of
+valour and the truest security in not challenging attack. That is why
+they built St. Joseph's in Willing's Alley where the visitor with a
+dramatic sense must be as thrilled by it as by the secret chapels and
+underground passages in old Elizabethan mansions and Scott's novels.
+Philadelphia gave the Jesuits a proof of their wisdom when, within a
+quarter of a century, Young America, in a playful moment, burnt down as
+much as it could of St. Michael's and St. Augustine's; churches which
+had been built bravely and hopefully in open places. Young America
+believed in a healthy reminder to Catholics, that, if they had not been
+disturbed for some time, it was not because they did not deserve to be.
+
+Philadelphia had got beyond the exciting stage of intolerance before I
+was born. There were no delicious tremors to be had when I heard Mass at
+St. Joseph's or went to Vespers at St. Mary's. There was no ear alert
+for a warning of the approach of the enemy, no eye strained for the
+first wisp of smoke or burst of flame. With churches and convents
+everywhere--convents intruding even upon Walnut Street and Rittenhouse
+Square--with a big Cathedral in town and a big Seminary at Villanova,
+Catholics were in a fair way to forget it had ever been as dangerous for
+them as for the early Christians to venture from their catacombs. Their
+religion had become a tame affair, holding out no prospect of the
+martyr's crown. Only the social prejudice survived, but it was the more
+bitter to fight because, whether the end was victory or defeat, it
+appeared so inglorious a struggle to be engaged in.
+
+One good result there was of this social ostracism. I leave myself out
+of the argument. Religion, I have often heard it said, is a matter of
+temperament. As this story of my relations to Philadelphia seems to be
+resolving itself into a general confession, I must at least confess my
+certainty that I have not and never had the necessary temperament,
+that, moreover, the necessary temperament is not to be had by any effort
+of will power, depending rather upon "the influence of the unknown
+powers." But I am not totally blind, nor was I in the old days when,
+many as were the things I did not see, my eyes were still open to the
+effect of social opposition on Catholics with the temperament. It made
+them more devout, at times more defiant. I know churches that are in
+themselves alone a reward for faith and fidelity--who would not be a
+Catholic in the dim religious light of Chartres Cathedral, or in the
+sombre splendours of Seville and Barcelona? But St. Joseph's and St.
+Mary's, St. Patrick's and St. John's gave no such reward, nor did the
+Cathedral in its far-away imitation of the Jesuit churches of Italy and
+France. In these arid, unemotional interiors, emotion could not kindle
+piety which, if not fed by more spiritual stuff, was bound to flicker
+and go out. This is why the Philadelphian who, in those unattractive
+churches and in spite of the social price paid, remained faithful, was
+the most devout Catholic I have ever met at home or in my wanderings.
+
+
+V
+
+For his spiritual welfare, it might have been better had the conditions
+remained as I knew them. But even at that period, the signs of weakening
+in the social barrier must have jumped to my eyes had I had eyes for the
+fine shades. Catholics among themselves had begun to put up social
+barriers, so much further had Philadelphia travelled on the road to
+liberty.
+
+Religiously, one of their churches was as good as another, but not
+socially. St. Mark's, from its superior Episcopal heights, might look
+down equally upon St. Patrick's and St. John's, but the Catholic with a
+pew at St. John's did not at all look upon the Catholic with a seat at
+St. Patrick's as on the same social level as himself. St. Patrick's name
+alone was sufficient to attract an Irish congregation, and the Irish who
+then flocked to Philadelphia were not the flower of Ireland's
+aristocracy. St. John's, by some unnamed right, claimed the Catholics of
+social pretensions--the excellence of its music may have strengthened
+its claim. I know that my Father, who was a religious man, did not
+object to having the comfort of religion strengthened by the charms of
+Gounod's Mass well sung, and, at the last, he drifted from the Cathedral
+to St. John's.
+
+[Illustration: OLD SWEDES' CHURCH]
+
+The Cathedral necessarily was above such distinctions, as a Cathedral
+should be, and it harboured an overflow from St. Patrick's and St.
+John's both. But it was the Cathedral, rather than St. John's, that did
+most to weaken the foundations of the social prejudice against the
+Catholic. The Bishop there was Bishop Wood, and Bishop Wood, like my
+Father a convert, was no Irish emigrant, no Italian missionary, but came
+from the same old family of Philadelphia Friends as J. Some people
+think that Quakerism and Catholicism are more in sympathy with each
+other than with other creeds because neither recognizes any half way,
+each going to a logical extreme. Whether Bishop Wood thought so, I am
+far from sure, but he had himself gone from one extreme to the other
+when he became a Catholic, and the religious step had its social
+bearing. With his splendid presence and splendid voice, he must have
+added dignity to every service at the Cathedral, but he did more than
+that: in Philadelphia eyes he gave it the sanction of Philadelphia
+respectability. The Catholic was no longer quite without Philadelphia's
+social pale.
+
+I had no opportunity, because of my long absence, to watch the gradual
+breakdown, but I saw that the barrier had fallen when I got back to
+Philadelphia. Never again will Philadelphia children think they are
+doing an odd thing when they go to Mass, never again need the
+Philadelphia girl fresh from the Convent fancy herself alone in the
+yawning gulf of evil that opens at the Convent gate. I should not be
+surprised if an eligible man from the Dancing Class or Assembly list can
+to-day be picked up at the door of more than one Catholic church for the
+Sunday Walk on Walnut Street. St. John's has risen, new and resplendent,
+if ugly, from its ashes; St. Patrick's has blossomed forth from its
+architectural insignificance into an imposing Romanesque structure. The
+Cathedral has been new swept and garnished--not so large perhaps as I
+once saw it, for I have been to St. Paul's and St. Peter's and many a
+Jesuit church in the meanwhile, but more ornate, with altars and
+decorations that I knew not, and with Mr. Henry Thouron's design on one
+wall as a promise of further beauty to come. The difference confronted
+me at every step--and saddened me, though I could not deny that it meant
+improvement. But the change, as change, displeased me in a Philadelphia
+that ceases to be my Philadelphia when it ceases to preserve its old
+standards and prejudices as jealously as its old monuments. For the sake
+of the character I loved, I could wish Philadelphia as far as ever from
+hope of salvation by anything save its own invincible ignorance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX: THE FIRST AWAKENING
+
+
+I
+
+I had been out, I do not remember how long, but long enough to confirm
+my belief in the Philadelphia way of doing things as the only way, when
+I found that Philadelphia was involved in an enterprise for which its
+history might give the reason but could furnish no precedent. To
+Philadelphians who were older than I, or who had been in Philadelphia
+while I was getting through the business of education at the Convent,
+the Centennial Exposition probably did not come as so great a surprise.
+Having since had experience of how these matters are ordered, I can
+understand that there must have been some years of leading up to it. But
+I seem to have heard of it first within no time of its opening, and just
+as I had got used to the idea that Philadelphia must go on for ever
+doing things as it always had done them, because to do them otherwise
+would not be right or proper.
+
+The result was that, at the moment, I saw in the Centennial chiefly a
+violent upheaval shaking the universe to the foundations, with
+Philadelphia emerging, changed, transformed, unrecognizable, plunging
+head-foremost into new-fangled amusements, adding new duties to the
+Philadelphian's once all-sufficing duty of being a Philadelphian,
+inventing new attractions to draw to its drowsy streets people from the
+four quarters of the globe, and, more astounding, giving itself up to
+these innovations with zest.
+
+[Illustration: INDEPENDENCE HALL: THE ORIGINAL DESK ON WHICH THE
+DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE WAS SIGNED AND THE CHAIR USED BY THE
+PRESIDENT OF CONGRESS, JOHN HANCOCK, IN 1776 (BOTH ON PLATFORM)]
+
+I looked on at the preparations,--as at most things, to my infinite
+boredom,--from outside: a perspective from which they appeared to me
+little more than a new form of social diversion. For they kept my gayer
+friends, who were well on the inside, busy going to Centennial balls at
+the Academy of Music in the Colonial dress which was as essential for
+admission as a Colonial name or a Colonial family tree, while I stayed
+at home and, seeing what lovely creatures powder and patches and paniers
+made of Philadelphia girls with no more pretence to good looks than I,
+felt a little as I did when the coloured dignitary rang at our front
+door with the Assembly card that was not for me. And between the balls,
+the same friends were immersed in Centennial Societies and Centennial
+Committees and Centennial Meetings and Centennial Subscriptions and
+Centennial Petitions, Philadelphia women for the first time admitted,
+and pining for admission, into public affairs; while I was so far apart
+from it all that I remember but one incident in connection with the
+Centennial orgy of work, and this as trivial as could be. When we moved
+into the Third Street house we had found in possession a cat who left us
+in no doubt of her disapproval of our intrusion, but who tolerated us
+because of the convenience of the ground floor windows from which to
+watch for her enemies among the dogs of the neighbourhood, and for the
+comfort of certain cupboards upstairs during the infancy of her
+kittens. She kept us at a respectful distance and we never ventured upon
+any liberties with her. Those of our friends who did, heedless of her
+growls, were sure to regret it. Our family doctor carried the marks of
+her teeth on his hand for many a day. It happened that once, when two
+Centennial canvassers called, she was the first to greet them and was
+unfavourably impressed by the voluminous furs in which they were
+wrapped. When I came downstairs she was holding the hall, her eyes
+flaming, her tail five times its natural size, and I understood the
+prudence of non-interference. The canvassers had retreated to the
+vestibule between the two front doors and, as I opened the inner door,
+another glance at the flaming eyes and indignant tail completed their
+defeat and they fled without explaining the object of their visit. I
+must indeed have been removed from the Centennial delirium and turmoil
+to have retained this absurd encounter as one of my most vivid memories.
+
+
+II
+
+Upon the Centennial itself I looked at closer quarters. I was as removed
+from it officially, but not quite so penniless less and friendless as
+never to have the chance to visit it. Inexperienced and untravelled as I
+was, it opened for me vistas hitherto undreamed of and stirred my
+interest as nothing in Philadelphia had until then. As I recall it, that
+long summer is, as it was at the time, a bewildering jumble of first
+impressions and revelations--Philadelphia all chaos and confusion,
+functions and formalities, spectacles and sensations--buildings
+Philadelphia could not have conceived of in its sanity covering acres of
+its beautiful Park, a whole shanty town of huge hotels and cheap
+restaurants and side-shows sprung up on its outskirts--marvels in the
+buildings, amazing, foreign, unbelievable marvels, the Arabian Nights
+rolled into one--interminable drives in horribly crowded street-cars to
+reach them--lunches of Vienna rolls and Vienna coffee in Vienna cafes,
+as unlike Jones's on Eleventh Street or Burns's on Fifteenth as I could
+imagine--dinners in French restaurants that, after Belmont and
+Strawberry Mansion, struck me as typically Parisian though I do not
+suppose they were Parisian in the least--the flaring and glaring of
+millions of gas lamps under Philadelphia's tranquil skies--a delightful
+feeling of triumph that Philadelphia was the first American town to do
+what London had done, what Paris had done, and to do it so
+splendidly--burning heat, Philadelphia apparently bent on proving to the
+unhappy visitor what the native knew too well, that, when it has a mind
+to, it can be the most intolerably hot place in the world--sweltering,
+demoralized crowds--unexpected descents upon a household as quiet as
+ours of friends not seen for years and relations never heard
+of--brilliant autumn days--an atmosphere of activity, excitement and
+exultation that made it good to be alive and in the midst of Centennial
+celebrations without bothering to seek in them a more serious end than a
+season's amusement.
+
+[Illustration: PHILADELPHIA FROM BELMONT]
+
+
+III
+
+But, without bothering, I could not escape a dim perception that
+Philadelphia had not turned itself topsy-turvy to amuse me and the
+world. Things were in the air I could not get away from. The very words
+Centennial and Colonial were too new in my vocabulary not to start me
+thinking, little given as I was to thinking when I could save myself the
+trouble. And however lightly I might be inclined to take the whole
+affair, the rest of Philadelphia was so far from underestimating it that
+probably the younger generation, used to big International Expositions
+and having seen the wonders of the Centennial eclipsed in Paris and
+Chicago and St. Louis and its pleasures rivalled in an ordinary summer
+playground like Coney Island or Willow Grove, must wonder at the
+innocence of Philadelphia in making such a fuss over such an everyday
+affair. But in the Eighteen-Seventies the big International Exposition
+was not an everyday affair. Europe had held only one or two, America had
+held none, Philadelphia had to find out the way for itself, with the
+whole country watching, ready to jeer at the sleepy old town if it went
+wrong. As I look back, though I realize that the Centennial buildings
+were not architectural masterpieces--how could I help realising it with
+Memorial Hall still out there in the Park as reminder?--though I realise
+that Philadelphia prosperity did not date from the Centennial, that
+Philadelphians had not lived in a slough of inertia and ignorance until
+the Centennial pulled them out of it: all the same, I can see how fine
+an achievement it was, and how successful in jerking Philadelphians from
+their comfortable rut of indifference to everything going on outside of
+Philadelphia, or to whether there was an outside for things to go on in.
+
+I know that I was conscious of the jerk in my little corner of the rut.
+The Centennial, for one thing, gave me my first object lesson in
+patriotism. There was no special training for the patriot when I was
+young--no school drilling, with flags, to national music. An American
+was an American, not a Russian Jew, a Slovak, or a Pole, and patriotism
+was supposed to follow as a matter of course. It did, but I fancy with
+many, as with me, after a passive, unintelligent sort of fashion. I knew
+about the Declaration of Independence, but had anybody asked for my
+opinion of it, I doubtless should have dismissed it as a dull page in a
+dull history book, a difficult passage to get by heart. But I could not
+go on thinking of it in that way when so remote an occasion as its
+hundredth birthday was sending Philadelphia off its head in this mad
+carnival of excitement. In little, as in big, matters I was constantly
+brought up against the fact that things did not exist simply because
+they were, but because something had been. An old time-worn story that
+amused the Philadelphian in its day is of the American from another
+town, who, after listening to much Philadelphia talk, interrupted to
+ask: "But what is a Biddle?" I am afraid I should have been puzzled to
+answer. For a Biddle was a Biddle, just as Spruce Street was Spruce
+Street, just as Philadelphia was Philadelphia. That had been enough in
+all conscience for the Philadelphian, but the Centennial would not let
+it be enough for me any longer.
+
+My first hint that Philadelphia and Spruce Street and a Biddle needed a
+past to justify the esteem in which we held them, came from the
+spectacle of Mrs. Gillespie towering supreme above Philadelphians with
+far more familiar names than hers at every Centennial ball and in every
+Centennial Society, the central figure in the Centennial preparations
+and in the Centennial itself. I did not know her personally, but that
+made no difference. There was no blotting out her powerful presence, she
+pervaded the Centennial atmosphere. She remains in the foreground of my
+Centennial memories, a tall, gaunt woman, not especially gracious,
+apparently without a doubt of her right to her conspicuous position,
+ready to resent the effrontery of the sceptic who challenged it had
+there been a sceptic so daring, anything but popular, and yet her rule
+accepted unquestioningly for no better reason than because she was the
+descendant of Benjamin Franklin, and I could not help knowing that she
+was his descendant, for nobody could mention her without dragging in his
+name. It revolutionized my ideas of school and school books, no less
+than of Philadelphia. I had learned the story of Benjamin Franklin and
+the kite, just as I had learned the story of George Washington and the
+cherry tree, and of General Marion and the sweet potatoes, and other
+anecdotes of heroes invented to torment the young. And now here was
+Franklin turning out to be not merely the hero of an anecdote that bored
+every right-minded school-girl to death, but a person of such
+consequence that his descendant in the third or fourth generation had
+the right to lord it over Philadelphia. There was no getting away from
+that any more than there was from Mrs. Gillespie herself and,
+incidentally, it suggested a new reason for Biddles and Cadwalladers and
+Whartons and Morrises and Norrises and Logans and Philadelphia families
+with their names on the Assembly list. That they were the resplendent
+creatures Philadelphia thought them was not so elementary a fact as the
+shining of the sun in the heavens; they owed it to their ancestors just
+as Mrs. Gillespie owed her splendour to Franklin; and an ancestor
+immediately became the first necessity in Philadelphia.
+
+[Illustration: THE DINING ROOM, STENTON]
+
+The man who is preoccupied with his ancestors has a terrible faculty of
+becoming a snob, and Philadelphians for a while concerned themselves
+with little else. They devoted every hour of leisure to the study of
+genealogy, they besieged the Historical Society in search of
+inconsiderate ancestors who had neglected to make conspicuous figures of
+themselves and so had to be hunted up, they left no stone unturned to
+prove their Colonial descent. It must have been this period that my
+Brother, Grant Robins, irritated with our forefathers for their mistake
+in settling in Virginia half a century before there was a Philadelphia
+to settle in and then making a half-way halt in Maryland, hurried down
+to the Eastern Shore to get together what material he could to keep us
+in countenance in the town of my Grandfather's adoption. It was soothing
+to find more than one Robins among the earliest settlers of Virginia and
+mixed up with Virginia affairs at an agreeably early date. But what
+wouldn't I have given to see our name in a little square on one of the
+early maps of the City of Philadelphia as I have since seen J.'s? And
+the interest in ancestors spread, and no Englishman could ever have been
+so eager to prove that he came over with the Conqueror as every American
+was to show that he dated back to William Penn, or the first Virginia
+Company, or the Dutch, or the Mayflower; no Order of Merit or Legion of
+Honour could have conferred more glory on an American than a Colonial
+Governor in the family; no aristocracy was more exclusive than the
+American founded on the new societies of Colonial Dames and Sons and
+Daughters of Pennsylvania and of every other State.
+
+It was preposterous, I grant, in a country whose first article of faith
+is that all men are born equal, but Americans could have stood a more
+severe attack of snobbishness in those days, the prevailing attitude of
+Americans at home being not much less irreverent than that of the
+Innocents Abroad. In Philadelphia it was not so much irreverence as
+indifference. The habit of Philadelphians to depreciate their town and
+themselves, inordinate as, actually, was their pride in both, had not
+been thrown off. Why they ever got into the habit remains to me and to
+every Philadelphian a problem. Some think it was because the rest of the
+country depreciated them; some attribute it to Quaker influence, though
+how and why they cannot say; and some see in it the result of the
+Philadelphia exclusiveness that reduces the social life of Philadelphia
+to one small group in one small section of the town so that it is as
+small as village life, and has the village love of scandal, the village
+preoccupation with petty gossip, the little things at the front door
+blotting out the big things beyond. A more plausible reason is that
+Philadelphians were so innately sure of themselves--so sure that
+Philadelphia was _the_ town and Philadelphians _the_ aristocracy of the
+world--that they could afford to be indifferent. But whatever the cause,
+this indifference, this depreciation, was worse than a blunder, it was a
+loss in a town with a past so well worth looking into and being proud of
+and taking care of.
+
+A few Philadelphians had interested themselves in their past, otherwise
+the Historical Society would not have existed, but they were
+distressingly few. I can honestly say that up to the time of the
+Centennial it had never entered into my mind that the past in
+Philadelphia had a value for every Philadelphian and that it was every
+Philadelphian's duty to help preserve any record that might survive of
+it--that the State House, the old churches, the old streets where I took
+my daily walks were a possession Philadelphia should do its best not to
+part with--and I was such a mere re-echo of Philadelphia ideas and
+prejudices that I know most Philadelphians were as ignorant and as
+heedless. But almost the first effort of the new Dames and Sons and
+Daughters was to protect the old architecture, the outward sign and
+symbol of age and the aristocracy of age, and they made so much noise in
+doing so that even I heard it, even I became conscious of a research as
+keen for a past, or a genealogy in the familiar streets and the familiar
+buildings as in the archives of Historical Societies.
+
+If the Centennial had done no more for Philadelphia than to put
+Philadelphians to this work, it would have done enough. But it did do
+more. The pride of family, dismissed by many as pure snobbishness, awoke
+the sort of patriotism that Philadelphia, with all America, was most in
+need of if the real American was not to be swept away before the hordes
+of aliens beginning then to invade his country. In my opinion, the
+Colonial Dames, for all their follies, are doing far more to keep up the
+right American spirit than the flaunting of the stars and stripes in the
+alien's face and the lavishing upon him of the Government's paternal
+attention. The question is how long they can avoid the pitfall of
+exaggeration.
+
+
+IV
+
+If there was one thing in those days I knew less of than the past in
+Philadelphia, it was the present outside of it. Of my own country my
+knowledge was limited to an occasional trip to New York, an occasional
+visit to Richmond and Annapolis, an occasional summer month in Cape May
+and Atlantic City. Travelling is not for the poor. Rich Philadelphians
+travelled more, but from no keen desire to see their native land. The
+end of the journey was usually a social function in Washington or
+Baltimore, in New York or Boston, upon which their presence conferred
+distinction, though they would rather have dispensed with it than let it
+interfere with the always more important social functions at home. Or
+else the heat of summer drove them to those seashore and mountain
+resorts where they could count upon being with other Philadelphians, and
+the winter cold sent them in Lent to Florida, when it began to be
+possible to carry all Philadelphia there with them.
+
+[Illustration: DOWN THE AISLE AT CHRIST CHURCH]
+
+My knowledge of the rest of the world was more limited. I had been in
+France, but when I was such a child that I remembered little of it
+except the nuns in the Convent at Paris where I went to school, and the
+Garden of the Tuileries I looked across to from the Hotel Meurice. Nor
+had going abroad as yet been made a habit in Philadelphia. There was
+nothing against the Philadelphian going who chose to and who had the
+money. It defied no social law. On the contrary, it was to his social
+credit, though not indispensable as the Grand Tour was to the Englishman
+in the Eighteenth Century. I remember when my Grandfather followed the
+correct tourist route through England, France, and Switzerland, his
+children considered it an event of sufficient importance to be
+commemorated by printing, for family circulation, an elaborately got up
+volume of the eminently commonplace letters he had written home--a
+tribute, it is due to him to add, that met with his great astonishment
+and complete disapproval. I can recall my admiration for those of my
+friends who made the journey and my regret that I had made it when I was
+too young to get any glory out of it; also, my delight in the trumpery
+little alabaster figures from Naples and carved wood from Geneva and
+filigree jewellery from the Rue de Rivoli they brought me back from
+their journey: the wholesale distribution of presents on his return
+being the heavy tax the traveller abroad paid for the distinction of
+having crossed the Atlantic--a tax, I believe, that has sensibly been
+done away with since the Philadelphian's discovery of the German Bath,
+the London season, and the economy of Europe as reasons for going abroad
+every summer.
+
+I was scarcely more familiar with the foreigner than with his country.
+Philadelphia had Irish in plenty, as many Germans as beer saloons, or so
+I gathered from the names over the saloon doors, and enough Italians to
+sell it fruit and black its boots at street corners. But otherwise,
+beyond a rare Chinaman with a pigtail and a rarer Englishman on tour,
+the foreigner was seldom seen in Philadelphia streets or in Philadelphia
+parlours. In early days Philadelphia had been the first place the
+distinguished foreigner in the country made for. It was the most
+important town and, for a time, the capital. But after Washington
+claimed the diplomat and New York strode ahead in commerce and size and
+shipping, Philadelphia was too near each for the traveller to stop on
+his way between them, unless he was an actor, a lecturer, or somebody
+who could make money out of Philadelphia.
+
+I feel sorry for the sophisticated young Philadelphian of to-day who
+cannot know the emotion that was mine when, of a sudden, the Centennial
+dumped down "abroad" right into Philadelphia, and the foreigner was
+rampant. The modern youth saunters into a World's Fair as casually as
+into a Market Street or Sixth Avenue Department Store, but never had the
+monotony of my life been broken by an experience so extraordinary as
+when the easy-going street-car carried me out of my world of red brick
+into the heart of England, and France, and Germany, and Italy, and
+Spain, and China, and Japan, where I rubbed elbows with yellow Orientals
+in brilliant silks, and with soldiers in amazing uniforms--I who had
+seen our sober United States soldiers only on parade--and with people
+who, if they wore ordinary clothes, spoke all the languages under the
+sun. It was extraordinary even to meet so many Americans who were not
+Philadelphians, all talking American with to me a foreign accent,
+extraordinary to see such familiar things as china, glass, silks,
+stuffs, furniture, carpets, transformed into the unfamiliar, unlike
+anything I had ever seen in Chestnut Street windows or on Chestnut
+Street counters, so extraordinary that the most insignificant details
+magnified themselves into miracles, to the mere froth on top of the cup
+of Vienna coffee, to the fatuous song of a little Frenchman in a
+side-show, so that to this day, if I could turn a tune, I could still
+sing the "Ah! Ah! Nicolas!" of its foolish refrain.
+
+
+V
+
+Travelling, I should have seen all the Centennial had to show and a
+thousand times more, but slowly and by degrees, losing the sense of the
+miraculous with each new marvel. The Centennial came as one
+comprehensive revelation--overwhelming evidence that the Philadelphia
+way was not the only way. And this I think was a good thing for me, just
+as for Philadelphia it was a healthy stimulus. But the Centennial did
+not give me a new belief in exchange for the old; it did nothing to
+alter my life, nothing to turn my sluggish ambition into active
+channels. And big as it was, it was not as big as Philadelphia thought.
+I do believe that Philadelphians who had helped to make it the splendid
+success it proved, looked upon it as no less epoch-making than the
+Declaration of Independence which it commemorated. But epoch-making as
+it unquestionably was, it was not so epoch-making as all that. For some
+years Philadelphians had a way of saying "before" and "after" the
+Centennial, much as Southerners used to talk of "before" and "after" the
+War: with the difference that for Philadelphians all the good dated
+from "after." But manufacturing and commerce had been heard of "before."
+Cramp's shipyard did not wait for its first commission until the
+Centennial, neither did Baldwin's Locomotive Works, nor the factories in
+Kensington; Philadelphia was not so dead commercially that it was out of
+mere compliment important railroads made it the chief centre on their
+route. All large International Expositions are bound to do good by the
+increased knowledge that comes with them of what the world is producing
+and by the incentive this knowledge is to competition, and as the
+Centennial was the first held in America it probably accomplished more
+for the country than those that followed. But I do not have to be an
+authority on manufacture and commerce to see that they flourished before
+the Centennial; I have learned enough about art since to know that its
+existence was not first revealed to Philadelphia by the Centennial. The
+Exhibition had an influence on art which I am far from undervaluing. Its
+galleries of paintings and prints, drawings and sculptures, were an aid
+in innumerable ways to artists and students who previously had had no
+facilities for seeing a representative collection. It threw light on the
+arts of design for the manufacturer. But we knew a thing or two about
+beauty down in Philadelphia before 1876, though beauty was a subject to
+which we had ceased to pay much attention, and from the Centennial we
+borrowed too many tastes and standards that did not belong to us. It
+set Philadelphia talking an appalling lot of rubbish about art, and the
+new affectation of interest was more deplorable than the old frank
+indifference.
+
+[Illustration: THE BRIDGE ACROSS MARKET STREET FROM BROAD STREET
+STATION]
+
+I was as ignorant of art as the child unborn, but not more ignorant than
+the average Philadelphian. The old obligatory visits to the Academy had
+made but a fleeting impression and I never repeated them when the
+obligation rested solely with me. I had never met an artist, never been
+in a studio. The result was that the Art Galleries at the Centennial
+left me as blank and bewildered as the Hall of Machinery. Of all the
+paintings, the one I remembered was Luke Fildes's picture of a milkmaid
+which I could not forget because, in a glaring, plush-framed
+chromo-lithograph, it reappeared promptly in Philadelphia dining-and
+bedrooms, the most popular picture of the Centennial--a popularity in
+which I can discern no signs of grace. Nor can I discern them in the
+Eastlake craze, in the sacrifice of reps and rosewood to Morris and of
+Berlin work to crewels, in the outbreak of spinning-wheels and
+milking-stools and cat's tails and Japanese fans in the old simple,
+dignified Philadelphia parlour; in the nightmare of wall-papers with
+dadoes going half-way up the wall and friezes coming halfway down, and
+every square inch crammed full of pattern; in the pretence and excess of
+decoration that made the early Victorian ornament, we had all begun to
+abuse, a delight to the eye in its innocent unpretentiousness. And if to
+the Centennial we owe the multiplication of our art schools, how many
+more artists have come out of them, how much more work that counts?
+
+However, the good done by the Centennial is not to be sought in the
+solid profits and losses that can be weighed in a practical balance. It
+went deeper. Philadelphia was the better for being impressed with the
+reason of its own importance which it had taken on faith, and for being
+reminded that the world outside of Philadelphia was not a howling
+wilderness. I, individually, gained by the widening of my horizon and
+the stirring of my interest. But the Centennial did not teach me how to
+think about, or use, what I had learned from it. When it was at an end,
+I returned placidly to my occupation of doing nothing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X: THE MIRACLE OF WORK
+
+
+I
+
+In the story of my life in Philadelphia, and my love for the town which
+grew with my knowledge of it, my beginning to work was more than an
+awakening: it was an important crisis. For work first made me know
+Philadelphia as it is under the surface of calm and the beauty of age,
+first made me realize how much it offers besides the social adventure.
+
+Personally, the Centennial had left me where it found me. It had amused
+me vastly, but it had inspired me with no desire to make active use of
+the information and hints of which it had been so prodigal. My interest
+had been stimulated, awakened, but I did not know Philadelphia any the
+better for it, I did not love Philadelphia any the better. I had got no
+further than I was in my scheme of existence, into which work, or
+research, or interest, on my part had not yet entered, but I had reached
+a point where that aimless scheme was an insufferable bore. From the
+moment I began to work, I began to see everything from the standpoint of
+work, and it is wonderful what a fresh and invigorating standpoint it
+is. I began to see that everything was not all of course and matter of
+fact, that everything was worth thinking about. Work is sometimes said
+to help people to put things out of their minds, but it helps them more
+when it puts things into their minds, and this is what it did for me.
+Through work I discovered Philadelphia and myself together.
+
+
+II
+
+It strikes me as one of the little ironies of life that for the first
+inducement to work, and therefore the first incentive to my knowledge
+and love of Philadelphia, I should have been indebted to my Uncle,
+Charles Godfrey Leland, who, in 1880, when the Centennial excitement was
+subsiding, settled again in Philadelphia after ten years abroad, chiefly
+in England. Philadelphia welcomed him with its usual serenity, betrayed
+into no expression of emotion by the home-coming of one of its most
+distinguished citizens who, in London, had been received with the open
+arms London, in expansive moments, extends to the lion from America. The
+contrast, no doubt, was annoying, and my Uncle, of whom patience could
+not be said to be the predominating virtue, was accordingly annoyed and,
+on his side, betrayed into anything but a serene expression of his
+annoyance. Many smaller slights irritated him further until he worked
+himself up into the belief that he detested Philadelphia, and he was apt
+to be so outspoken in criticism that he succeeded in convincing me,
+anyway, that he did. Later, when I read his _Memoirs_, I found in them
+passages that suggest the charm of Philadelphia as it has not been
+suggested by any other writer I know of, and that he could not have
+written had he not felt for the town an affection strong enough to
+withstand that town's easy indifference. But during the few years he
+spent in Philadelphia after his return he was uncommonly successful in
+hiding his affection, a fact which did not add to his popularity.
+
+[Illustration: STATE HOUSE YARD]
+
+From his talk, I might have been expected to borrow nothing save dislike
+for Philadelphia. But his influence did not begin and end with his talk.
+There never was a man--except J.--who had such a contempt for idleness
+and such a talent for work. He could not endure people about him who did
+not work and, as I was anxious to enjoy as much of his company as I
+could, for I had found nobody in Philadelphia so entertaining, and as by
+work I might earn the money to pay for the independence I wanted above
+all things, I found myself working before I knew it.
+
+I had my doubts when he set me to drawing but, my time being wholly my
+own and frequently hanging drearily on my hands, my ineffectual attempts
+to make spirals and curves with a pencil on a piece of paper, attempts
+that could not by the wildest stretch of imagination be supposed to have
+either an artistic or a financial value, did not strike me as a
+disproportionate price for the pleasure and stimulus of his
+companionship. Besides, he held the comfortable belief that anybody who
+willed to do it, could do anything--accomplishment, talent, genius
+reduced by him to a question of will. His will and mine combined,
+however, could not make a decorative artist of me, but he was so kind
+as not to throw me over for ruthlessly shattering his favourite theory.
+He insisted that I should write if I could not draw.
+
+I had my doubts about writing too. I have confessed that I was not given
+to thinking and therefore I had nothing in particular to say, nor were
+words to say it in at my ready disposal, for, there being one or two
+masters of talk in the immediate home circle, I had cultivated to the
+utmost my natural gift of silence. Nor could I forget two literary
+ventures made immediately upon my leaving the Convent, before the
+blatant conceit of the prize scholar had been knocked out of me--one, an
+essay on Francois Villon, my choice of a maiden theme giving the measure
+of my intelligence, the second a short story re-echoing the last love
+tale I had read--both MSS., neatly tied with brown ribbon to vouch for a
+masculine mind above feminine pinks and blues, confidently sent to
+_Harper's_ and as confidently sent back with the Editor's thanks and no
+delay. But my Uncle would not let me off. I must stick at my task of
+writing or cease to be his companion, and so relapse into my old Desert
+of Sahara, thrown back into the colourless life of a Philadelphia girl
+who did not go out and who had waited to marry longer than her parents
+thought considerate or correct. Of all my sins, of none was I more
+guiltily conscious than my failure to oblige my family in this respect,
+for of none was I more frequently and uncomfortably reminded by my
+family. I scarcely ever went to see my Grandmother at this period that
+from her favourite perch on the landing outside the dining-room, she did
+not look at me anxiously and reproachfully and ask, "Any news for me, my
+dear?" and she did not have to tell me there was but one piece of news
+she cared to hear.
+
+Luckily, writing, my substitute for marriage, was an occupation I was
+free to take up if I chose, as the work it involved met with no
+objection from my Father. It was only when work took a girl where the
+world could not help seeing her at it, that the Philadelphia father
+objected. To write in the privacy of a third-story front bedroom, or of
+a back parlour, seemed a ladylike way of wasting hours that might more
+profitably have been spent in paying calls and going to receptions. If
+this waste met with financial return, it could be hushed up and the
+world be none the wiser. The way in which my friends used to greet me
+after I was fairly launched is characteristic of the Philadelphia
+attitude in the matter--"always scribbling away, I suppose?" they would
+say with amiable condescension.
+
+I could not dismiss my scribbling so jauntily. The record of my
+struggles day by day might help to keep out of the profession of
+journalism and book-making many a young aspirant as ardent as I was, and
+with as little to say and as few words to say it in. Experience has
+taught me to feel, much as Gissing felt, about the "heavy-laden who sit
+down to the cursed travail of the pen," but nobody could have made me
+feel that way then, and I am not sure I should care to have missed my
+struggles, exhausting and heart-rending as they were. During my
+apprenticeship when nothing, not so much as a newspaper paragraph, came
+from my mountain of labour, the Philadelphia surface of calm told
+gloomily on my nerves. Ready to lay the blame anywhere save on my
+sluggish brain, and moved by my Uncle's vehement denunciations, I vowed
+to myself a hundred times that a sleepy place, a dead place, like
+Philadelphia did not give anybody the chance to do anything. I changed
+my point of view when at last my "scribbling away" got into print.
+
+
+III
+
+My first appearance was with a chapter out of a larger work upon which I
+had been engaged for months. My Uncle, whose ideas were big, had
+insisted that I must begin straight off with a book, something
+monumental, a _magnum opus_; no writer was known who had not written a
+book; and to be known was half the battle. I was in the state of mind
+when I would have agreed to publish a masterpiece in hieroglyphics had
+he suggested it, and I arranged with him to set to work upon my book
+then and there, though I was decidedly puzzled to know with what it was
+to deal. I think he was too, my literary resources and tendencies not
+being of the kind that revealed themselves at a glance. But he declared
+that there was not a subject upon which a book could not be written if
+one only went about it in the right way, and in a moment of
+inspiration, seeking the particular subject suitable to my particular
+needs, he suddenly, and to me to this day altogether incomprehensibly,
+hit upon Mischief. There, now, was a subject to make one's reputation
+on, none could be more original, no author had touched it--what did I
+think of Mischief?
+
+What did I think? Had I been truthful, I should have said that I thought
+Mischief was the special attribute of the naughty child who was spanked
+well for it if he got his deserts. But I was not truthful. I said it was
+the subject of subjects, as I inclined to believe it was before I was
+done with it, by which time I had persuaded myself to see in it the one
+force that made the world go round--the incentive to evolution, the root
+of the philosophies of the ages, the clue to the mystery of life.
+
+My days were devoted to the study of Mischief and, for the purpose, more
+carefully divided up and regulated than they ever had been at the
+Convent. Hours were set aside for research--I see myself and my
+sympathetic Uncle overhauling dusty dictionaries and encyclopaedias at
+the long table in the balcony of the dusty Mercantile Library where
+nobody dreamed of disturbing us; I see him at my side during shorter
+visits to the Philadelphia Library where we were forever running up
+against people we knew who did disturb us most unconscionably; I see him
+tramping with me down South Broad Street to the Ridgway Library, that
+fine mausoleum of the great collections of James Logan and Dr. Rush,
+where our coming awoke the attendants and exposed their awkwardness in
+waiting upon unexpected readers, and brought Mr. Lloyd Smith out of his
+private room, excited and delighted actually to see somebody in the huge
+and well-appointed building besides himself and his staff. Hours were
+reserved for reading at home, for it turned out that I could not
+possibly arrive at the definition of Mischief without a stupendous
+amount of reading in a stupendous variety of books of any and all kinds
+from Mother Goose to the Vedas and the Koran, from Darwin to Eliphas
+Levi. Hours, and they were the longest, were consecrated to my
+writing-table, putting the results of research and reading into words,
+defining Mischief in its all-embracing, universe-covering aspect, hewing
+the phrases from my unwilling brain as the blocks of marble are hewn out
+of the quarry. As I write, my old MSS. rises before me like a ghost, a
+disorderly ghost, erased, rewritten, pieces added in, pieces cut out,
+every scratched and blotted line bearing testimony to the toil that
+produced it. I can see now that I would have done better to begin with a
+more obvious theme, coming more within my limited knowledge and
+vocabulary. My task was too laborious for the fine frenzy, or the
+inspired flights, reputed to be the reward of the literary life. It was
+all downright hard labour, and so coloured my whole idea of the business
+of writing, that I have never yet managed to sit down to my day's work
+without the feeling which I imagine must be the navvy's as he starts out
+for his day's digging in the streets.
+
+In the course of time order grew out of the chaos. A chapter of my
+monumental work on Mischief was finished. It was made ready in a neat
+copy with hardly an erasure and, having an air of completeness in
+itself, was sent as a separate article to _Lippincott's Magazine_, for I
+decided magnanimously that, as I was a Philadelphian, Philadelphia
+should have the first chance. I had no doubts of it as a prophetic
+utterance, as a world-convulsing message, but the Editor of
+_Lippincott's_ had. He refused it.
+
+How it hurt, that prompt refusal! All my literary hopes came toppling
+over and I saw myself condemned to the old idleness and dependence. But
+our spirits when we are young go up as quickly as they go down. I
+recalled stories I had heard of great men hawking about their MSS. from
+publisher to publisher. Carlyle, I said to myself, had suffered and
+almost every writer of note--it was a sign of genius to be refused.
+Therefore,--the logic of it was clear and convincing--the refusal proved
+me a genius! A more substantial reassurance was the publication of the
+same article, done over and patched up and with the fine title of
+_Mischief in the Middle Ages_, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ a very few
+months later. And when, on top of this, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the
+Editor of the _Atlantic_, wrote and told me he would be pleased to have
+further articles from me; when, in answer to a letter my Uncle had
+insisted on my writing. Oliver Wendell Holmes promised me his interest
+in Mischief as I proposed to define it. I saw the world at my feet
+where, to my sorrow, I have never seen it since that first fine moment
+of elation.
+
+The spectacle of myself in print set Philadelphia dancing before my eyes
+and turned the world a bit unsteady. But it did not relieve the labour
+of writing. Within the next year or two seven or eight chapters did get
+done and were published as articles in the _Atlantic_, but the world is
+still the poorer for the _magnum opus_ that was to bring me fame. The
+fact was that in the making, it brought me mighty little money. My first
+cheque only whetted my appetite, but, in fairness to myself I must
+explain, through no more sordid motive than my desire to become my own
+bread-winner. The newspapers offered a wider scope at less expense of
+time and labour, and my Uncle not only relaxed so far as to allow me
+intervals from the bigger undertaking for simpler tasks, but gave me the
+benefit of his experience as a newspaper man. In the old days, before he
+had gone to live in London, he had had the run of almost every newspaper
+office in town, and he opened their doors for me. Thanks to his
+introduction, Philadelphia, at this stage of my progress, conspired to
+put work into my hands, and writing for Philadelphia papers taught me in
+a winter more about Philadelphia than I had learned in all the years I
+had already spent there. I marvelled that I could have thought it dead
+when it was so alive. I seemed to feel it quiver under my feet at every
+step, shaking me into speed, and filling me with pity for the sedate
+pace at which my Father and the Philadelphians of his generation walked
+through its pulsating streets.
+
+
+IV
+
+My first newspaper commissions came from the _Press_ and adventure
+accompanied them--the adventure of business letters in my morning's
+mail, of proofs, of visits to the office--adventures that far too soon
+became the commonplaces of my busy days as journalist. But my outlook
+upon life in Philadelphia had, up till then, been bounded by the brick
+walls of a Spruce Street house, and the editorial office, that holds no
+surprise for me now, held nothing save surprise when I was first
+summoned to it. I was bewildered by the disorder, stunned by the
+noise--boys coming and going, letters and telegrams pouring in, piles of
+proofs mounting up on the desk, baskets overflowing with MSS., floors
+strewn with papers, machinery throbbing close by, a heavy smell of
+tobacco over everything, and in the midst of the confusion--lounging,
+working, answering questions, tearing open letters and telegrams,
+correcting proof, and yet managing to talk with me,--Moses P. Handy, the
+editor, a red man in my memory of him, red hair, red beard, red cheeks,
+whose cordiality I could not flatter myself was due to his eagerness for
+my contributions, so engrossed was he in talking of the Eastern Shore of
+Maryland from which he came and in which my family had made their
+prolonged stay on the way from Virginia to Philadelphia. The Eastern
+Shore may be a good place to come away from, but the native never
+forgets that he did come from it and he never fails to hail his fellow
+exile as brother.
+
+My next commission I owed to the _Evening Telegraph_, for which I made a
+remarkable journey to Atlantic City: a voyage of discovery, though the
+report of it did not paralyse the Philadelphia public. I was deeply
+impressed by my exercise of my faculty of observation thus tested on
+familiar ground, but I am afraid it left the Editor indifferent, and, as
+in his case the Eastern Shore was not a friendly link between us, he
+expressed no desire for a second article or for a second visit. I have
+regretted it since, the Editor being Clarke Davis, whom not to know was,
+I believe, not to have arrived so far in Philadelphia journalism as I
+liked to think I had.
+
+[Illustration: THE PENITENTIARY]
+
+A more remarkable journey followed to New York for I wish I could
+remember what paper; or perhaps it is just as well I cannot, the
+adventure adding to the reputation neither of the paper nor of myself.
+The object was to attend the press view of an important exhibition of
+paintings, and at that stage of my education I doubt if I could have
+told a Rembrandt from a Rubens, much less a Kenyon Cox from a Church, a
+Chase from a Blum, which was more immediately to the point. I had my
+punishment on the spot, for my hours in the Gallery may be counted the
+most humiliating of my life. My ignorance would not let me lose sight of
+it for one little second. J. had gone with me--how I came to know him I
+mean to tell further on--but he had no press ticket, a stern man at the
+door refused to admit him without one, and I was alone in my
+incompetency to wrestle with it as I could. Had he not returned with me
+to Philadelphia in the afternoon and devoted the interval in the train
+to throwing light upon my obscure and agonised notes, my copy could not
+have been delivered that evening as agreed. I know now that the paper
+would have come out all the same the next morning, but in my misery it
+did not seem possible that it could, and besides I was from the first,
+as through my many years of journalism, scrupulous to be on time with my
+copy and to keep to my agreements. That was my first experience in art
+criticism. I have tried to atone for it by years of conscientious work,
+but few Philadelphia papers can say as much for themselves. In those I
+see from time to time, the art criticism usually reads as if
+Philadelphia editors had lost nothing of their old amiability in handing
+it over to young ladies to get their journalistic training on.
+
+I was given also my chance in two newspaper ventures Philadelphia made
+in the early Eighteen-Eighties. One was the _American_, a weekly on the
+lines of the New York _Nation_. Mr. Howard Jenkins, the editor, sent me
+books for review, and not the first baby, not the first baby's first
+tooth, could be as extraordinary a phenomenon as the first book sent for
+the purpose from the editorial office. Mine, as I have never forgotten,
+as I never could forget, was Howard Pyle's _Robin Hood_, and when Mr.
+Jenkins wrote me that "Mr. Pyle's folks" were pleased with what I had
+written, I thought I had got to the very top of the tree of journalism.
+That I had got no further than a step from the bottom, and upon that had
+none too secure a foothold, I was reminded when the second book for
+review lay open before me.
+
+The other venture was _Our Continent_, also a weekly, but illustrated,
+edited by Judge Tourgee. Of my contributions, I remember chiefly an
+article on Shop Windows, which suggests that I was busy with what I
+might call a more pretentious kind of reporting. My subjects and my
+manner of treating them may have been what they were,--of no special
+value to anybody but myself. But to myself I cannot exaggerate their
+value. I was learning from them all the time.
+
+[Illustration: ON THE READING AT SIXTEENTH STREET]
+
+It was an education just to learn what a newspaper was. Heretofore I had
+accepted it as a thing that came of itself, arriving in the morning with
+the milk and the rolls for breakfast. I knew as little of its origin as
+the town boy knew of where the milk comes from in the _Punch_ story that
+I do not doubt was old when _Punch_ was young. Milk he had always seen
+poured from a can, our newspaper we had always had from the nearest
+news-agent. It was very simple. A newspaper appeared on the
+breakfast-table of a well-regulated Philadelphia house just as the water
+ran when the tap was turned on in the bath-room, or the gas burned when
+lit by a match. But after one article, after one visit to a newspaper
+office, after one journey to Atlantic City or New York, the newspaper
+did not seem so simple. I began to understand that it would not have
+got as far as Spruce Street had it not been for an army of people
+writing, printing, correcting proof, tearing from one end of the
+town--of the world--to the other; without colossal machinery throbbing
+night and day, without an immeasurable consumption of tobacco. I began
+to understand the organization required to bring the army of people and
+the colossal machines into such perfect harmony that the daily miracle
+of the newspaper on the breakfast-table might be worked--to understand
+too that the miracle-working organization had not been created in a day,
+that behind the daily paper was not merely the toiling of its staff and
+its machines but a long history of striving, experiment, development.
+
+I cannot say I went profoundly into the history, I was too engrossed in
+contributing my delightful share to the newspaper as it was, but to go
+superficially sufficed to show me in Philadelphia a spirit of enterprise
+altogether new to me. I had discovered only shortly before Philadelphia
+as the scene of the first Colonial Congress, and the Declaration of
+Independence, and the first big International Exposition in America, and
+now I added to these other discoveries the fact that Philadelphia had
+been the first American town to publish a daily paper, the last
+discovery bringing me face to face with Benjamin Franklin who, it
+appeared, besides flying that tiresome kite and being the ancestor of
+Mrs. Gillespie, was the first printer and publisher of the paper that
+set an example for all America. Tranquil the Philadelphian was by
+repute, but he rolled up his sleeves and pitched in when the moment
+came. Philadelphia's famous calm was but skin deep over its seething
+mass of workers, its energy, its toiling, its triumph. When I reflected
+on what was going on at night in every newspaper office in town, it
+seemed to me as unbelievable that, on the verge of this volcano of work,
+Philadelphians could keep on dancing at parties, at the Dancing Class,
+at the Assembly, as that men and women should have danced at Brussels on
+the eve of Waterloo. And newspaper-making was one only of Philadelphia's
+innumerable industries. That thought gave me the scale of the labour
+that goes to keep the machinery of life running.
+
+
+V
+
+Of some of the other industries I got to know a little. My Uncle who, as
+I have said, was a man of ideas and who had his fair proportion of
+Philadelphia energy, included among his many interests the subject of
+education. He deplored existing systems and methods. My belief is that
+the systems and methods might be of the best and education would still
+be a mistake, vulgarizing the multitude to whom it does not belong and
+encouraging in them a prejudice against honest work. My Uncle did not
+think as I do,--that I do not think now as he did frightens me as a
+disloyalty to his memory. But he could not overlook the distaste for
+manual work that had grown out of too much attention to books and as he
+never let his theories exhaust themselves in words, he lost no time in
+persuading the Board of Education to put this particular one to a
+practical test. Doubts of their methods had assailed the Board, but no
+way out of the difficulty had been suggested until he came and said,
+"Set your children, your boys and girls, who are forgetting how to use
+their hands, to work at the Minor Arts." It struck them as a suggestion
+that warranted the experiment anyway, especially as the cost would be
+comparatively small. My Uncle had been back in Philadelphia not much
+more than a year when classes were put in his charge and a
+schoolroom--the school-house at Broad and Locust--at his disposal, and
+he inaugurated the study of the Arts and Crafts in Philadelphia with the
+Industrial Art School, as he had in London with the Home Arts. His sole
+payment was the pleasure of the experiment, a pleasure which few
+theorists succeed in securing. I, however, was paid by the City in solid
+dollars and cents for the fine amateurish inefficiency with which I
+helped him to manage the classes, recommended by him, whose
+consideration was as practical for my pockets which the _Atlantic_,
+backed by newspapers, had not filled to repletion.
+
+[Illustration: LOCUST STREET EAST FROM BROAD STREET]
+
+This is not the place for the history of his experiment. It is known.
+The school has passed from the experimental stage into a permanent
+institution, though in the passing my Uncle has been virtually
+forgotten,--often the fate of the man who sets a ball of reform rolling.
+Of all this I have elsewhere made the record. I am at present concerned
+with the influence the school had upon me and the unexpected extent to
+which it widened my knowledge of Philadelphia and Philadelphia
+activities.
+
+How Philadelphia was educated was not a question that had kept me awake
+at nights. The Philadelphia girl of my acquaintance, if a day scholar,
+went naturally to Miss Irwin's or to Miss Annabel's in town; if a
+boarder perhaps to Miss Chapman's at Holmesburg or Mrs. Comegys at
+Chestnut Hill; unless her parents were converts or Catholics by birth
+when she went instead to the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Torresdale
+or in Walnut Street. The Philadelphia boy began with the Episcopal
+Academy and finished with the University of Pennsylvania. Friends went
+to the Friends' School in Germantown, and to Swarthmore and Haverford.
+What others did, did not matter. I had heard there were public or free
+schools where children could go for nothing, but nobody to my knowledge
+went to them. With what insolence we each of us, in our own little
+fraction of the world, think everybody outside of it nobody! But up in
+the top story rooms of the school-house at Broad and Locust, where my
+work took me two afternoons in the week, I found myself the centre of a
+vast network of schools! High Schools, Grammar Schools, Primary Schools,
+Scholarships, more divisions and subdivisions than I could count; with
+teachers--for there was a class for teachers--and pupils coming from
+every ward and suburb, every street and alley of the town; a School
+Board keeping a watchful eye upon schools and teachers, not leaving me
+out; and all about me a vast population without one idea or interest
+except the education of Philadelphia. And this implied, like the
+newspaper, a perfect organization of its own to keep the whole thing
+going--an organization that never could have been born in a day. The
+education of Philadelphia had absorbed a vast population since
+Philadelphia was: the first Philadelphia children hardly escaping from
+their cave dwellings before they were hurried into school to have their
+poor little minds trained and disciplined. Really, in my first days of
+work, life was a succession of startling discoveries about Philadelphia.
+
+I could not get paid for my afternoons at the school, which I ought to
+have paid for considering the education they were to me, without making
+another discovery. The pay came monthly from the City in the form of a
+warrant, or so I believe it is called. As I have explained that I had
+never been possessed of money of my own, some allowance will be made for
+my stupidity in thinking it necessary to cash the warrant in person. It
+never occurred to me to open a bank account or to ask my Father to
+exchange the warrant for money. I went myself to the office in the big,
+new, unfinished City Hall--how well I remember, when I was kept waiting
+which was always, my conscientiousness in jotting down elaborate notes
+of windows and doors and upholstery and decoration: Zola in France and
+Howells at home having made Realism the literary fashion, and Realism,
+I gathered, being achieved only by way of jotting down endless notes in
+every situation in which I found myself; especially as J. had brought
+back from Italy exemplary and inspiring tales of Vernon Lee (Violet
+Paget) and Mary Robinson (Mme. Duclaux), with whom he had worked and
+travelled, filling blank books with memoranda collected from the windows
+of every train they took and every hotel in which they stayed.
+
+I am glad I was stupid, such a good thing for me was this going in
+person, such a suggestive lesson in City Government which I learned was
+as little of an automatic arrangement as education and the newspaper,
+and not necessarily something that all decent people should be ashamed
+of being mixed up with, the way my Father and the old-fashioned
+Philadelphian of his type looked upon it and every other variety of
+Government. It was just another huge, busy, striving, toiling
+organization, so huge as to fit with difficulty into the enormous ugly
+new buildings, then recently set down for it in Penn Square with
+complete indifference to Penn's plan for his green country town, or to
+get its work done in the maze of courts and passages and offices by the
+hordes of big and little officials no less preoccupied in City
+Government than journalists in their newspaper, or teachers in their
+school, or--outrageous as it may sound--society in the Assembly and
+Dancing Class and the things which I had been brought up to believe the
+beginning and end of existence on this earth.
+
+[Illustration: BROAD STREET, LOOKING SOUTH FROM ABOVE ARCH STREET]
+
+My new knowledge of Philadelphia was widened in various other directions
+as time went on. My Uncle's experiment, when it took practical shape,
+attracted attention and he was asked to lecture on it in places like the
+Franklin Institute--there was no keeping away very long from Benjamin
+Franklin in Philadelphia once I got to know anything about
+Philadelphia--and to visit institutions like Moyamensing Prison or
+Kirkbride's Insane Asylum that he might consider the advisability of
+introducing his scheme of manual work for the benefit of the insane and
+the criminal. I usually accompanied him on these occasions, and before
+he had got through his rounds I had seen a number of different phases of
+Philadelphia activity and enterprise and power of organization. I had
+been given some idea of the armies of doctors and nurses and scientists
+who had made Kirkbride's a model throughout the land, while Dr. Albert
+Smith had helped me to an additional insight into the hospitals that set
+as excellent an example. I had been given an idea of the armies of
+judges and juries and police and governors and warders and visiting
+inspectors,--of whom my Father was one, with a special tenderness for
+murderers whom he used to take his family to visit--at Moyamensing. And
+from the combination of all my new experiences I had gained further
+knowledge of the energies at work beyond the limits of "Chestnut,
+Walnut, Spruce and Pine" to make Philadelphia what it was.
+
+
+VI
+
+I ought to have needed no guide to the knowledge and appreciation of
+these things, it may be said. I admit it. But the happy mortals who are
+born observant do not picture to themselves the tortures gone through by
+those who must have observation thrust upon them before they begin to
+use their eyes. I had not been born to observe, I had not been trained
+to observe, and to become observant I had to go through the sort of
+practical course Mr. Squeers set to his boys. His method, denounce it as
+you will, has its merits. The students of Dotheboys Hall could never
+have forgotten what a window is or what it means to clean it. I had
+grown up to accept life as a pageant for me to look on at, with no part
+to play in it. After my initiation into work, I could never forget, in
+the quietest, emptiest sections of the town, not even in placid little
+backwaters like Clinton Street and De Lancey Place, the machinery
+forever crashing and grinding and roaring to produce the pageant, to
+weave for Philadelphia the beautiful serenity it wore like a garment. I
+could never forget that, insignificant as my share in the machinery
+might be, all the same I was contributing something to make it go. I
+could never be sure that everybody I met, however calm in appearance,
+might not be as mixed up in the great machine of work as I was beginning
+to be.
+
+[Illustration: CLINTON STREET, WITH THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL AT ITS
+END]
+
+I had to work to learn that Philadelphia had worked, and still worked,
+and worked so well as to be the first to have given America much that
+is best and most vital in the country--the first to show the right way
+with its schools and hospitals and libraries and newspapers and
+galleries and museums, the leader in the fight for liberty of
+conscience, the scene of the first Colonial Congress and the signing of
+the Declaration of Independence and the Centennial Exposition to
+commemorate it, a pioneer in science and industry and manufacture--a
+town upon which all the others in the land could not do better than
+model themselves--while all the time it maintained its fine air of calm
+that perplexes the stranger and misleads the native. But I had found it
+out, found out its greatness, before age had dimmed my perceptions and
+dulled my power of appreciation; and to find Philadelphia out is to love
+it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI: THE ROMANCE OF WORK
+
+
+I
+
+I was still in the stage of wonder and joy at seeing myself in print,
+when work and Philadelphia joined in the most unlooked for manner to
+help me tell my Grandmother that "something" she was so anxiously
+waiting to hear. An article on Philadelphia which an intelligent Editor
+asked me to write was my introduction to J. The town that we both love
+first brought us together, as it now brings us back to it together after
+the many years that have passed since it laid the foundation of our long
+partnership.
+
+[Illustration: THE CHERRY STREET STAIRS NEAR THE RIVER]
+
+I would say nothing about the article at this late date had it not added
+so materially to my life and to my knowledge of Philadelphia. I am not
+proud of it as a piece of literary work. But it seems, as I recall the
+days of my apprenticeship, to mark the turning of the ways, to point to
+the new road I was destined to take. I got it out the other day, the
+first time in over a quarter of a century, proposing to reprint it,
+thinking the contrast between my impressions of Philadelphia thirty
+years ago and my impressions of Philadelphia to-day might be amusing. In
+memory, it had remained a brilliant performance, one any editor would be
+pleased to jump at, and I was astonished to find it youthful and crude,
+inarticulate, inadequate not only to the subject itself but to my
+appreciation of the subject which at the time was unbounded. I do not
+know whether to be more amazed at my failure in it to say what I wanted
+to say, or at the Editor's amiability in publishing it. The article may
+not have lost all its eloquence for me, since between the halting lines
+I can read the story I did not know how to tell, but for others it would
+prove a dull affair and it is best left where it is, forgotten in the
+old files of a popular magazine.
+
+The story I read is one of a series of discoveries with a romance in
+each. The way the article came about was that J. had made etchings of
+Philadelphia, and the Editor, who had wisely arranged to use them,
+thought they could not be published without accompanying text. When he
+asked me, as a young Philadelphian just beginning to write, to supply
+this text, he advised me to consult with J., whom I did not know and
+whose studio address he gave me.
+
+I was thrilled by the prospect, never having been in a studio nor met an
+artist, and when it turned out not half so simple as it looked on paper,
+when the first catching my artist was attended with endless delays and
+difficulties, it did not lessen the thrill or take away from the sense
+of adventure.
+
+J.'s studio, which he shared with Mr. Harry Poore, was at the top of
+what was then the Presbyterian Building on Chestnut Street above
+Thirteenth, quite new and of tremendous height at a time when the
+sky-scraper had not been invented nor the elevator become a necessity
+of Philadelphia life. Day after day, varying the hour with each attempt,
+now in the morning, now at noon, now toward evening, I toiled up those
+long flights of stairs, marvelling at the strange, unaccountable
+disclosures through half-opened studio doors, for it was a building of
+studios; glad of the support of my Uncle who was seeing me through this,
+as he saw me through all my earliest literary enterprises; arriving at
+the top, breathless and panting, only to be informed by a notice,
+written on paper and pinned on the tight-locked door, that J. was out
+and would be back in half an hour. My Uncle and I were inclined to
+interpret this literally, once or twice waiting trustingly on the dark
+landing some little while beyond the appointed time. On one occasion I
+believe the door was opened, when we knocked, by Mr. Poore who was not
+sure of the length of a half hour as J. reckoned it, but had an idea it
+might vary according to circumstances, especially now that J. was out of
+town. I went away not annoyed as I should be to-day, but more stirred
+than ever by the novelty of the adventure.
+
+[Illustration: THE MORRIS HOUSE ON EIGHTH STREET]
+
+At last I tied J. down by an appointment, as I should have done at the
+start, and he, having returned to town, kept it to the minute. I think
+from first to last of this astonishing business I had no greater shock
+of astonishment than when I followed him into his studio. We were in the
+Eighteen-Eighties then, when American magazines and newspapers were
+making sensational copy out of the princely splendour of the London
+studios, above all of Tadema's, Leighton's, Millais': palatial
+interiors, hung with priceless tapestries, carpeted with rare Oriental
+rugs, shining with old brass and pottery and armour, opening upon
+Moorish courts, reached by golden stairs, fragrant with flowers, filled
+with soft couches and luxurious cushions--flamboyant, exotic interiors
+that would not have disgraced Ouida's godlike young Guardsmen but that
+scarcely seemed to belong to men who made their living by the work of
+their hands. Indeed, it was their splendour that misled so many
+incompetent young men and women of the later Victorian age into the
+belief that art was the easiest and most luxurious short cut to wealth.
+But there was nothing splendid or princely about J.'s studio. It was
+frankly a workshop, big and empty, a few unframed drawings and life
+studies stuck up on the bare walls, the floors carpetless, for furniture
+an easel or two and a few odd rickety chairs--a room nobody would have
+dreamed of going into except for work. But then, my first impression of
+J. was of a man who did not want to do anything except work.
+
+My experience had been that people--if I leave out my Uncle--worked, not
+because they wanted to but because they had to and that, sceptical as
+they might be on every other Scriptural point, they were not to be
+shaken out of their belief in work as a curse inherited from Adam. J.,
+evidently, would have found the curse in not being allowed to work. And
+as new to me was the enthusiasm with which, while he showed me his
+prints and drawings, he began to talk about Philadelphia and its beauty.
+It was unusual for Philadelphians to talk about their town at all; if
+they did, it was more unusual for them to talk with enthusiasm; and the
+interest in it forced upon them by the Centennial had been for every
+quality rather than its beauty. Even my Uncle--though later, in his
+_Memoirs_, he wrote charmingly of the charm of Philadelphia--at that
+time affected to admire nothing in it except the unsightly arches of the
+Pennsylvania Railroad, bridging the streets between the Schuylkill and
+the Station, and if he made the exception in their favour, it was
+because they reminded him of London. Thanks to the Centennial and the
+stimulus of hard work, I was not as ignorant of Philadelphia as I had
+been, but I was not rid of the old popular fallacy that the American in
+search of beauty must cross the Atlantic and go to Europe. And here was
+J., in five minutes telling me more about Philadelphia than I had
+learned in a lifetime, revealing to me in his drawings the beauty of
+streets and houses I had not had the wit to find out for myself, firing
+me with sudden enthusiasm in my turn, convincing me that nothing in the
+world counted but Philadelphia, opening my eyes to its unsuspected
+resources, so that after this I could walk nowhere without visions of
+romance where all before had been everyday commonplace, leaving me eager
+and impatient to start on my next journey of discovery which was to be
+in his company.
+
+
+II
+
+To illustrate our article--for _ours_ it had become--J. passed over the
+obvious picturesqueness of Philadelphia--the venerable Pennsylvania
+Hospital, the beautiful State House, Christ Church, the Old Swedes, St.
+Peter's--buildings for which Philadelphia, after years of indifference,
+had at last been exalted by the Centennial into historic monuments, the
+show places of the town, labelled and catalogued--buildings of which J.
+had already made records, having begun his work by drawing them, his
+plate of the State House among the first he ever etched. He now went in
+preference to the obscure by-ways, to the unpretending survivals of the
+past, so merged, so swallowed up in the present, that it needed keen
+eyes to detect them: old buildings stamped with age, but too humble in
+origin for the Centennial to have resurrected; busy docks, grimy river
+banks, crazy old rookeries abandoned to the business and poverty that
+claimed them: to the strange, neglected, never-visited corners of a
+great town where beauty springs from the rich soil of labour and chance,
+neglect and decay.
+
+How little I had known of Philadelphia up till then! One of the very
+first places to which he took me was the old Second Street Market that,
+when I lived within a stone's throw of it, I had never set my eyes
+on--the old market that, south of Pine, forces Second Street to widen
+and make space for it and that turns the gable of the little old Court
+House directly north, breaking the long vista of the street as St.
+Clement's and St. Mary's in London break the vista of the Strand--the
+old market that I believe the city proposes to pull down, very likely
+will have pulled down before these lines are in print, though there is
+not a Philadelphian who would not go into ecstasies over as shabby and
+down-at-the-heel Eighteenth Century building if stumbled upon in an
+English country town. And as close to his old family home and mine J.
+led me into inn yards that might have come straight from the Borough on
+the Surrey side of the Thames, and in and out of dark mysterious courts
+which he declared as "good" as the exploited French and Italian courts
+every etcher has at one time or another made a plate of--curious nooks
+and by-ways I had never stopped to look at during my Third Street days
+and would have seen nothing in if I had.
+
+And I remember going with him along Front Street, where I should have
+thought myself contaminated at a time when it might have varied the dull
+round of my daily walks, so unlike was it to the spick and span streets
+I knew,--glimpses at every crossing of the Delaware, Philadelphia's
+river of commerce that Philadelphians never went near unless to take the
+boat for Torresdale or, in summers of economy, the steamer for
+Liverpool; for several blocks, groups of seafaring men mending sails on
+the side-walk, Mariners' Boarding-Houses, a Mariners' Church, and
+Philadelphia here the seaport town it is and always has been; and then,
+successive odours of the barnyard, fish, spice, coffee, Philadelphia
+smelling as strong of the romance of trade as any Eastern bazaar.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD COACHING-INN YARD]
+
+And I remember J. and I crossing the forbidden line into "up town" to
+find beauty, interest, picturesqueness in "Market, Arch, Race and
+Vine"--old houses everywhere, the old Meeting-House, Betsy Ross' house,
+Provost Smith's, the Christ Church Burial Ground at Fifth and Arch where
+Franklin is buried, narrow rambling alleys, red and black brick, and
+there, up on a house at the corner of Front, where it is to this day, a
+sign going back to the years when Race was still Sassafras Street, and
+so part of the original scheme of Philadelphia, to which, with
+Philadelphia docility, I had all my life believed South of Market alone
+could claim the right.
+
+And I remember our wandering to the Schuylkill, not by the neat and
+well-kept roads and paths of the Park, but where tumbled-down houses
+faced it near Callowhill Street Bridge and works of one kind or another
+rose from its banks near Gray's Ferry, and Philadelphia was a town of
+industry, of machines, of railroads connecting it with all parts of the
+world,--for already to J. "the Wonder of Work" had made its irresistible
+appeal. And I remember our wandering farther, north and south, east and
+west--interest, beauty, picturesqueness never failing us--in the end
+Philadelphia transformed into a vast Wonderland, where in one little
+section people might spend their lives dancing, paying calls at noon,
+eating chicken salad and croquettes from Augustine's, but where in every
+other they were striving, struggling, toiling, to carry on Penn's
+traditions and to give to his town the greatness, power and beauty he
+planned for it.
+
+In these walks I had followed J. into streets and quarters of the town I
+had not known. But I would be leaving out half the story if I did not
+say how much he showed me in the streets and quarters I did know. It is
+with a town, I suppose, as with life out of which, philosophers say, we
+get just as much, or as little, as we bring to it. I had brought no
+curiosity, no interest, no sympathy, to Philadelphia, and Philadelphia
+therefore had given me nothing save a monotony of red brick and green
+shade. But now I came keen with curiosity, full of interest, aflame with
+sympathy, and Philadelphia overwhelmed me with its gifts. Oh, the
+difference when, having eyes, one sees! I was as surprised to learn that
+I had been living in the midst of beauty all my life as M. Jourdain was
+to find he had been talking prose.
+
+Down in lower Spruce and all the neighbouring streets, where I had
+walked in loneliness longing for something to happen, something happened
+at every step--beautiful Colonial houses, stately doorways, decorative
+ironwork, dormer windows, great gables facing each other at street
+corners, harmonious proportions--not merely a bit here and a bit there,
+but the old Colonial town almost intact, preserved by Philadelphia
+through many generations only to be abandoned now to the Russian Jew and
+the squalor and the dirt that the Russian Jew takes with him wherever
+he goes. In not another American town had the old streets then changed
+so little since Colonial days, in not another were they so well worth
+keeping unchanged. I had not to dive into musty archives to unearth the
+self-evident fact that the early Friends, when they left England, packed
+up with their liberty of conscience the love of beauty in architecture
+and, what was more practical, the money to pay for it; that, in a fine
+period of English architecture, they got good English architects,--Wren
+said to have been of the number--to design not merely their public
+buildings, but their private houses; that, their Founder setting the
+example, they carried over in their personal baggage panelling,
+carvings, ironwork, red and black brick, furniture, and the various
+details they were not likely to procure in Philadelphia until
+Philadelphians had moved from their caves and the primeval forest had
+been cut down; that when Philadelphia could contribute its share of the
+work, they modified the design to suit climate, circumstances, and
+material, and bequeathed to us a Philadelphia with so much local
+character that it never could be mistaken for an English town.
+
+This used to strike the intelligent foreigner as long as Philadelphia
+was content to have a character of its own and did not bother to be in
+architectural or any other movements. "Not a distressingly new-looking
+city, for the Queen Anne style in vogue when its prosperity began is in
+the main adhered to with Quaker-like precision; good red brick; numerous
+rather narrow windows with white outside shutters, a block cornice along
+the top of the facades and the added American feature of marble steps
+and entry,"--this, in a letter to William Michael Rossetti, was Mrs.
+Gilchrist's description of Philadelphia in the late Eighteen-Seventies,
+and it is an appreciative description though most authorities would
+probably describe Philadelphia as Georgian rather than Queen Anne.
+Philadelphia did more to let the old character go to rack and ruin
+during the years I was away from it than during the two centuries
+before, and is to-day repenting in miles upon miles of sham Colonial.
+But repentance cannot wipe away the traces of sin--cannot bring back the
+old Philadelphia I knew.
+
+[Illustration: FRANKLIN'S GRAVE]
+
+I do not want to attribute too much to my new and only partially
+developed power of observing. Had the measuring worm not retreated
+before the sparrow, I might perhaps have been less prepared during my
+walks with J. to admit the beauty of the trees lining every street, as
+well as of the houses they shaded. But what is the use of troubling
+about the might-have-been? The important thing is that, with him I did
+for the first time see how beautiful are our green, well-shaded streets.
+With him too I first saw how beautiful is their symmetry as they run in
+their long straight lines and cross each other at right angles. It was a
+symmetry I had confused with monotony, with which most Philadelphians,
+foolishly misled, still confuse it. They would rather, for the sake of
+variety, that Penn had left the building and growth of Philadelphia to
+chance as the founders of other American towns did--they would rather
+boast with New York or Boston of the disorderly picturesqueness of
+streets that follow old cow tracks made before the town was. But Penn
+understood the value of order in architecture as in conduct. It is true
+that Ruskin, the accepted prophet of my young days, did not include
+order among his Seven Lamps, but there was a good deal Ruskin did not
+know about architecture, and a town like Paris in its respect for
+arrangement--for order--for a thought-out plan--will teach more at a
+glance than all his rhapsodies. Philadelphia has not the noble
+perspectives of the French capital nor the splendid buildings to
+complete them, but its despised regularity gives it the repose, the
+serenity, which is an essential of great art, whether the art of the
+painter or the engraver, the sculptor or the architect. And it gives,
+too, a suggestiveness, a mystery we are more apt to seek in
+architectural disorder and caprice. I know nobody who has pointed out
+this beauty in Penn's design except Mrs. Gilchrist in the description
+from which I have already borrowed, and she merely hints at the truth,
+not grasping it. Philadelphia to her was more picturesque and more
+foreign-looking than she expected, and her explanation is in the "long
+straight streets at right angles to each other, long enough and broad
+enough to present that always pleasing effect of vista-converging lines
+that stretch out indefinitely and look as if they must certainly lead
+somewhere very pleasant," the streets that are to the town what "the
+open road" is to the country,--the long, white, straight road beckoning
+who can say where?
+
+
+III
+
+It was without the slightest intention on my part that the
+vista-converging lines of the streets led me direct to William Penn. But
+I defy anybody to do a little thinking while walking through the streets
+of Philadelphia and not be led to him, so for eternity has he stamped
+them with his vivid personality--not William Penn, the shadowy prig of
+the school history, but William Penn, the man with a level head, big
+ideas, and the will to carry them out--three things that make for
+genius. To the weakling of to-day the fight for liberty of conscience
+would loom up so gigantic a task as to fill to overflowing his little
+span here below. But in the fight as Penn fought it, the material
+details could be overlooked as little as the spiritual, the comfort of
+the bodies of his people no more neglected than the freedom of their
+souls. He did not stop to preach about town-planning and garden cities,
+and improved housing for the workman, like the would-be reformer of
+to-day. With no sentimental pose as saviour of the people, no drivel
+about reforming and elevating and sweetening the lives of humanity, no
+aspiration towards "world-betterment," Penn made sure that Philadelphia
+should be the green town he thought it ought to be and that men and
+women, whatever their appointed task, should have decent houses to live
+in. He had the common-sense to understand that his colonists would be
+the sturdier and the better equipped for the work they had to do if they
+lived like men and not like beasts, and that a town as far south as
+Philadelphia called for many gardens and much green shade. The most
+beautiful architecture is that which grows logically out of the needs of
+the people. That is why Penn's city as he designed it was and is a
+beautiful city, to which English and German town reformers should come
+for the hints Philadelphians are so misguided as to seek from them.
+
+I could not meet Penn in his pleasant streets and miss the succession of
+Friends who took over the responsibility of ensuring life and reality to
+his design, not allowing it, like Wren's in London, to lapse into a
+half-forgotten archaeological curiosity. Personally. I knew nothing of
+the Friends and envied J. who did because he was one of them, as I never
+could be, as nobody, not born to it, can. I had seen them, as alas! they
+are seen no longer: quiet, dignified men in broad-brimmed hats,
+sweet-faced women in delicate greys and browns, filling our streets in
+the spring at the time of Yearly Meeting. Once or twice I had seen them
+at home, the women in white caps and fichus, quiet and composed, sitting
+peacefully in their old-time parlours simple and bare but filled with
+priceless Sheraton or Chippendale. They looked, both in the open streets
+and at their own firesides, so placid, so detached from the world's
+cares, it had not occurred to me that they could be the makers of the
+town's beauty and the sinews of its strength. But in my new mood I could
+nowhere get far from them.
+
+Ghosts of the early Friends haunted the old streets and the old houses
+and, mingling with them, were ghosts of the World's People who had lost
+no time in coming to share their town and ungraciously abuse the
+privilege. The air was thick with association. J. and I walked in an
+atmosphere of the past, delightfully conscious of it but never troubling
+to reduce it to dry facts. We could not have been as young as we were
+and not scorn any approach to pedantry, not as lief do without ghosts as
+to grub them up out of the Philadelphia Library or the Historical
+Society. We left it to the antiquary to say just where the first Friends
+landed and the corner-stone of their first building was laid, just in
+which Third Street house Washington once danced, in which Front Street
+house Bishop White once lived. It was for the belated Boswell, not for
+us, to follow step by step the walks abroad of Penn, or Franklin, or any
+of our town's great men. It was no more necessary to be historians in
+order to feel the charm of the past than to be architects in order to
+feel the charm of the houses, and for no amount of exact knowledge would
+we have exchanged the romance which enveloped us.
+
+[Illustration: ARCH STREET MEETING]
+
+Could I have put into words some of the emotion I felt in gathering
+together my material, what an article I would have made! But my words
+came with difficulty, and indeed I have never had the "ready pen" of the
+journalist, always I have been shy in expressing emotion of any kind. No
+reader could have guessed from my article my enthusiasm as I wrote it.
+But at least it did get written and my pleasure in it was not disturbed
+by doubt. I was too enthralled by what I had to say to realize that I
+had not managed to say it at all.
+
+
+IV
+
+With the publication of the article our task was at an end, but not our
+walks together. J. and I had got into the habit of them, it was a
+pleasant habit, we saw no reason to give it up.
+
+Sometimes we walked with new work as an object. There were articles
+about Philadelphia for _Our Continent_. We called it work--learning
+Romany--when we both walked with my Uncle up Broad Street to Oakdale
+Park, and through Camden and beyond to the Reservoir, where the Gypsies
+camped, and made Camden in my eyes, not the refuge of all in doubt,
+debt, or despair as its traditions have described it, but a rival in
+romance of Bagdad or Samarcand. When we walked still further, taking the
+train to help us out, to near country towns for the autumn fairs, never
+missing a side show, we called this the search for local colour, and I
+filled note-books with notes. Sometimes we walked for no more practical
+purpose than pleasure in Philadelphia. And we could walk for days, we
+could walk for miles, and exhaust neither the pleasure nor the town that
+I once fancied I knew by heart if I walked from Market to Pine and from
+the Delaware to the Schuylkill.
+
+I remember as a remarkable incident my discovery of the suburbs. With
+the prejudice borrowed from my Father, I had cultivated for all
+suburbs something of the large sweeping contempt which, in the
+Eighteen-Nineties, Henley and the _National Observer_, carrying on the
+tradition of Thackeray, made it the fashion to profess for the suburbs
+of London. West Philadelphia and Germantown were no less terms of
+opprobrium in my mouth than Clapham and Brixton in Henley's. But Henley,
+though it was a mistake to insist upon Clapham with its beautiful Common
+and old houses and dignified air, was expressing his splendid scorn of
+the second-rate, the provincial, in art and in letters. I was only
+expressing, parrot-like, a pose that did not belong to me, but to my
+Father in whose outlook upon life and things there was a whimsical
+touch, and who carried off' his prejudices with humour.
+
+[Illustration: CLIVEDEN, THE CHEW HOUSE]
+
+I was the more foolish in this because few towns, if any, have lovelier
+suburbs than Philadelphia. Their loveliness is another part of our
+inheritance from William Penn who set no limits to his dream of a green
+country town, and from the old Friends who, in deference to his desire,
+lined not only their streets but their roads with trees. This is only
+as it should be, I thought when, reading the letters of John Adams, I
+came upon his description of the road to Kensington and beyond,
+"straight as the streets of Philadelphia, on each side ... beautiful
+rows of trees, button-woods, oaks, walnuts, cherries, and willows." In
+our time, scarcely a road out of Philadelphia is without the same
+beautiful rows, if not the same variety in the trees, and while much of
+the open country it ran through in John Adams' day has been built up
+with town and suburban houses, the trees still line it on each side.
+Everybody knows the beauty of the leafy roads of the Main Line, quite a
+correct thing to know, the Main Line being the refuge of the
+Philadelphian pushed out of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine" by
+business and the Russian Jew combined. But the Main Line has not the
+monopoly of suburban beauty, though it may of suburban fashion. The Main
+Street in Germantown, with its peaceful old grey stone houses and great
+overshadowing trees, has no rival at home or abroad, and I have seen as
+commonplace a street as Walnut in West Philadelphia, its uninteresting
+houses screened behind the two long lines of trees, become in the golden
+light of a summer afternoon as stately an avenue as any at Versailles or
+St. Germain.
+
+Not only the trees, but the past went with us to Germantown. Has any
+other American suburb so many old houses to boast? Stenton, the Chew
+House, the Johnson House, the Morris House, the Wistar House, Wyck--are
+there any other Colonial houses with nobler interiors, statelier
+furniture, sweeter gardens? I recall the pillared hall of Chew House,
+the finely proportioned entrance and stairway of Stenton, the garden of
+Wyck as I last saw it--rather overgrown, heavy with the perfume of roses
+and syringa, the June sun low behind the tall trees that stand close to
+the wall along Walnut Lane;--I recall the memories clustering about
+those old historic homes, about every lane and road and path, and I
+wonder that Germantown is not one of the show places of the world. But
+the foreigner, to whom Philadelphia is a station between New York and
+Washington or New York and Chicago, has never heard of it, nor has the
+rest of America to whom Philadelphia is the junction for Atlantic City.
+With the exception of Stenton, the old Germantown houses are for use,
+not for show, still lived in by the families who have lived in them from
+the beginning, and I love them too well to want to see them overtaken by
+the fate of sights starred in Baedeker, even while I wonder why they
+have escaped.
+
+At times J. and I walked in the green valley of the Wissahickon, along
+the well-kept road past the old white taverns, with wide galleries and
+suppers of cat-fish and waffles, which had not lost their pleasant
+primitiveness to pass themselves off as rural Rumpelmeyers where ladies
+stop for afternoon tea. Can the spring be fairer anywhere than in and
+around Philadelphia when wistaria blossoms on every wall and the country
+is white with dogwood? Often we wandered in the Wissahickon woods, by
+narrow footpaths up the low hillsides, so often that, wherever I may
+be, certain effects of brilliant sunshine filtering through the pale
+green of early spring foliage will send me straight back to the
+Wissahickon and to the days when I could not walk in Philadelphia or its
+suburbs and not strike gold at every step. And the Wissahickon was but
+one small section of the Park, of which the corrupt government
+Philadelphia loves to rail at made the largest and fairest, at once the
+wildest and most wisely laid-out playground, in America. Will a reform
+Government, with all its boasting, do as much for Philadelphia? I had
+skimmed the surface only on those boating parties up the river and those
+walking parties in the starlit or moonlit shade. Wide undiscovered
+stretches lay off the beaten track, and the mansions of the
+Park--Strawberry, Belmont, Mount Pleasant--were well stocked, not only
+with lemonade and cake and peanuts, with croquettes and chicken salad,
+but with beauty and associations for those who knew how to give the
+order. And, greater marvel, beauty--classic beauty--was to be had even
+in the Fairmount Water Works that, after I left school, I had looked
+down upon as a childish entertainment provided for the holidays, beneath
+the consideration of my maturer years.
+
+
+V
+
+Of all our walks, none was better than the walk to Bartram's on the
+banks of the Schuylkill beyond Gray's Ferry. It seemed very far then,
+before the trolley passed by its gate, and before the rows of little
+two-story houses had begun to extend towards it like the greedy
+tentacles of the great town. The City Government had not taken it over,
+it was not so well looked after. The old grey stone house, with the
+stone tablet on its walls bearing witness that his Lord was adored by
+John Bartram, had not yet been turned into a museum. I am not sure
+whether the trees around it--the trees collected from far and near--were
+learnedly labelled as they are now. The garden had grown wild, the
+thicket below was a wilderness. It is right that the place should be
+cared for. The city could not afford to lose the beauty one of its most
+famous citizens, who was one of the most famous botanists of his day,
+built up, and his family preserved, for it, and when I returned I
+welcomed the sign this new care gave of Philadelphia's interest, so long
+in the awakening. But Bartram's was more beautiful in its neglect, as an
+old church is more beautiful before the restorer pulls down the ivy and
+scrapes and polishes the stone. Many were the Sunday afternoons J. and I
+spent there, and many the hours we sat talking on the little bench at
+the lower end of the wilderness, where we looked out on the river and
+planned new articles.
+
+[Illustration: BARTRAM'S]
+
+When our walks together had become too strong a habit to be broken and
+we decided to make the habit one for life, we went back again and again
+to Bartram's and on that same little bench, looking out upon the river,
+we planned work for the long years we hoped were ahead of us: perhaps
+seeing the future in the more glowing colours for the contrast with the
+past about us, the ashes of the life and beauty from which our phoenix
+was to soar. The work then planned carried and kept us thousands of
+miles away, but it belongs none the less to the old scenes, where it was
+inspired, and I like to think that, though the chances of this work have
+made us exiles for years, the memory of our life as we have lived it is
+inseparable from the memory of Bartram's or, indeed, of Philadelphia
+which, through work, I learned to see and to love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII: PHILADELPHIA AND LITERATURE
+
+
+I
+
+On the principle that nothing interests a man--or a woman--so much as
+shop, I had no sooner begun to write than I saw Philadelphia divided not
+between the people who could and could not go to the Assembly and the
+Dancing Class, but between the people who could and could not write;
+and, after I began to write for illustration, between the people who
+could and could not paint and draw. It had never before occurred to me
+to look for art and literature in Philadelphia.
+
+[Illustration: CARPENTER'S HALL INTERIOR]
+
+At that time, you had, literally, to look for the literature to find it.
+Philadelphia, with its usual reticence and conscientiousness in
+preventing any Philadelphian from becoming a prophet in Philadelphia,
+had hidden its literary, with its innumerable other, lights under a
+bushel, content itself to know they were there, if nobody else did. As
+towns, like men, are apt to be accepted at their own valuation, most
+Americans would then have thought it about as useful to look for snakes
+in Ireland as for literature in Philadelphia. I am not sure that the
+Philadelphian did not agree with them. Recently, I have heard him, in
+his new zeal for Philadelphia, talk as if it were the biggest literary
+thing on earth, the headquarters of letters in the United States, a
+boast which I am told Indianapolis also makes and, as far as I am
+concerned, can keep on making undisputed, for I do not believe in
+measuring literature like so much sheet iron or calico. But no matter
+what we have come to in Philadelphia, in the old days the Philadelphian
+seldom gave his lions a chance to roar at home or paid the least
+attention to them if they tried to. I rather think he would have
+affected to share the Western Congressman's opinion of "them literary
+fellers" when the literary fellers came from his native town.
+
+But the Philadelphian must have done a great deal of reading to judge by
+the number of public libraries in the town,--the Philadelphia Library,
+the Ridgway, the Mercantile, the Free Public Library, the University
+Library, the Bryn Mawr College Library, the Friends' Germantown Library,
+the Library of the Historical Society, and no doubt dozens I know
+nothing about--and there were always collectors from the days of Logan
+and Dr. Rush to those of Mr. Widener, George C. Thomas and Governor
+Pennypacker. But the Philadelphia reading man never talked books and the
+Philadelphia collector never vaunted and advertised his treasures, as he
+does now that collecting is correct. The average man kept his books out
+of sight. I remember few in my Grandfather's house, and not a bookcase
+from top to bottom--few in any other house except my Father's. But I
+know that many people had books and a library set apart to read them in,
+and I have been astonished since to see the large collections in houses
+where of old I had never noticed or suspected their presence. The
+Philadelphian was as reticent about his books and his pleasure in them
+as about everything else, with the result that he got the credit for
+neither, even at home. This had probably something to do with the fact
+that though, as far back as I can remember, I had had a fancy for books
+and for reading, I grew up with the idea that for literature, as for
+beauty, the Atlantic had to be crossed, that it was not in the nature of
+things for Philadelphia to have had a literary past, to claim a literary
+present, or to hope for a literary future. But as I had discovered my
+mistake about the beauty during those walks with J., so in my modest
+stall in the literary shop, I learned how far out I had been about the
+literature. It was the same story over again. I had only to get
+interested, and there was everything in the world to interest me.
+
+
+II
+
+There was the past, for Philadelphia had had a literary past, and not at
+all an empty past, but one full of the romance of effort and pride of
+achievement. Because Philadelphians did not begin to write the minute
+they landed on the banks of the Delaware, some wise people argue that
+Friends were then, as now, unliterary. But what of William Penn, whose
+writings have become classics? What of Thomas Elwood, the friend of
+Milton? What of George Fox who, if unlettered, was a born writer no less
+than Bunyan? Friends did not write and publish books right off in
+Philadelphia for the same excellent reason that other Colonists did not
+in other Colonial towns. Living was an absorbing business that left them
+no time for writing, and printing presses and publishers' offices and
+book stores did not strike them as immediate necessities in the
+wilderness. It was not out of consideration that the early Philadelphia
+Friends bequeathed nothing to the now sadly overladen shelves of the
+British Museum and the Library of Congress.
+
+When leisure came Philadelphians were readier to devote it to science.
+According to Mr. Sydney Fisher, Pennsylvania has done more for science
+than any other State: a subject upon which my profound ignorance bids me
+be silent. But science did not keep them altogether from letters. No
+people ever had a greater itch for writing. Look at the length of their
+correspondence, the minuteness of their diaries. And they broke into
+poetry on the slightest provocation. Authorities say that no real poem
+appeared in America before 1800, but the blame lies not alone with
+Philadelphia. It did what it could. Boston may boast of Anne Bradstreet
+who was rhyming before most New Englanders had time for reading, but so
+could Philadelphia brag of Deborah Logan--if Philadelphia ever bragged
+of anything Philadelphian--and I am willing to believe there is no great
+difference between the two poetesses without labouring through their
+verses to prove myself wrong. And the Philadelphian was as prolific as
+any other Colonial in horrible doggerel to his mistress's hoops and
+bows, to her tears and canary birds. And as far as I know, only a
+Philadelphian among Colonial poets is immortalized in the Dunciad,
+though possibly Ralph, Franklin's friend to whom the honour fell, would
+rather have been forgotten than remembered solely because his howls to
+Cynthia made night hideous for Pope. And where else did the young men so
+soon form themselves into little groups to discourse seriously upon
+literature and kindred matters, as they walked sedately in the woods
+along the Schuylkill? Where else was there so soon a society--a
+junto--devoted to learning?
+
+In innumerable ways I could see, once I could see anything, how
+Philadelphia was preparing itself all along for literary pursuits and
+accomplishment. Let me brag a little, if Philadelphia won't. Wasn't it
+in Germantown that the first paper mill of the Colonies was set up?
+Wasn't it there that the New Testament was printed in German--and went
+into seven editions--before any other Colony had the enterprise to print
+it in English, so that Saur's Testament is now a treasure for the
+collector? Isn't it maintained by some authorities, if others dispute
+it, that the first Bible in English was published in Philadelphia by
+Robert Aitken, at "Pope's Head above the Coffee House, in Market
+Street"? And Philadelphia issued the first American daily paper, the
+most important of the first American reviews, the most memorable Almanac
+of Colonial days--can any other compete with Poor Richard's? And
+Philadelphia opened the first Circulating Library--the Philadelphia
+Library is no benevolent upstart of to-day. And Philadelphia publishers
+were for years the most go-ahead and responsible--who did not know the
+names of Cary, Lea, Blanchard, Griggs, Lippincott, knew nothing of the
+publishing trade. And Philadelphia book stores, with Lippincott's
+leading, were the best patronized. And Philadelphia had the monopoly of
+the English book trade, with Thomas Wardle to direct it. And
+Philadelphia held its own views on copyright and stuck to them in the
+face of opposition for years--whether right or wrong does not matter,
+the thing is that it cared enough to have views. There is a record for
+you! Why the literary man had only to appear, and Philadelphia was all
+swept and garnished for his comfort and convenience.
+
+[Illustration: MAIN STREET, GERMANTOWN]
+
+And the literary man did appear, with amazing promptness under the
+circumstances. When the demand was for political writers, Philadelphia
+supplied Franklin, Dickinson, and a whole host of others, until it is
+all the Historical Society of Pennsylvania can do to cope with their
+pamphlets. When the demand was for native fiction, Philadelphia produced
+the first American novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, and if
+Philadelphians do not read him in our day, Shelley did in his, which
+ought to be as much fame as any pioneer could ask for. When the need was
+for an American Cookery Book, Philadelphia presented Miss Leslie to the
+public who received her with such appreciation that, in the First
+Edition, she is harder to find than Mrs. Glasse. When, with the years,
+the past rose in value, Philadelphia gave to America an antiquary, and
+John Watson, with his Annals, set a fashion in Philadelphia that had to
+wait a good half century for followers. And when the writer was
+multiplied all over the country and the reader with him, Philadelphia
+provided the periodical, the annual, the parlour-table book, that the
+one wrote for and the other subscribed to--an endless succession of
+them: _The Casket_, _The Gift_, _The Souvenir_, which I have no desire
+to disturb on their obscure shelves; the _Philadelphia Saturday Museum_,
+and _Burton's Gentleman's Magazine_, to me the emptiest of empty names;
+_Sartain's Union Magazine_, which I might as well be honest and say I
+have never seen; _Graham's_, in its prime, unrivalled, unapproached;
+_Godey's Lady's Book_, offering its pages alike to the newest verse and
+the latest mode, the popular magazine that every American saw at his
+dentist's or his doctor's, edited by Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, for a
+woman, then as always, could get where she chose, if she had the mind
+to, without the help of arson and suicide; _Peterson's_, which I recall
+only in its title; _Lippincott's_, in my time the literary test or
+standard in Philadelphia and scrupulously taken in by the Philadelphia
+householder. I can see it still, lying soberly on the centre table in
+the back parlour of the Eleventh and Spruce Street house, never defaced
+or thumbed, I fancy seldom opened, but like everything in the house,
+like my Grandfather himself, a type, a symbol of Philadelphia
+respectability. It was as much an obligation for the respectable
+Philadelphia citizen to subscribe to _Lippincott's_ as to belong to the
+Historical Society, to be a member of the Philadelphia Library, to buy
+books for Christmas presents at Lippincott's or Porter and Coates'. The
+Philadelphian, who had no particular use for a book as a book or, if he
+had, kept the fact to himself, was content to parade it as an ornament,
+and no parlour was without its assortment of pretty and expensive
+parlour-table books, received as Christmas presents, and as purely
+ornamental as the pictures on the wall and the vases on the mantelpiece.
+I know one Philadelphian who carried this decorative use of books still
+further and nailed them to the ceiling to explain that the room they
+decorated was a library, which nobody would have suspected for a moment,
+as they were the only volumes in it.
+
+For the man who had a living to make out of literature, Philadelphia was
+a good place, not to come away from, but to go to, and a number of
+American men of letters did go, though I need hardly add Philadelphia
+made as little of the fact as possible. In Philadelphia Washington
+Irving, sometimes called America's first literary man, published his
+books, but truth compels me to admit that he fared better when he handed
+them over to Putnam in New York; though of late years, the Lippincotts
+have done much to atone for the old failure by their successful issues
+of _The Alhambra_ and _The Traveller_. To Philadelphia magazines, N. P.
+Willis, and there was no more popular American writer, pledged himself
+for months ahead. To Philadelphia, Lowell came from Boston to get work.
+Poe deserted Richmond and the South for Philadelphia, where he
+contributed to Philadelphia magazines, edited them, planned new ones,
+while Philadelphia waited until he was well out of the world to know
+that he ever had lived there. Altogether, when I came upon the scene,
+Philadelphia had had a highly creditable literary past, and was having a
+highly creditable literary present, and, in pursuance of its invariable
+policy, was making no fuss about it.
+
+
+III
+
+As I look back, the three most conspicuous figures of this literary
+present were Charles Godfrey Leland, George Boker and Walt Whitman. All
+three were past middle age, they had done most of their important work,
+they had gained an international reputation. But that of course made no
+difference to Philadelphia. I doubt if it had heard of George Boker as a
+man of letters, though it knew him politically and also socially, as he
+had not lost his interest in society and the Philadelphia Club. My
+Uncle, having no use for society in Philadelphia and saying so with his
+accustomed vigour, and not having busied himself with politics for many
+years, was ignored unreservedly. Walt Whitman, who probably would not
+have been considered eligible for the Assembly and the Dancing Class
+had he condescended to know of their existence, did not exist socially,
+and it is a question if he would have collected round him his ardent
+worshippers from Philadelphia had he not had the advantage of having
+been born somewhere else. If I am not mistaken, this worship had not
+begun in my time, when he was more apt to receive a visitor from London
+or Boston than from Philadelphia.
+
+[Illustration: ARCH STREET MEETING--INTERIOR]
+
+The fact that it was my good fortune to know these three men contributed
+considerably to my new and pleasant feeling of self-importance. When I
+wrote the life of my Uncle a few years ago, I had much to say of him and
+my relations with him at this period, and I do not want to repeat
+myself. But I can no more leave him out of my recollections of literary
+Philadelphia than out of my personal reminiscences. When he entered so
+intimately into my life he was nearer sixty than fifty, but he had lost
+nothing of his vigour nor of his physical beauty--tall, large,
+long-bearded, a fine profile, the eyes of the seer. He was fastidious in
+dress, with a leaning to light greys and browns, and a weakness for
+canes which he preferred thin and elegant. I remember his favourite was
+black and had an altogether unfashionable silver, ruby-eyed dragon for
+handle. On occasions to which it was appropriate, he wore a silk hat; on
+others, more informal, he exchanged it for a large soft felt--a modified
+cowboy hat--which suited him better, though he would not have forgiven
+me had I had the courage to say so to his face, his respect for the
+conventions, always great, having been intensified during his long
+residence in England. It seems superfluous to add that he could not pass
+unnoticed in Philadelphia streets, which did not run to cowboy hats or
+dragon-handled canes or any deviations from the approved Philadelphia
+dress. Nor did his fancy for peering into shop windows make him less
+conspicuous, and as his daily walk was hardly complete if it did not
+lead to his buying something in the shop, were it only a five-cent bit
+of modern blue-and-white Japanese china, this meant that before his
+purchase was handed over to me, as it usually was, his pleasure being
+not in the possession but in the buying, he had parcels to carry, a
+shocking breach of good manners in Philadelphia. In his company
+therefore I became a conspicuous figure myself, and I was often his
+companion in the streets; but to this I had no objection, having been
+inconspicuous far too long for my taste.
+
+[Illustration: FRONT AND CALLOWHILL]
+
+He had written his _Breitmann Ballads_ years before when the verse of no
+other American of note--unless it was Longfellow's and Whittier's and
+Lowell's in the _Biglow Papers_--had had so wide a circulation. He had
+also published one or two of his Gypsy books, never surpassed except by
+Borrow. And he was engaged in endless new tasks--more Gypsy papers, Art
+in the Schools, Indian Legends, Comic Ballads, Essays on Education, and
+I did not mind what since my excitement was in being admitted for the
+first time into the companionship of a man who devoted himself to
+writing, to whom writing was business, who sat down at his desk after
+breakfast and wrote as my Father after breakfast went down to his office
+and bought and sold stocks, who never stopped except for his daily walk,
+who got back to work if there was a free hour before dinner and who,
+after dinner, read until he went to bed. Moreover, he had brought with
+him the aroma, as it were, of the literary life in London. He had met
+many of the people who, because they had written books, were my heroes.
+Here would have been literature enough to transfigure Philadelphia had I
+known no other writers.
+
+
+IV
+
+But, through him, I did know others. First of all, George Boker with
+whom, however, I could not pretend to friendship or more than the barest
+acquaintance. In the streets he was as noticeable a figure as my Uncle,
+though given neither to cowboy hats and dragon-handled canes nor to
+peering into shop windows and carrying parcels. Like my Uncle, he was
+taller than the average man, and handsomer, his white hair and white
+military moustache giving him a more distinguished air, I fancy, in his
+old age than was his in his youth. His smile was of the kindliest, the
+characteristic I remember best. He had returned from his appointments as
+Minister to Russia and Turkey and had given up active political and
+diplomatic life. He had written most of his poems, if not all,
+including the _Francesca da Rimini_ which Lawrence Barrett was shortly
+afterwards to put on the stage, and he impressed me as a man who had had
+his fill of life and work and adventure and was content to settle down
+to the comforts of Philadelphia. He and my Uncle, who had been friends
+from boyhood or babyhood, spent every Sunday afternoon together. My
+Uncle had large spacious rooms on the ground floor of a house in South
+Broad Street where the Philadelphia Art Club now is, and there George
+Boker came Sunday after Sunday and there, if I dropped in, I saw him. I
+had the discretion never to stay long, for I realized that their
+intimate free talk was valued too much by both for them to care to have
+it interrupted. I can remember nothing he ever said--I have an idea he
+was a man who did not talk a great deal, while my Uncle did; my memory
+is of his kindly smile and my sense that here was one of the literary
+friendships I had read of in books. So, I thought, might Dr. Johnson and
+Goldsmith have met and talked, or Lamb and Coleridge, and Broad Street
+seemed tinged with the romance that I took for granted coloured the
+Temple in London and Gough Square.
+
+
+V
+
+Through my Uncle I also met Walt Whitman, and he impressed me still more
+with the romance of literature. He was so unexpected in Philadelphia,
+for which I claim him in his last years, Camden being little more than a
+suburb, whatever Camden itself may think. I could almost have imagined
+that it was for the humour of the thing he came to settle where his very
+appearance was an offence to the proprieties. George Boker was
+scrupulously correct. My Uncle's hat and dragon-handled cane only seemed
+to emphasize his inborn Philadelphia shrinking from eccentricity. But
+Walt Whitman, from top to toe, proclaimed the man who did not bother to
+think of the conventions, much less respect them. You saw it in his long
+white hair and long white beard, in his loose light grey clothes, in the
+soft white shirt unlaundered and open at the neck, in the tall, formless
+grey hat like no hat ever worn in Philadelphia. To have been stopped by
+him on Chestnut Street--a street he loved--would have filled me with
+confusion and shame in the days before literature had become my shop.
+But once literature blocked my horizon, to be stopped by him lifted me
+up to the seventh heaven. If people turned to look, and Philadelphians
+never grew quite accustomed to his presence, my pleasure was the
+greater. I took it for a visible sign that I was known, recognized, and
+accepted in the literary world. And what a triumph in streets where, of
+old, life had appalled me by its emptiness of incident!
+
+In one way or another I saw a good deal of Walt Whitman, but most
+frequently by the chance which increased the picturesqueness of the
+meeting. I called on him in the Camden house described many times by
+many people: in my memory, a little house, the room where I was received
+simple and bare, the one ornament as unexpected there as Walt Whitman
+himself in Philadelphia, for it was an old portrait, dark and dingy, of
+an ancestor; and I wondered if an ancestor so ancient as to grow dark
+and dingy in a frame did not make it easier to play the democrat and
+call every man comrade--or _Camerado_, I should say, as Walt Whitman
+said, with his curious fondness for foreign words and sounds. But though
+I saw him at home, he is more associated in my memory with the
+ferry-boat for Camden when my Uncle and I were on our way to the Gypsy's
+camping place near the reservoir; and with the corner of Front and
+Market and the bootblack's big chair by the Italian's candy and fruit
+stand where he loved to sit, and where I loved to see him, though,
+Philadelphian at heart, I trembled for his audacity; and with the Market
+Street horse-car, where he was already settled in his corner before it
+started and where the driver and the conductor, passing through, nodded
+to him and called him "Walt," and where he was as happy as the modern
+poet in his sixty-horse-power car. He was happiest when sitting out in
+front with the driver, and I have rarely been as proud as the afternoon
+he gave up that privileged seat to stay with my Uncle and myself inside.
+His greeting was always charming. He would take a hand of each of us,
+hold the two in his for a minute or so beaming upon us, never saying
+very much. I remember his leading us once, with our hands still in his,
+from the fruit-stand to the tobacconist's opposite to point out to my
+Uncle the wooden figure of an Indian at the door, for which he professed
+a great admiration as an example of the art of the people before they
+were trained in the Minor Arts.
+
+[Illustration: THE ELEVATED AT MARKET STREET WHARF]
+
+These chance meetings were always the best, and he told us that he
+thought them so, that he loved his accidental meetings with
+friends--there were many he prized among his most valued reminiscences.
+And I remember his story of Longfellow having gone over to Camden
+purposely to call on him, and not finding him at home, and their running
+into each other on the ferry-boat to Market Street, and Longfellow
+saying that he had come from the house deeply disappointed, regretting
+the long quiet talk he had hoped for, but deciding that perhaps the
+strange chance of the meeting on the water was better. My Uncle, had he
+been hurrying to catch a train, would still have managed to talk
+philosophy and art education. But I remember Walt Whitman also saying
+that the ferry and the corner of Market Street and the Market Street car
+were hardly places for abstract discussion, though the few things said
+there were the less easily forgotten for being snatched joyfully by the
+way.
+
+It was one day in the Market Street car that he and my Uncle had the
+talk which left with me the profoundest impression. As a rule I was too
+engrossed in thinking what a great person I was, when in such company,
+to shine as a reporter. But on this occasion the subject was the School
+of Industrial Arts in which I was giving my Uncle the benefit of my
+incompetent assistance. He asked Walt Whitman to come and see it,
+telling him a little of its aims and methods. Whitman refused, amiably
+but positively. I cannot recall his exact words, but I gathered from
+them that he had no sympathy with schemes savouring of benevolence or
+reform, that he believed in leaving people to work out their own
+salvation, and this, coming as it did after I had seen for myself the
+terms he was on with the driver and conductor, expressed more eloquently
+than his verse his definition of democracy. I may be mistaken, but I
+thought then and have ever since that his belief in the people carried
+him to the point of thinking they knew better than the philanthropist
+what they needed and did not need. My Uncle was not of accord with him
+and I, who am neither democrat nor philanthropist, would not pretend to
+decide between them. My Uncle did not like Walt Whitman's attitude and
+refusal, convinced as he was of the good to the people that was to come
+of the reform he was initiating, though he was constitutionally
+incapable of meeting the people he was reforming on equal terms. The
+twinkle in Walt Whitman's eye when he refused gave me the clue to the
+large redeeming humour with which he looked upon a foolish world, seeing
+each individual in the place appointed, right in it, fitting into it,
+unfit for any other he did not make for himself of his own desire and
+courage--the humour without which the human tragedy would not be
+bearable.
+
+I wish I could have had more talk with Whitman, I wish I had been older
+or more experienced, that I might have got nearer to him--or so I felt
+in those old days. I have now an idea that his silence was more
+effective than his speech, that if he had said more to any of his
+devoted following he might have been less of a prophet. But his tranquil
+presence was in itself sufficient to open a new outlook, and it
+reconciled me to the scheme of the universe for good or for ill. His
+personality impressed me far more than his poems. It seemed to me to
+explain them, to interpret them, as nothing else could--his few words of
+greeting worth pages of the critic's eloquent analysis.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII: PHILADELPHIA AND LITERATURE--CONTINUED
+
+
+I
+
+I had glimpses into other literary vistas, but mostly from a respectful
+and highly appreciative distance. How I wish I could recapture even as
+much as the shadow of the old rapturous awe with which any man or woman
+who had ever made a book inspired me!
+
+[Illustration: DR. FURNESS'S HOUSE, WEST WASHINGTON SQUARE, JUST BEFORE
+IT WAS PULLED DOWN]
+
+There was reason for awe when the man was Dr. Horace Howard Furness, the
+editor of Shakespeare, and if Philadelphia knew its duty better than to
+draw attention to so scholarly a performance by a Philadelphian,
+scholars out of Philadelphia, who were not hampered by Philadelphia
+conventions, hailed it as the best edition of Shakespeare there could
+be. I must always regret that in his case I succeeded in having no more
+than the glimpse. Most of my literary introductions came through my
+Uncle who, though he knew Dr. Furness, saw less and less of him as time
+went on, partly I think because of one of those small misunderstandings
+that are more unpardonable than the big offences--certainly they were to
+my Uncle. Dr. Furness' father, old Dr. Furness the Unitarian Minister,
+meeting him in the street one day, asked him gaily, but I have no doubt
+with genuine interest, how his fad, the school, was getting on. My
+Uncle, who could not stand having an enterprise so serious to him
+treated lightly by others, retorted by asking Dr. Furness how his fad
+the pulpit was getting on. The result was coolness. The chances are that
+Dr. Furness never realized the enormity of which he had been guilty, but
+my Uncle could neither forget his jest nor forgive him and his family
+for it. And his heart was not softened until many years afterwards, when
+in far Florence he heard that Dr. Furness wished for his return to
+Philadelphia that he might vindicate his claim, in danger of being
+overlooked, as the first to have introduced the study of the Minor Arts
+into the Public Schools.
+
+Mrs. Wister was another Philadelphia literary celebrity whose work had
+made her known to all America by name, the only way she was known to me.
+It was my loss, for they say she was more charming than her work. But to
+Philadelphia no charm of personality, no popularity of work, could shed
+lustre upon her name, which was her chief glory: literature was honoured
+when a Wister stooped to its practice. On her translations of German
+novels, Philadelphians of my generation were brought up. After _Faith
+Gartney's Girlhood_ and _Queechy_ and _The Wide, Wide World_, no tales
+were considered so innocuous for the young, not yet provided with the
+mild and exemplary adventures of the tedious Elsie. Would the _Old
+Mam'selle's Secret_ survive re-reading, I wonder? The favourites of
+yesterday have a way of turning into the bores of to-day. Not long ago I
+tried re-reading Scott whom in my youth I adored, but his once
+magnificent heroes had dwindled into puppets, their brilliant exploits
+into the empty bombast of Drury Lane and Wardour Street. If Scott cannot
+stand the test, what hope for the other old loves? I risk no more lost
+illusions.
+
+From no less a distance I looked to Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis who, with
+Mrs. Wister, helped to supply the country with fiction, in her case
+original, while her son, Richard Harding Davis, was on the sensational
+brink of his career. And again from a distance I looked to Frank
+Stockton, with no idea that he was a Philadelphia celebrity--very likely
+every other Philadelphian was as ignorant, but that is no excuse for me.
+I had not found him out as my fellow citizen when I saw much of him some
+years later in London, nor did I find it out until recently when,
+distrustful of my Philadelphia tendency to look the other way if
+Philadelphians are distinguishing themselves, I consulted the
+authorities to make sure how great or how small was my knowledge of
+Philadelphia literature. From all this it will be seen that in those
+remote days I was very much on the literary outside in Philadelphia, but
+with the luck there to run up against some of the giants.
+
+Into the vista of the poets chance gave me one brief but more intimate
+glimpse. In a Germantown house--I am puzzled at this day to say whose--I
+was introduced one evening to Mrs. Florence Earle Coates and Dr. Francis
+Howard Williams, both already laurel-crowned, at a small gathering over
+which Walt Whitman presided. In his grey coat and soft shirt I remember
+he struck me as more dressed than the guests in their evening clothes,
+but I remember he also struck me as less at home in the worshipping
+parlour than in the bootblack's corner. The eloquence of his presence
+stands out in my memory vividly, though I have forgotten the name of the
+host or hostess to whom I am indebted for enjoying it, and I think it
+must have been then that I began to suspect there was more of a literary
+life in Philadelphia than I had imagined. I had no opportunity to get
+further than my suspicion, for it was very shortly after that J. and I
+undertook to carry out the plans we had been making on the old bench by
+the river in Bartram's Garden. Walt Whitman I never saw again, and of
+the group assembled about him nothing for many years.
+
+[Illustration: THE GERMANTOWN ACADEMY]
+
+I came into closer contact with writers to whom literature and
+journalism were not merely a method of expression, but a means of
+livelihood. Philadelphia, with its magazines, as with so much else, had
+shown the way and other towns had lost no time in following and getting
+ahead. New York was in the magazine ascendant. _The Century_ and
+_Harper's_ had replaced _Graham's_ and _Godey's Lady's Book_ and
+_Peterson's_. But _Lippincott's_ remained, and though the Editor, after
+his cruel letter of refusal, never deigned to notice me, it was some
+satisfaction to have been in actual correspondence with an author as
+distinguished as John Foster Kirk, the historian of Charles the Bold.
+When _Our Continent_ was labouring to revive the old tradition of
+Philadelphia as a centre of publishers and periodicals, I got as far as
+the editorial office--very far indeed in my opinion--and there once or
+twice I saw Judge Tourgee, who had abandoned his reconstructive mission
+and judicial duties for an editorial post in Philadelphia, and who at
+the moment was more talked about than any American author, his _Fool's
+Errand_ having given him the sort of fame that _Looking Backward_
+brought to Bellamy: ephemeral, but colossal while it lasted. Curiously,
+I recall nothing of the man himself--not his appearance, his manner, his
+talk. I think it must have been because, for me, he was overshadowed by
+his Art Editor, Miss Emily Sartain; my interest in him eclipsed by my
+admiration for her and my envy of a woman, so young and so handsome, who
+had attained to such an influential and responsible post. I thought if I
+ever should reach half way up so stupendous a height, I could die
+content. Louise Stockton, Frank Stockton's sister, and Helen Campbell
+were on the staff, in my eyes amazing women with regular weekly tasks
+and regular weekly salaries. I might argue for my comfort that there was
+greater liberty in being a free lance, but how wonderful to do work that
+an editor wanted every week, was willing to pay for every
+week!--wonderful to me, anyway, who had just had my first taste of
+earning an income, but not of earning it regularly and without fail. My
+Uncle wrote more than once for Tourgee; J. and I contributed those
+articles which were further excuses for our walks together: Judge
+Tourgee, to his own loss, thinking it a recommendation for a contributor
+to be a Philadelphian as he would not have thought had he known his
+Philadelphia better. _Our Continent_ was too Philadelphian to be
+approved in Philadelphia or to be in demand out of it. One symbol of
+literary respectability the town had in _Lippincott's_, and one was as
+much as it could then support. _Our Continent_ came to an end either
+just before or just after J. and I set out on our travels. There were
+other women in journalism who excited my envy. Mrs. Lucy Hooper's
+letters to the _Evening Telegraph_ struck me as the last and finest word
+in foreign correspondence. I never, even upon closer acquaintance, lost
+my awe of Mrs. Sarah Hallowell who was intimately associated with the
+_Ledger_, or of Miss Julia Ewing, though her association with the same
+paper had nothing to do with its literary side.
+
+
+II
+
+Now and then I was stirred to the depths by my glimpse of writers from
+other parts of the world. It was only when a prophet was a home product
+that Philadelphia kept its eyes tight shut; when the prophet came from
+another town it opened them wide, and its arms wider than its eyes, and
+showed him what a strenuous business it was to be the victim of
+Philadelphia hospitality. It was rather pleased if the prophet happened
+to be a lord, or had a handle of some kind to his name, but an author
+would answer for want of something better, especially if he came from
+abroad. No Englishman on a lecture tour was allowed to pass by
+Philadelphia.
+
+Immediately on his arrival, the distinguished visitor was appropriated
+by George W. Childs, who had undertaken to play in Philadelphia the part
+of the Lord Mayor in the City of London and do the town's official
+entertaining, and who was known far and wide for it--"he has entertained
+all the English who come over here," Matthew Arnold wrote home of him,
+and visitors of every other nationality could have written the same of
+their own people passing through Philadelphia. You would meet him in the
+late afternoon, fresh from the _Ledger_ office, strolling up Chestnut
+Street of which he was another of the conspicuous figures--not because
+of any personal beauty, but because he did not believe in the
+Philadelphia practice of hiding one's light under a bushel, and had
+managed to make himself known by sight to every other man and woman in
+the street; just as old Richard Vaux was; or old "Aunt Ad" Thompson,
+everybody's aunt, in her brilliant finery, growing ever more brilliant
+with years; or that distinguished lawyer, Ben Brewster, "Burnt-faced
+Brewster," whose genius for the law made every one forget the terrible
+marks a fire in his childhood had left upon his face. Philadelphia would
+not have been Philadelphia without these familiar figures. Childs seldom
+appeared on Chestnut Street without Tony Drexel, straight from some big
+operation on the Stock Exchange, the two representing all that was most
+successful in the newspaper and banking world of Philadelphia: their
+friendship now commemorated in that new combination of names as
+familiar to the new and changing generation as Cadwallader-Biddle was to
+the old and changeless. Between them it was the exception when there was
+not an emperor, or a prince, or an author, or an actor, or some other
+variety of a distinguished visitor being put through his paces and shown
+life in Philadelphia, on the way to the house of one or the other and to
+the feast prepared in his honour. At the feast, if there was speaking to
+be done, it was invariably Wayne MacVeagh who did it. As I was not
+greatly in demand at public functions, I heard him but once--a memorable
+occasion which did not, however, impress me with the brilliance of his
+oratory.
+
+Matthew Arnold, the latest distinguished visitor, was to lecture, and I
+had been looking forward to the evening with an ardour for which alas! I
+have lost the faculty. Literary celebrities were still novelties--more
+than that, divinities--in my eyes. Among them, Matthew Arnold held
+particularly high rank, one of the chief heroes of my worship, and many
+of my contemporaries worshipped with me. Youth was then, as always,
+acutely conscious of the burden of life, and we made our luxury of his
+pessimism. I could spout whole passages of his poems, whole poems when
+they were short, though now I could not probably get further than their
+titles. There had been a dinner first--there always was a dinner first
+in Philadelphia--and a Philadelphia dinner being no light matter, he
+arrived late. The delay would have done no harm had not Wayne MacVeagh,
+who presided, introduced him in a speech to which, once it was started,
+there seemed no end. It went on and on, the audience growing restless,
+with Matthew Arnold himself an object of pity, so obvious was his
+embarrassment. Few lecturers could have saved the situation, and Matthew
+Arnold would have been a dull one under the most favourable
+circumstances. I went away disillusioned, reconciled to meeting my
+heroes in their books. And I could understand when, years later, I read
+the letters he wrote home, why the tulip trees seemed to have as much to
+do as the people in making Philadelphia the most attractive city he had
+seen in America.
+
+[Illustration: THE STATE HOUSE FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE]
+
+Another distinguished visitor who lectured about this period came off
+more gaily:--Oscar Wilde, to whose lecture I had looked forward with no
+particular excitement, for I was young enough to feel only impatience
+with his pose. After listening to him, I had to admit that he was
+amusing. His affected dress, his deliberate posturings, his flamboyant
+phrases and slow lingering over them as if loth to let them go, made him
+an exhilarating contrast to Matthew Arnold, shocked as I was by a writer
+to whom literature was not always in dead earnest, nor to teach its
+goal, even though it was part of his pose to ape the teacher, the voice
+in the wilderness. And he was so refreshingly enthusiastic when off the
+platform, as I saw him afterwards in my Uncle's rooms. He let himself go
+without reserve as he recalled the impressions of his visit to Walt
+Whitman in Camden and his meeting with the cowboy in the West. To him,
+the cowboy was the most picturesque product of America from whom he
+borrowed hat and cloak and appeared in them, an amazing spectacle. And I
+find in some prim, priggish, distressingly useless little notes I made
+at the time, that it was a perfect, a supreme moment when he talked to
+Walt Whitman who had been to him the master, at whose feet he had sat
+since he was a young lad, and who was as pure and earnest and noble and
+grand as he had hoped. That to Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde seemed "a great
+big splendid boy" is now matter of history.
+
+I know that Philadelphia entertained Wilde, and so I fancy him staying
+with George W. Childs, dining with Tony Drexel, and being talked to
+after dinner by Wayne MacVeagh, though I cannot be sure, as
+Philadelphia, with singular lack of appreciation, included me in none of
+the entertaining. I saw him only in Horticultural Hall, where he
+lectured, and at my Uncle's. This was seeing him often enough to be
+confirmed in my conviction that literature might be a stimulating and
+emotional adventure.
+
+Many interesting people of many varieties were to be met in my Uncle's
+rooms. I remember the George Lathrops who, like Lowell and Poe of old,
+had come to Philadelphia for work: Lathrop rather embittered and
+disappointed, I thought; Mrs. Lathrop--Rose Hawthorne--a marvellous
+woman in my estimation, not because of her beautiful gold-red hair, nor
+her work, which I do not believe was of special importance, but as the
+daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne and therefore a link between me in my
+insignificance and the great of Brook Farm and Concord. I remember
+editors from New York, impressive creatures; and Members of Parliament,
+hangers-on of the literary world of London; and actresses, its lions,
+when in England:--Janauschek, heavily tragic off as on the stage, for
+whom my Uncle's admiration was less limited than mine; and Miss
+Genevieve Ward, playing in _Forget-Me-Not_, her one big success, for she
+failed in the popularity to repeat it that comes so easily to many less
+accomplished. How timidly I sat and listened, marvelling to find myself
+there, feeling like the humble who shall be exalted in the Bible,
+looking upon my Uncle's rooms as the literary threshold from which I was
+graciously permitted to watch the glorious company within.
+
+
+III
+
+I had gone no further than this first, tremulous ardent stage in my
+career when my Uncle deserted his memorable rooms never to return, and
+J. and I started on the journey that we thought might last a year--as
+long as the money held out, we had said, to the discomfort of the family
+who no doubt saw me promptly on their hands again--and that did not
+bring me back to Philadelphia for over a quarter of a century. Of
+literary events during my absence, somebody else must make the record.
+
+[Illustration: "THE LITTLE STREET OF CLUBS," CAMAC STREET ABOVE SPRUCE
+STREET]
+
+When I did go back after all those years, I was conscious that there
+must have been events for a record to be made of, or I could not have
+accounted for the change. Literature was now in the air. Local prophets
+were acknowledged, if not by all Philadelphia, by little groups of
+satellites revolving round them. Literary lights had come from under the
+bushel and were shining in high places. Societies had been industriously
+multiplying for the encouragement of literature. All such encouragement
+in my time had devolved upon the Penn Club that patronized literature,
+among its other interests, and wrote about books in its monthly journal
+and invited their authors to its meetings. During my absence, not only
+had the Penn Club continued to flourish--to such good purpose that J.
+and I were honoured by one of these invitations and felt that never
+again could Fame and Fate bring us such a triumphant moment, except when
+the Academy of Fine Arts paid us the same honour and so upset our old
+belief that no Philadelphian could ever be a prophet in
+Philadelphia!--but Philadelphia had broken out into a multitude of Clubs
+and Societies, beginning with the Franklin Inn, for Franklin is not to
+be got away from even in Clubland, and his Inn, I am assured, is the
+most comprehensive literary centre to which every author, every artist,
+every editor, every publisher who thinks himself something belongs to
+the number of one hundred--that there should be the chance of one
+hundred with the right to think themselves something in Philadelphia is
+the wonder!--and in the house in Camac Street, which one Philadelphian I
+know calls "The Little Street of Clubs," the members meet for light
+lunch and much talk and, it may be, other rites of which I could speak
+only from hearsay, my sex disqualifying me from getting my knowledge of
+them at first hand. And there is a Business and Professional Club and a
+Poor Richard, bringing one back to Franklin again, in the same Little
+Street. And there are Browning Societies, and Shakespeare Societies, and
+Drama-Reforming Societies, and Pegasus Societies, and Societies for
+members to read their own works to each other; and more Societies than
+the parent Society discoursing in the woods along the Schuylkill could
+have dreamed of: with the Contemporary Club to assemble their variously
+divided ends and objects under one head, and to entertain literature as
+George W. Childs had entertained it, and, going further, to pay
+literature for being entertained, if literature expresses itself in the
+form of readings and lectures by those who practise it professionally.
+The change disconcerted me more than ever when I, Philadelphia born, was
+assured of a profitable welcome if I would speak to the Club on
+anything. The invitation was tentative and unofficial, but the
+Contemporary Club need be in no fear. It may make the invitation
+official if it will, and never a penny the poorer will it be for my
+presence: I am that now rare creature, a shy woman subject to stage
+fright. And I cannot help thinking that, despite the amiability to the
+native, the stranger, simply because he is a stranger, continues to have
+the preference, so many are the Englishmen and Englishwomen invited to
+deliver themselves before the Club who never could gather an audience at
+home.
+
+[Illustration: DOWN SANSOM STREET FROM EIGHTH STREET. THE LOW HOUSES AT
+SEVENTH STREET HAVE SINCE BEEN TORN DOWN AND THE WESTERN END OF THE
+CURTIS BUILDING NOW OCCUPIES THEIR PLACE]
+
+And Philadelphia has recaptured the lead in the periodical publication
+that pays, and I found the Curtis Building the biggest sky-scraper in
+Philadelphia, towering above the quiet of Independence Square, a brick
+and marble and pseudo-classical monument to the _Ladies' Home Journal_
+and the _Saturday Evening Post_, and if in the race literature lags
+behind, what matter when merit is vouched for in solid dollars and
+cents? What matter, when the winds of heaven conspire with bricks and
+mortar to make the passer-by respect it? I am told that on a windy day
+no man can pass the building without a fight for it, and no woman
+without the help of stalwart policemen. In her own organ of fashion and
+feminine sentiment, she has raised up a power against which, even with
+the vote to back her, she could not prevail.
+
+And Philadelphia is not content to have produced the first daily
+newspaper but is bent on making it as big as it can be made anywhere. If
+I preserved my morning paper for two or three days in my hotel bedroom,
+I fairly waded in newspapers. On Sundays if I carried upstairs only the
+_Ledger_ and the _North American_, I was deep in a flood of Comic
+Supplements, and Photograph Supplements, and Sport Supplements, and
+every possible sort of Supplement that any other American newspaper in
+any other American town can boast of--all the sad stuff that nobody has
+time to look at but is what the newspaper editor is under the delusion
+that the public wants--in Philadelphia, one genuine Philadelphia touch
+added in the letters and gossip of "Peggy Shippen" and "Sally Wister,"
+names with the double recommendation to Philadelphia of venerable age
+and unquestionable Philadelphia respectability.
+
+And I found that the Philadelphia writer has increased in numbers and in
+popularity, whether for better or worse I will not say. I have not the
+courage for the role of critic on my own hearth, knowing the penalty for
+too much honesty at home. Nor is there any reason why I should hesitate
+and bungle and make myself unpleasant enemies in doing indifferently
+what Philadelphia, in its new incarnation, does with so much grace. I
+have now but to name the Philadelphian's book in Philadelphia to be
+informed that it is monumental--but to mention the Philadelphia writer
+of verse to hear that he is a marvel--but to enquire for the
+Philadelphia writer of prose to be assured that he is a genius. There is
+not the weeest, most modest little Philadelphia goose that does not sail
+along valiantly in the Philadelphia procession of swans. The new pose is
+prettier than the old if scarcely more successful in preserving a sense
+of proportion, and it saves me from committing myself. I can state the
+facts that strike me, without prejudice, as the lawyers say.
+
+
+IV
+
+One is that the last quarter of a century has interested the
+Philadelphia writer in Philadelphia as he had not been since the days of
+John Watson. Most Philadelphians owned a copy of Watson's _Annals_. I
+have one on my desk before me that belonged to J.'s Father, one must
+have been in my Grandfather's highly correct Philadelphia house, though
+I cannot recall it there, for a Philadelphian's duty was to buy Watson
+just as it was to take in _Lippincott's_, and Philadelphians never
+shirked their obligations. They probably would not have been able to say
+what was in Watson, or, if they could, would have shrugged their
+shoulders and dismissed him for a crank. But they would have owned the
+_Annals_, all the same. Then the Centennial shook them up and insisted
+on the value of Philadelphia's history, and Philadelphians were no
+longer in fashion if they did not feel, or affect, an interest in
+Philadelphia and its past. After the Centennial the few who began to
+write about it could rely upon the many to read about it.
+
+[Illustration: THE DOUBLE STAIRWAY IN THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL]
+
+Once, the Philadelphian who was not ashamed to write stories made them
+out of the fashionable life of Philadelphia. Dr. Weir Mitchell
+inaugurated the new era, or the revolt, or the secession, or whatever
+name may be given it with the first historical novel of Philadelphia. It
+is fortunate, when I come to _Hugh Wynne_, that I have renounced
+criticism and all its pretences. As a Friend by marriage, if such a
+thing is possible, I cannot underestimate the danger. Only a Friend born
+a Friend is qualified to write the true Quaker novel, and I am told
+by this kind of Friend that _Hugh Wynne_ is not free from
+misrepresentations, misconceptions and misunderstandings. This may be
+true--I breathe more freely for not being able to affirm or to deny
+it--but, as Henley used to say, there it is--the first romantic gold out
+of the mine Philadelphia history is for all who work it. Since these
+lines were written the news has reached me that never again will Dr.
+Mitchell work this or any other mine. I cannot imagine Philadelphia
+without him. When I last saw him, it seemed to me that no Philadelphian
+was more alive, more in love with life, better equipped to enjoy life in
+the way Philadelphia has fashioned it--the Philadelphia life in which
+his passing away must leave no less a gap than the disappearance of the
+State House or the Pennsylvania Hospital would leave in the Philadelphia
+streets. If Dr. Mitchell's digging brought up the romance of
+Philadelphia, Mr. Sydney George Fisher's has unearthed the facts, for
+Philadelphia was the root of the great growth of Pennsylvania which is
+the avowed subject of his history. And the men who helped to make this
+history have now their biographers at home, though hitherto the task of
+their biography had been left chiefly to anybody anywhere else who would
+accept the responsibility, and my Brother, Edward Robins, Secretary of
+the University of Pennsylvania, has written the life of Benjamin
+Franklin, without whom the University would not have been, at least
+would not have been what it is. And in so many different directions has
+the interest spread that my friend since _Our Convent Days_, Miss Agnes
+Repplier, has taken time from her studies in literature and from
+building a monument to her beloved Agrippina to write its story. When
+she sent me her book, I opened it with grave apprehensions. In the
+volumes she had published, humour was the chief charm, and how would
+humour help her to see Philadelphia? I need not have been uneasy. There
+is no true humour without tenderness. If she had her smile for the town
+we all love, as we all have, it was a tender smile, and I think no
+reader can close her book without wanting to know still more of
+Philadelphia than it was her special business in that place to tell
+them. And that no vein of the Philadelphia mine might be left unworked.
+Miss Anne Hollingsworth Wharton has busied herself to gather up old
+traditions and old reminiscences, dipping into old letters and diaries,
+opening wide Colonial doorways, resurrecting Colonial Dames, reshaping
+the old social and domestic life disdained by historians. The numerous
+editions into which her books have gone explain that she has not worked
+for her own edification alone, that Philadelphia, once it was willing to
+hear any talk about itself, could not hear too much. And after Miss
+Wharton have come Mr. Mather Lippincott and Mr. Eberlein to collect the
+old Colonial houses and their memories, followed by Mr. Herbert C. Wise
+and Mr. Beidleman to study their architecture: just in time if
+Philadelphia perseveres in its crime of moving out of the houses for the
+benefit of the Russian Jew and of mixing their memories with squalor. Of
+all the ways in which Philadelphia has changed, none is to me more
+remarkable than in this rekindling of interest out of which has sprung
+the new group of writers in its praise.
+
+Nor were the Philadelphia poets idle during my absence. Dr. Mitchell had
+not before sung so freely in public, nor had he ranked, as I am told he
+did at the end, his verse higher than his medicine. Mrs. Coates' voice
+had not carried so far. Dr. Francis Howard Williams had not rhymed for
+Pageants in praise of Philadelphia. Mr. Harrison Morris had not joined
+the Philadelphia choir. Mr. Harvey M. Watts had not been heard in the
+land. I have it on good authority that yearly the Philadelphia poets
+meet and read their verses to each other, a custom of which I cannot
+speak from personal knowledge as I have no passport into the magic
+circle, and perhaps it is just as well for my peace of mind that I have
+not. Rumour declares that, on certain summer evenings, a suburban porch
+here or there is made as sweet with their singing as with the perfume of
+the roses and syringa in the garden, and I am content with the rumour
+for there is always the chance the music might not be so sweet if I
+heard it. I like to remember that the poets on their porch, whether
+their voices be sweet or harsh, descend in a direct line from the young
+men who wandered, discoursing of literature, along the Schuylkill. And
+Philadelphia's love of poetry is to be assured not only by its own
+singers but by its care, now as in the past, for the song of others.
+Horace Howard Furness, Jr., has taken over his father's task and, in so
+doing, will see that Philadelphia continues to be famous for the most
+complete edition of Shakespeare.
+
+There had been equal activity during my absence among the story-tellers.
+Since Brockden Brown, not one had written so ambitious a tale as _Hugh
+Wynne_, not one had ever laughed so good-humouredly at Philadelphia as
+Thomas A. Janvier in his short stories of the Hutchinson Ports and
+Rittenhouse Smiths--what gaiety has gone out with his death! Not one had
+ever seen character with such truth as Owen Wister,--if only he could
+understand that as good material awaits him in Philadelphia as in
+Virginia and Wyoming. And John Luther Long is another of the
+story-tellers Philadelphia can claim though, like Mr. Wister, he shows a
+greater fancy for far-away lands or to wander among strange people at
+home.
+
+There is no branch of literature that Philadelphia has not taken under
+its active protection. Who has contributed more learnedly to the records
+of the Inquisition than Henry Charles Lea, or to the chronicles of the
+law in the United States than Mr. Hampton L. Carson and Mr. Charles
+Burr, duly conscious as Philadelphia lawyers should be of the
+Philadelphian's legal responsibility? Who can compete in knowledge of
+the evolution of the playing card with Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer or
+rival her collection? Who ever thought of writing the history of
+autobiography before Mrs. Anna Robeson Burr? The time had but to come
+for an admirer to play the Boswell to Walt Whitman, and Mr. Traubel
+appeared. When Columbia wanted a Professor of Journalism, Philadelphia
+sent it Dr. Talcott Williams. When England seemed a comfortable shelter
+for research there was no need to be in a hurry about, Mr. Logan
+Pearsall Smith showed what could be done with an exhaustive study of Dr.
+Donne, though why he was not showing instead what could be done with the
+Loganian Library, where the chance to show it was his for the claiming,
+he alone can say. When such recondite subjects as Egyptian and Assyrian
+called for interpreters, Philadelphia was again on the spot with Mrs.
+Cornelius Stevenson and Dr. Morris Jastrow. And for authorities on the
+drama and history, it gives us Mr. Felix Schelling and Dr.
+McMaster,--but perhaps for me to attempt to complete the list would only
+be to make it incomplete. Here, too, I tread on dangerous ground. It may
+be cowardly, but it is safe to give the tribute of my recognition to all
+that is being accomplished by the University of Pennsylvania and its
+scholars--by Bryn Mawr College and its students--by the Historical
+Society of Pennsylvania--by other Colleges and learned bodies--by
+innumerable individuals--and not invite exposure by venturing into
+detail and upon comment. It is in these emergencies that the sense of my
+limitations comes to my help.
+
+[Illustration: CARPENTER'S HALL, BUILT 1771]
+
+At least I am not afraid to say that, on my return, I fancied I found
+this side of Philadelphia life less a side apart, less isolated, more
+identified with the social side, and the social side, for its part,
+accepting the identification. The University and Bryn Mawr could not
+have played the same social part in the Philadelphia I remember. Perhaps
+I shall express what I mean more exactly if I say that, returning with
+fresh eyes, I saw Philadelphia ready and pleased, as I had not
+remembered it, to acknowledge openly talents and activities it once made
+believe to ignore or despise--to go further really and, having for the
+first time squarely faced its accomplishments, for the first time to
+blow its own trumpet. The new spirit is one I approve. I would not call
+all the work that comes out of Philadelphia monumental, as some
+Philadelphians do, or Philadelphia itself a modern Athens, or the hub of
+the literary universe, or any other absurd name. But I do think that in
+literature and learning it is now contributing, as it always has
+contributed, its fair share to the country, and that if Philadelphia
+does not say so, the rest of the country will not, for the rest of the
+country is still under the delusion that Philadelphia knows how to do
+nothing but sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV: PHILADELPHIA AND ART
+
+
+I
+
+Ignorance of art and all relating to it could not have been greater than
+mine when I paid that first eventful visit to J.'s studio on Chestnut
+Street.
+
+I lay the blame only partly on my natural capacity for ignorance. It was
+a good deal the fault of the sort of education I received and the
+influences among which I lived--the fault of the place and the period in
+which I grew up. Nominally, art was not neglected at the Convent. A
+drawing-class was conducted by an old bear of a German, who also gave
+music lessons, and who prospered so on his monopoly of the arts with us
+that he was able to live in a delightful cottage down near the river.
+Drawing was an "extra" of which I was never thought worthy, but I used
+to see the class at the tables set out for the purpose in the long low
+hall leading to the Chapel, the master grumbling and growling and
+scolding, the pupils laboriously copying with crayon or chalk little
+cubes and geometrical figures or, at a more advanced stage, the
+old-fashioned copy-book landscape and building, rubbing in and rubbing
+out, wrestling with the composition as if it were a problem in algebra.
+The Convent could take neither credit, nor discredit, for the system; it
+was the one then in vogue in every school, fashionable or otherwise,
+and not so far removed, after all, from systems followed to this day in
+certain Academies of Art.
+
+[Illustration: INDEPENDENCE HALL--LENGTHWISE VIEW]
+
+Another class was devoted to an art then considered very beautiful,
+called Grecian Painting. It was not my privilege to study this either,
+but I gathered from friends who did that it was of the simplest: on the
+back of an engraving, preferably of a religious subject and prepared by
+an ingenious process that made it transparent, the artist dabbed his
+colours according to written instructions. The result, glazed and
+framed, was supposed to resemble, beyond the detection of any save an
+expert, a real oil painting and was held in high esteem.
+
+A third class was in the elegant art of making wax flowers and, goodness
+knows why, my Father squandered an appreciable sum of his declining
+fortunes on having me taught it. I am the more puzzled by his desire to
+bestow upon me this accomplishment because none of the other girls'
+fathers shared his ambition for their daughters and I was the only
+member of the class. Alone, in a room at the top of the house--chosen no
+doubt for the light, as if the deeds there done ought not to have been
+shrouded in darkness--I worked many hours under the tuition of Mother
+Alicia, cutting up little sheets of wax into leaves and petals,
+colouring them, sticking them together, and producing in the end two
+horrible masterpieces--one a water-lily placed on a mirror under a glass
+shade, the other a basket of carnations and roses and camelias--both of
+which masterpieces my poor family, to avoid hurting my feelings, had to
+place in the parlour and keep there I blush to remember how long. It
+must be admitted that this was scarcely an achievement to encourage an
+interest in art. For the appreciation of art, as for its practice, it is
+important to have nothing to unlearn from the beginning; mine was the
+sort of training to reduce me to the necessity of unlearning everything;
+and most of my contemporaries, on leaving school, were in the same
+plight.
+
+My eyes were no better trained than my hands. Works of art at the
+Convent consisted of the usual holy statues designed for our spiritual,
+not aesthetic edification; the Stations of the Cross whose merit was no
+less spiritual; two copies of Murillo and Rafael which my Father, in the
+fervour of conversion, presented to the Mother Superior; and a picture
+of St. Elizabeth of Hungary that adorned the Convent parlour, where we
+all felt it belonged, such a marvel to us was its combination of
+brilliantly-coloured needle-and-brush work.
+
+Illustrated books there must have been in the ill-assorted hodge-podge
+of a collection in the Library from which we obtained our reading for
+Thursday afternoons and Sundays. But though I doubt if there was a book
+I had not sampled, even if I had not been able to read it straight
+through, I can recall no illustrations except the designs by Rossetti,
+Millais, and Holman Hunt, made for Moxon's Tennyson and reproduced by
+the Harpers for a cheap American edition of the Poems, a copy of which
+was given to me one year as a prize. Little barbarian as I was, I
+disliked the drawings of the Pre-Raphaelites because they mystified
+me--the Lady of Shalott, entangled in her wide floating web, the finest
+drawing Holman Hunt ever made; the company of weeping queens in the Vale
+of Avalon, in Rossetti's harmoniously crowded design--when I flattered
+myself I understood everything that was to be understood, more
+especially Tennyson's Poems, many of which I could recite glibly from
+beginning to end--and did recite diligently to myself at hours when I
+ought to have been busy with the facts and figures in the class books
+before me. Most people, young or old, dislike anything which shows them
+how much less they understand than they think they do.
+
+Of the history of art I was left in ignorance as abject, the next to
+nothing I knew gleaned from a _Lives of the Artists_ adapted to
+children, a favourite book in the Library, one providing me with the
+theme for my sole serious effort in drama--a three-act play, Michael
+Angelo its hero, which, with a success many dramatists might envy. I
+wrote, produced, acted in, and found an audience of good-natured nuns
+for, all at the ripe age of eleven.
+
+
+II
+
+When I left the Convent for the holidays and eventually "for good,"
+little in my new surroundings was calculated to increase my knowledge of
+art or to teach me the first important fact, as a step to knowledge,
+that I knew absolutely nothing on the subject. In my Grandfather's
+house, art was represented by the family portraits, the engraving after
+Gilbert Stuart's Washington, the illustrated lamp shade, and the Rogers
+Group. My Father, re-established in a house of his own, displayed an
+unaccountably liberal taste, straying from the Philadelphia standard to
+the extent of decorating his parlour walls with engravings of Napoleon
+he had picked up in Paris--to one, printed in colour, attaching a value
+which I doubt if the facts would justify, though, as I have never come
+across it in any collection, Museum, or Gallery, it may be rarer and,
+therefore, more valuable, than I think. Other fruits of his old journeys
+to Paris were two engravings, perhaps after Guys, of two famous ladies
+of that town, whose presence in our prim and proper and highly domestic
+dining-room seems to me the most incongruous accident in an otherwise
+correctly-appointed Philadelphia household. When I think of Napoleon
+replacing Washington on our walls, I suspect my Father of having broken
+loose from the Philadelphia traces in his youth, though by the time I
+knew him the prints were the only signs of a momentary dash for freedom
+on the part of so scrupulous a Philadelphian.
+
+It is curious that illustrations should have as small a place in my
+memory of home life as of the Convent. The men of the Golden Age of the
+Sixties had published their best work long before I had got through
+school, and in my childhood books gave me my chief amusement. But I
+remember nothing of their fine designs. The earlier Cruikshank drawings
+for Dickens I knew well in the American edition which my Father owned,
+and never so long as I live can I see the Dickens world except as it is
+shown in the much over-rated Cruikshank interpretations. Other memories
+are of the highly-finished, sentimental steel-engravings of Scott's
+heroines, including Meg Merrilies, whom I still so absurdly associate
+with Crazy Norah. Another series of portraits, steel-engravings, as
+highly-finished and but slightly less insipid, illustrated my Father's
+edition of Thiers' _French Revolution_ through which, one conscientious
+winter, I considered it my duty to wade. And I recall also the large
+volumes of photographs after Rafael and other masters that, in the
+Eighteen-Seventies, came into fashion for Christmas presents and
+parlour-table books, and that I think must have heralded the new
+departure the Centennial is supposed to have inaugurated.
+
+If I try to picture to myself the interior of the houses where I used to
+visit, art in them too seems best represented by family portraits no
+more remarkable than my Grandfather's, by the engraving of Stuart's
+Washington, or of Penn signing the Treaty with the Indians, or of the
+American Army crossing the Delaware, all three part of the traditional
+decoration of the Philadelphia hall and dining-room, and by a Rogers
+Group and an illustrated lamp shade. The library in which a friend first
+showed me a volume of Hogarth's engravings I remember as exceptional.
+But I have an idea that had I possessed greater powers of appreciation
+then, I should have a keener memory now of other houses full of
+interesting pictures and prints and illustrated books, which I did not
+see simply because my eyes had not been trained to see them.
+
+Certainly, there were Philadelphia collections of these things then, as
+there always have been--only they were not heard of and talked about as
+they are now, or, if they were, it was to dismiss their collecting as an
+amiable fad. Mr. John S. Phillips had got together the engravings which
+the Pennsylvania Academy is to-day happy to possess. People who were
+interested did not have to be told that Mr. Claghorn's collection was
+perhaps the finest in the country; J. was one of the wise minority, and
+often on Sundays took advantage of Mr. Claghorn's generosity in letting
+anybody with the intelligence to realize the privilege come to look at
+his prints and study them; but I, who had not learned to be interested,
+knew nothing of the collection until I knew J. Gebbie and Barrie's store
+flourished in Walnut Street as it hardly could had there not been people
+in Philadelphia, as Gebbie once wrote to Frederick Keppel, who collected
+"these smoky, poky old prints." Gebbie and Barrie have gone, but Barrie
+remains, a publisher of art books, and there are other dealers no less
+important and perhaps more enterprising, who prosper, as one of them has
+recently assured me they could not, if they depended for their chief
+support upon Philadelphia. But Philadelphia gives, as it gave, solid
+foundations of support, with the difference that to-day it takes good
+care the world should know it.
+
+[Illustration: GIRARD COLLEGE]
+
+A few Philadelphians collected pictures. One of the show places, more
+select and exclusive than the Mint and Girard College, for the rare
+visitor to the town with a soul above dancing and dining, was Mr.
+Gibson's gallery in Walnut Street, open on stated days to anybody
+properly introduced, or it may be that only a visiting card with a
+proper address was necessary for admission. The less I say about the
+Gallery the better, for I never went to Mr. Gibson's myself, though I
+knew the house as I passed it for one apart in Philadelphia--one where
+so un-Philadelphia-like a possession as a picture gallery was allowed to
+disturb the Philadelphian's first-story arrangement of front and back
+parlours. The collection can now be visited, without any preliminary
+formalities, at the Academy of Fine Arts. Mrs. Bloomfield Moore was
+still living in Philadelphia and she must have begun collecting though,
+well as I knew the inside of her house in my young days, I hesitate to
+assert it as a fact--which shows my unpardonable blindness to most
+things in life worth while. I never, as far as I remember, went anywhere
+for the express purpose of looking at paintings. I had not even the
+curiosity which is the next best thing to knowledge and understanding. I
+have said how meagre are my impressions of the old Academy on Chestnut
+Street. It is a question to me whether I had ever seen more than the
+outside of the new Academy at Broad and Cherry Streets before I met J.
+To go to the exhibitions there had not as yet come within the list of
+things Philadelphians who were not artists made a point of doing.
+Altogether, judging from my own recollections, Philadelphians did not
+bother about art, and did not stop to ask whether there was any to
+bother about in Philadelphia, or not.
+
+
+III
+
+Their indifference was their loss. The art, with a highly respectable
+pedigree, was there for Philadelphia to enjoy and be proud of, if
+Philadelphia had not been as reticent about it as about all its other
+accomplishments and possessions. I have a decided suspicion that I have
+come to a subject about which I might do well to observe the same
+reticence, not only as a Philadelphian, but as the wife of an artist.
+For if, as the wife of a Friend, I have learned that only Friends are
+qualified to write of themselves, as the wife of an artist I have reason
+to believe it more discreet to leave all talk of art to artists, though
+discretion in this regard has not been one of the virtues of my working
+life. But just now, I am talking not so much of art as of my attitude
+towards art which must have been the attitude of the outsider in
+Philadelphia, or else it would not have been mine. As for the genealogy
+of Philadelphia art, it is, like the genealogy of Philadelphia families,
+in the records of the town for all who will to read.
+
+In the very beginning of things Philadelphia may have had no more
+pressing need for the artist's studio than for the writer's study. But
+it was surprising how soon its needs expanded in this direction. English
+and other European critics deplore the absence of an original--or
+aboriginal--school of art in America, as if they thought the American
+artist should unconsciously have lost, on his way across the Atlantic,
+that inheritance from centuries of civilization and tradition which the
+modern artist who calls himself Post-Impressionist is deliberately
+endeavoring to get rid of, and on his arrival have started all over
+again like a child with a clean slate. Only an American art based on the
+hieroglyphics and war paint of the Indians would satisfy the critic with
+this preconceived idea. But the first American artists were not savages,
+they were not primitives. They did not paint pictures like Indians any
+more than the first American architects built wigwams like Indians, or
+the first American Colonials dressed themselves in beads and feathers
+like Indians. Colonials had come from countries where art was highly
+developed, and they could no more forget the masters at home than they
+could forget the literature upon which they and their fathers had been
+nourished. If years passed before a Philadelphian began to paint
+pictures, it was because Philadelphians had not time to paint as they
+had not time to write. The wonder really is that they began so
+soon--that so soon the artist got to work, and so soon there was a
+public to care enough for his work to enable him to do it.
+
+In a thousand ways the interest of Philadelphians in art expressed
+itself. It is written large in the beauty of their houses and in their
+readiness to introduce ornament where ornament belonged. The vine and
+cluster of grapes carved on William Penn's front door; the panelling and
+woodwork in Colonial houses; the decoration of a public building like
+the State House; the furniture, the silver, the china, we pay small
+fortunes for when we can find them and have not inherited them; the
+single finely-proportioned mirror or decorative silhouette on a white
+wall; the Colonial rooms that have come down to us untouched, perfect in
+their simplicity, not an ornament too many;--all show which way the wind
+of art blew.
+
+There was hardly one of the great men from any American town, makers of
+first the Revolution and then the Union, who did not appreciate the
+meaning and importance of art and did not leave a written record, if
+only in a letter, of his appreciation. Few things have struck me more in
+reading the Correspondence and Memoirs and Diaries of the day. But these
+men were not only patriots, they were men of intelligence, and they knew
+the folly of expecting to find in Philadelphia or New York or Boston the
+same beautiful things that in Paris or London or Italy filled them with
+delight and admiration, or of seeing in this fact a reason to lower
+their standard. The critics who are shocked because we have no
+aboriginal school might do worse than read some of these old documents.
+I recommend in particular a passage in a letter John Adams wrote to his
+wife from Paris. It impressed me so when I came upon it, it seemed to me
+such an admirable explanation of a situation perplexing to critics, that
+I copied it in my notebook, and I cannot resist quoting it now.
+
+[Illustration: UPSALA, GERMANTOWN]
+
+"It is not indeed the fine arts which our country requires," he writes,
+"the useful, the mechanic arts are those which we have occasion for in a
+young country as yet simple and not far advanced in luxury, although
+much too far for her age and character.... The science of government it
+is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of
+legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take place of,
+indeed to exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics
+and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and
+philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy,
+geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce
+and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study
+painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and
+porcelain."
+
+John Adams and his contemporaries may not have had American grandfathers
+with the leisure to earn for them the right to study art, but they did
+not ignore it. All the time they felt its appeal and responded to the
+appeal as well as busy men, absorbed in the development of a new
+country, could. They got themselves painted whenever they happened to
+combine the leisure to sit and a painter to sit to. When a statesman
+like Jefferson, who confessed himself "an enthusiast on the subject of
+the arts," was sent abroad, he devoted his scant leisure to securing the
+best possible sculptor for the statue of Washington, or the best
+possible models for public buildings at home. Much that we now prize in
+architecture and design we owe to the men who supposed themselves too
+occupied with politics and war to encourage art and artists. They were
+not too busy to provide the beauty without which liberty would have been
+a poor affair--not too busy to welcome the first Americans who saw to it
+that all the beauty should not be imported from Europe. "After the first
+cares for the necessaries of life are over, we shall come to think of
+the embellishments," Franklin wrote to his London landlady's daughter.
+"Already some of our young geniuses begin to lisp attempts at painting,
+poetry and music. We have a young painter now studying at Rome."
+
+[Illustration: THE HALL AT CLIVEDEN, THE CHEW HOUSE]
+
+In this care for the embellishments of life, of so much more real
+importance than the necessaries, Philadelphia was the first town to take
+the lead, though Philadelphians have since gone out of their way to
+forget it. The old Quaker lady in her beautiful dress, preserving her
+beautiful repose, in her beautiful old and historic rooms, shows the
+Friends' instinctive love of beauty even if they never intentionally, or
+deliberately, undertook to create it. For the most beautiful of what we
+now call Colonial furniture produced in the Colonies, Philadelphia is
+given the credit by authorities on the subject. Franklin's letters
+could also be quoted to show Philadelphians' keenness to have their
+portraits done in "conversation" or "family" pieces, or alone in
+miniatures, whichever were most in vogue. Even Friends, before Franklin,
+when they visited England sought out a fashionable portrait-painter like
+Kneller because he was supposed the best. Artists from England came to
+Philadelphia for commissions, artists from other Colonies drifted there,
+Peale, Stuart, Copley. Philadelphia, in return, spared its artists to
+England, and the Royal Academy was forced to rely upon Philadelphia for
+its second President--Benjamin West. The artist's studio in Philadelphia
+had become a place of such distinction by the Revolution that members of
+the first Congress felt honoured themselves when allowed to honour it
+with their presence--in the intervals between legislating and dining.
+The Philadelphian to-day, goaded by the moss-grown jest over
+Philadelphia slowness and want of enterprise into giving the list of
+Philadelphia "firsts," or the things Philadelphia has been the first to
+do in the country, can include among them the picture exhibition which
+Philadelphia was the first to hold, and the Pennsylvania Academy which
+was the first Academy of the Fine Arts instituted in America.
+Philadelphia was the richest American town and long the Capital; the
+marvel would be if it had not taken the lead in art as in politics.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV: PHILADELPHIA AND ART--CONTINUED
+
+
+I
+
+By the time I grew up years had passed since Philadelphia had ceased to
+be the Capital, and during these years its atmosphere had not been
+especially congenial to art. But the general conditions had not been
+more stimulating anywhere in America. The Hudson River School is about
+all that came of a period which, for that matter, owed its chief good to
+revolt in countries where more was to be expected of it: in France, to
+first the Romanticists and then the Impressionists who had revolted
+against the Academic; in England to the Pre-Raphaelites who, with noisy
+advertisement, broke away from Victorian convention. Art in America had
+not got to the point of development when there was anything to revolt
+against or to break away from. What it needed was a revival of the old
+interest, a reaction from the prevailing indifference to all there was
+of art in the country.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD WATER-WORKS, FAIRMOUNT PARK]
+
+Some say this came in Philadelphia with the Centennial. The Centennial's
+stirring up, however, would not have done much good had not artists
+already begun to stir themselves up. How a number of Americans who had
+been studying in Paris and Munich returned to America full of youth and
+enthusiasm in the early Eighteen-Seventies, there to lead a new
+movement in American art, has long since passed into history--also the
+fact that one of the most remarkable outcomes of this new movement was
+the new school of illustration that quickly made American illustrated
+books and magazines famous throughout the world. But what concerns me as
+a Philadelphian is that, once more at this critical moment, Philadelphia
+took the lead. The publishers of the illustrated books and magazines may
+have been chiefly in New York, the illustrations were chiefly from
+Philadelphia, and there is no reason why Philadelphia should not admit
+it with decent pride. Abbey and Frost were actually, Howard Pyle and
+Smedley virtually, Philadelphians. Blum and Brennan passed through the
+Academy Schools. J., when I met him, was at the threshold of his career.
+And the illustrators were but a younger offshoot of the new Philadelphia
+group. Miss Mary Cassatt had already started to work in Paris, where
+Jules Stewart and Ridgway Knight represented the older Philadelphia
+school; Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt was already in London; J. McLure Hamilton
+had finished his studies at Antwerp; Alexander and Birge Harrison had
+been heard of in Paris where Sargent--who belongs to Philadelphia if to
+any American town--had carried off his first honours. At home Richards
+was painting his marines; Poore had begun his study of animals; Dana, I
+think, was beginning his water-colours; William Sartain had long been
+known as an engraver; Miss Emily Sartain was an art editor and soon to
+be the head of an art school; the Moran family, with the second
+generation, had become almost a Philadelphia institution; from Stephen
+Ferris J. could learn the technic of etching as from the Claghorn
+collection he could trace its development through the ages; and of the
+younger men and women, his contemporaries, he did not leave me long in
+ignorance.
+
+My own work had led me to the discovery of so many worlds of work in
+Philadelphia, I could not have believed there was room for another. But
+there was, and the artists' world was so industrious, so full of energy,
+so sufficient unto itself, so absorbed in itself, that, with the first
+glimpse into it, the difficulty was to believe space and reason could be
+left for any outside of it. This new experience was as extraordinary a
+revelation as my initiation into the newspaper world. I had been living,
+without suspecting it, next door to people who thought of nothing,
+talked of nothing, occupied themselves with nothing, but art: people for
+whom a whole army of men and women were busily employed,
+managing schools, running factories, keeping stores, putting up
+buildings--delightful people with whom I could not be two minutes
+without reproaching myself for not having known from the cradle that
+nothing in life save art ever did count, or ever could. And at this
+point I can afford to get rid of Philadelphia reticence without scruple
+since through this, to me, new world of work I had the benefit of J.'s
+guidance.
+
+It was a moment when it had got to be the fashion for artists in all the
+studios in the same building to give receptions on the same day, and I
+learned that J.'s, so strange to me at first, was only one of an endless
+number. For part of my new experience was the round of the studios on
+the appointed day, when I was too oppressed by my ignorance and my
+desire not to expose it and my uncertainty as to what was the right
+thing to say in front of a picture, that I do not remember much besides,
+except the miniatures of Miss Van Tromp and the marines of Prosper
+Senat, and why they should now stand out from the confused jumble of my
+memories I am sure I cannot see.
+
+Then J. took me to the Academy of Fine Arts and it was revealed to me as
+a place not to pass by but to go inside of: artists from all over the
+country struggling to get in for its annual exhibition of paintings
+which already had a reputation as one of the finest given in the
+country; artists from all over the world drawn in for its international
+exhibitions of etchings--Whistler, Seymour Haden, Appian, Lalanne, a
+catalogue-full of etchers introduced for the first time to my uneducated
+eyes; everybody who could crowding in on Thursday afternoons to sit on
+the stairs and listen to the music, while I upbraided myself for not
+having known ages ago what delightful things there were to do, instead
+of letting my time hang heavy on my hands, in Philadelphia.
+
+J. had me invited to more private evenings and reunions of societies of
+artists, and I remember--if they do not--meeting many who were at the
+very heart of the machinery that made the wheels of the new movement go
+round:--Mr. Leslie Miller, the director of the School of Industrial Art
+from which promising students were emerging or had emerged; Stephen
+Parrish and Blanche Dillaye and Gabrielle Clements, whose etchings were
+with the Whistlers and the Seymour Hadens in the international
+exhibitions; Alice Barber full of commissions from magazines; Margaret
+Leslie and Mary Trotter in their fervent apprenticeship; Boyle and
+Stephens the sculptors; Colin Cooper and Stephens the painters. What a
+rank outsider I felt in their company! And how grateful I was for my
+talent as a listener that helped to save me from exposure!
+
+
+II
+
+I saw another side of the revival at my Uncle's Industrial Art School in
+the eagerness of teachers and pupils both to know and to learn and to
+practise--an eagerness that had, I fear, an eye to ultimate profit. That
+was the worst feature of the booming of art in the Eighteen-Eighties.
+Gain was the incentive that drove too many students to the art schools
+of Philadelphia as to those of Paris, or London, and set countless
+amateurs in their own homes to hammering brass and carving wood and
+stamping leather. Art was to them an investment, a speculation, a
+gentlemanly--or ladylike--way of making a fortune. An English painter I
+know told me a few years since that he had put quite six thousand pounds
+into art, what with studying and travelling for subjects, and he thought
+he had a right to look for a decent return on his money. That expresses
+the attitude of a vast number of Philadelphians in their new active
+enthusiasm. However trumpery the amount of labour they invested, they
+counted on it to bring them in a big dividend in dollars and cents.
+
+[Illustration: THE STAIRWAY, STATE HOUSE]
+
+I am afraid my Uncle, without meaning to, encouraged this spirit, when
+he started not only the Industrial Art School, but the Decorative Art
+Club in Pine Street. He was an optimist and saw only the beautiful side
+of anything he was interested in. To please him I was made the Treasurer
+of the Club. The Committee sympathised with my Uncle and worked for the
+ultimate good he thought the Club was to accomplish in Philadelphia.
+Mrs. Harrison, Mrs. Mifflin, Mrs. Pepper, Miss Julia Biddle with whom I
+served, agreed with him that women who had some training in art would
+understand better the meaning of art and the pleasure of the stimulus
+this understanding could give. My Uncle, however, always ready to do
+anybody a good turn, went further and was anxious that provision should
+also be made to sell the work done in the Club, which in this way would
+be open to many who could not otherwise afford it. I fancy that this
+provision, if not the success of the Club, was one of its chief
+attractions. The amateur is apt to believe she can romp in gaily and
+snatch whatever prizes are going by playing with the art which is the
+life's work, mastered by toil and travail, of the artist.
+
+I criticise now, but in my new ardour I saw nothing to criticise. On the
+contrary, I saw perfection: artists and students encouraged,
+occupations and interests lavished upon amateurs whose lives had been as
+empty as mine; and I worked myself up into a fine enthusiasm of belief
+in art as a new force, or one that if it had always existed had been
+waiting for its prophet,--just as electricity had waited for Franklin to
+capture and apply it to human needs. I went so far in my exaltation as
+to write an inspired--or so it seemed to me--article on Art as the New
+Religion, proving that the old religions having perished and the old
+gods fallen, art had re-arisen in its splendour and glory to provide a
+new gospel, a new god, to take their place, and I filled my essay with
+ingenious arguments, and liberal quotations from William Morris and
+Ruskin, and rhetorical flights of prophecy. I had not given the last
+finishing and convincing touches to my exposition of the new gospel
+when, with my marriage, came other work more urgent, and I was spared
+the humiliation of seeing my Palace of Art collapse, like the house
+built on sand, while I still believed in it. In the years that followed
+I got to know most of the galleries and exhibitions of Europe; despite
+my scruples I made a profession of writing about art; and the education
+this meant taught me, among other things, the simple truth that art is
+art, and not religion. But I cannot laugh at the old folly of my
+ignorance. The enthusiasm, the mood, out of which the article grew, was
+better, healthier, than the apathy that had saved me from being
+ridiculous because it risked nothing.
+
+
+III
+
+These years away from home were spent largely in the company of artists
+and were filled with the talk of art; what had been marvels to me in
+Philadelphia became the commonplaces of every day. But I was all the
+time in Italy, or France, or England, and could not realize the extent
+to which, for Philadelphians who had not wandered, artists and art were
+also becoming more and more a part of everyday life. I did not see
+Philadelphia in the changing, not until it had changed, and possibly I
+feel the change more than those who lived through it. It is not so much
+in the things done, in actual accomplishment, that I am conscious of it,
+as in the new concern for art, the new attentions heaped upon it, the
+new deference to it. Art is in the air--"on the town," a subject of
+polite conversation, a topic for the drawing-room.
+
+When I first came out, art had never supplied small talk in society,
+never filled up a gap at a dull dinner or reception. We should have been
+disgracefully behind the times if we could not chatter about Christine
+Nilsson and Campanini and the last opera, or Irving and Ellen Terry and
+their interpretation of Shakespeare; if we had not kept up with Trollope
+and George Eliot, and read the latest Howells and Henry James, and raved
+over the Rubaiyat. But we might have had the brand-newest biographical
+dictionary of artists at our fingers' ends--as we had not--and there
+would have been no occasion to use our information. Nobody sparkled by
+sprinkling his talk with the names of artists and sculptors, nobody
+asked what was in the last Academy or who had won the gold medal in
+Paris, nobody discussed the psychology or the meaning of the picture of
+the year. I remember thinking I was doing something rather pretentious
+and pedantic when I began to read Ruskin. I remember how a friend who
+was a tireless student of Kuegler and Crowe and Cavalcaselle, as a
+preparation to the journey to Europe that might never come off, was
+looked upon as a sort of prodigy--a Philadelphia phenomenon. But to-day
+I am sure there is not the name of an artist, from Cimabue and Giotto to
+Matisse and Picasso, that does not go easily round the table at any
+Philadelphia dinner; not a writer on art, from Lionardo to Nordau, who
+cannot fill up awkward pauses at an afternoon crush; not one of the
+learned women of Philadelphia who could not tell you where every
+masterpiece in the world hangs and just what her emotions before it
+should be, who could not play the game of attributions as gracefully as
+the game of bridge, who could not dispose of the most abstruse points in
+art as serenely as she settles the simplest squabble in the nursery.
+
+The Academy is no longer abandoned in the wilderness of Broad and Cherry
+Streets; its receptions and private views are social functions, its
+exhibitions are events of importance, the best given in Philadelphia and
+throughout the land, its collections are the pride of the wealthy
+Philadelphians who contribute to them, its schools are stifled with
+scholarships.
+
+[Illustration: UPPER ROOM, STENTON]
+
+The other Art Schools have multiplied, not faster, however, than the
+students whose legions account for, if they do not warrant, the
+existence not of the Academy Schools alone, but of the School of
+Industrial Art, the Drexel Institute, the Woman's School of Design, the
+Uncle's old little experiment enlarged into a large Public Industrial
+Art School where, I am told, the Founder is comfortably forgotten--of
+more institutes, schools, classes than I probably have heard of.
+
+The Art Galleries have multiplied: there is some reason for Memorial
+Hall now that the Wilstach Collection is housed there, and the _Yellow
+Buskin_, one of the finest Whistlers, hangs on its walls, now that the
+collections of decorative art are being added to by Mrs. John Harrison
+and other Philadelphians who are ambitious for their town and its
+supremacy in all things. Nor does this Philadelphia ambition soar to
+loftier heights than in the project for the new Parkway from the City
+Hall with a new Art Gallery--the centre of a sort of University of Art
+if I can rely upon the plans--to crown the Park end of this splendid
+(partially still on paper) avenue, as the Arc de Triomphe crowns the
+western end of the Avenue of the Champs-Elysees.
+
+The collectors multiply, their aims, purse, field of research, all
+expanding; their shyness on the subject surmounted; Old Masters for whom
+Europe now weeps making their triumphant entry into Philadelphia; the
+highest price, that test of the modern patron, paid for a Rembrandt in
+Philadelphia; the collections of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Widener and Mr.
+Elkins and Mr. Thomas in Philadelphia as well known by the authorities
+as the Borghesi collection in Rome or the Duke of Westminster's in
+London.
+
+The social life of art grows and can afford the large luxurious Club in
+South Broad Street, artists and their friends amply supporting it. And
+the old Sketch Club, once glad of the shelter of a room or so, has
+blossomed forth in a house of its own in the flourishing "Little Street
+of Clubs," with the Woman's Plastic Club close by.
+
+The artists only, as far as I can see, have not multiplied and grown in
+proportion. But the artist somehow appears to be the last consideration
+of those who think they are encouraging art. Still there are new names
+for my old list: Henry Thouron, Violet Oakley, Maxfield Parrish, now
+ranked with the decorative painters--and, I might just point out in
+passing, it is to Philadelphia that Boston, Harrisburg, and at times New
+York must send for their decorators, whose work I have not seen in place
+to express an opinion on it one way or the other. Cecilia Beaux and
+Adolphe Borie now figure with the portrait painters; Waugh and Fromuth
+with the marine painters, who include also Stokes, the chronicler of
+Arctic splendors of sea and sky, and Edward Stratton Holloway, the
+making of beautiful books claiming his interest no less than the sea;
+Glackens, Thornton Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Jessie Wilcox Smith
+with the illustrators; McCarter, Redfield with the group gathered about
+the Academy; Grafly with the sculptors; Clifford Addams, Daniel Garber
+with the winners of scholarships. Architects have not lagged behind in
+the race--after the Furness period, a Cope and Stewardson period, a
+Wilson Eyre period, to-day a Zantzinger, Borie, Medary, Day, Page,
+Trumbauer, and a dozen more periods each progressing in the right
+direction; with young men from the Beaux-Arts and young men from the
+University School, eager to tackle the ever-increasing architectural
+commissions in a town growing and re-fashioning itself faster than any
+mushroom upstart of the West, to inaugurate a period of their own.
+
+
+IV
+
+I am not a fighter by nature, I set a higher value on peace as I grow
+older, and I look to ending my days in Philadelphia. Therefore I
+chronicle the change; I do not criticise it. But a few comments I may
+permit myself and yet hope that Philadelphia will not bear me in return
+the malice I could so ill endure. I think the gain to Philadelphia from
+this new interest has, in many ways, been great. If art is the one thing
+that lives through the ages--art whether expressed in words, or paint,
+or bricks and mortar, or the rhythm of sound,--it follows that the
+pleasure it gives--when genuine--is the most enduring. This is a
+distinct, if perhaps at the moment negative, gain. A more visible gain I
+think comes from the new desire, the new determination to care for the
+right thing: a fashion due perhaps to the insatiable American craving
+for "culture," and at times guilty of unintelligent excesses, but
+pleasanter in results than the old crazes that filled Philadelphia
+drawing-rooms with spinning wheels and cat's tails and Morris
+mediaevalism,--if they brought _Art Nouveau_ in their train, thank
+fortune it has left no traces of its passing; a fashion more dignified
+in results than the old standards that filled Philadelphia streets with
+flights of originality, and green stone monsters, and the deplorable
+Philadelphia brand of Gothic and Renaissance, Romanesque and Venetian,
+Tudor and everything except the architecture that belongs by right and
+tradition in Penn's beautiful town.
+
+[Illustration: WYCK--The doorway from within]
+
+But interest in art does not create art, and when Philadelphia believes
+in this interest as a creator, Philadelphia falls into a mistake that it
+has not even the merit of having originated. I have watched for many
+years the attempts to make art grow, to force it like a hot-house plant.
+The same thing is going on everywhere. In England, South Kensington for
+more than half a century has had its schools in all parts of the
+kingdom, the County Council has added to them, the City Corporation and
+the City Guilds have followed suit, artists open private classes,
+exhibitions have increased in number until they are a drug on the
+market, art critics flourish, the papers devote columns to their
+platitudes. And what has England to show as the outcome of all this
+care? Go look at the decorations in the Royal Exchange and the pictures
+in the Royal Academy, examine the official records and learn how great
+is the yearly output of art teachers in excess of schools for them to
+teach in, and you will have a good idea of the return made on the money
+and time and red tape lavished upon the teaching of art. It is no better
+in Paris. Schools and students were never so many, foreigners arrive in
+such numbers that they are pushing the Frenchman out of his own Latin
+Quarter, American students swagger, play the prince on scholarships, are
+presented with clubs and homes where they can give afternoon teas and
+keep on living in a little America of their own. And what comes of it?
+Were the two Salons, with the Salon des Independants and the Salon
+d'Automne thrown in, ever before such a weariness to the flesh?--was
+mediocrity ever before such an invitation to the poseur and the crank to
+pass off manufactured eccentricity as genius?
+
+It would not be reasonable to expect more of Philadelphia than of London
+and Paris. I cannot see that finer artists have been bred there on the
+luxury of scholarships and schools than on their own efforts when they
+toiled all day to be able to study at night, when success was theirs
+only after a hard fight. The Old Masters got their training as
+apprentices, not as pampered youths luxuriating in fine schools and
+exhibitions and incomes and every luxury; they were patronized and more
+splendidly than any artists to-day, but not until they had shown reason
+for it, not until it was an honour to patronize them. The new system is
+more comfortable, I admit, but great work does not spring from comfort.
+Philadelphia is wise to set up a high standard, but not wise when it
+makes the way too easy. For art is a stern master. It cares not if the
+weak fall by the roadside, so long as the strong, unhampered, succeed in
+getting into their own. The best thing that has been done at the Academy
+for many a day is the reducing of the scholarships from a two, or three,
+years' interval free of responsibility, to a summer's holiday among the
+masterpieces of Europe, which, I am told, is all they are now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI: PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE
+
+
+I
+
+If interest in the art of eating called for justification, I could show
+that I come by mine legitimately. My family took care of that when the
+sensible ancestor who made me an American settled in Accomac, where most
+things worth eating were to be had for the fishing or the shooting or
+the digging, so that Accomac feasted while the rest of Virginia still
+starved, and when my Grandfather, in his day, moved to Philadelphia
+which is as well provided as Accomac and more conscientious in
+cultivating its possibilities. It would be sheer disloyalty to the
+family inheritance if I did not like to eat well, just as it would be
+rank hypocrisy to see in my loyalty a virtue.
+
+Accomac's reputation for good eating has barely got beyond the local
+history book, Accomac, I find, being a place you must have belonged to
+at one time or another, to know anything about. But Philadelphia made a
+reputation for its high living as soon as the Philadelphian emerged from
+his original cave, or sooner--read Watson and every other authority and
+you will find that before he was out of it, even the family cat occupied
+itself in hunting delicacies for the family feast. And right off the
+Philadelphian understood the truth the scientist has been centuries in
+groping after: that if people's food is to do them good, they must take
+pleasure in it. The material was his the minute he landed on the spot,
+not the least recommendations of which were its fish and game and its
+convenience as a port where all the country did not produce could be
+brought from countries that did--a spot that, half-way between the North
+and the South, assured to Philadelphia one of the best-stocked markets
+in the world, ever the wonder and admiration of every visitor to the
+town. Pleasure in the material, if history can be trusted, dates as far
+back. A wise man once suggested the agreeable journeys that could be
+planned on a gastronomical map of France--from the Tripe of Caen to the
+Bouillabaisse of Marseilles, from the Chateau Margaux of Bordeaux to the
+Champagne of Rheims, from the Ducks of Rouen to the Truffles of
+Perigord, and so, from one end to the other of that Land of Plenty. I
+would suggest that an agreeable record of Philadelphia might be based
+upon the dinners it has eaten, from the historic dinner foraged for by
+the cat over a couple of centuries ago, to the banquet of yesterday in
+Spruce Street or Walnut, at the Bellevue or the Ritz.
+
+[Illustration: THE PHILADELPHIA DISPENSARY FROM INDEPENDENCE SQUARE]
+
+I should like some day to write this history myself, when I have more
+space and time at my disposal. I have always been blessed with a healthy
+appetite, a decent sense of discrimination in satisfying it, and also a
+deep interest in the Philosophy of Food ever since I began to collect
+cookery books. The more profoundly I go into the subject, the readier I
+am to believe with Brillat-Savarin that what a man is depends a good
+deal on what he eats. This is why I think that if the Philadelphian is
+to be understood, the study of him must not stop with his politics and
+his literature and his art, but must include his marketing and his bill
+of fare. He has had the wit never to doubt the importance of both, and
+the pride never to make light of his genius for living well.
+
+The early Friends in Philadelphia knew better than to pull a long face,
+burrowing for the snares of the flesh and the devil in every necessity
+of life, like the unfortunate Puritans up in New England. It was not to
+lead a hermit's existence William Penn invited them to settle on the
+banks of the Delaware, and he and they realized that pioneer's work
+could not be done on hermit's fare. They entertained no fanatical
+disdain for the pleasures of the table, no ascetic abhorrence to good
+food, daintily prepared. Brawn and chocolate and venison were Penn's
+tender offering as lover to Hannah Callowhill, olives and wine his
+loving gift as friend to Isaac Norris. For equally "acceptable presents"
+that admirable citizen had to thank many besides Penn. James Logan knew
+that the best way to manage your official is to dine him, and in his
+day, and after it, straight on, no public commissioner, and indeed no
+private traveller, could visit Philadelphia and not be fed with its
+banquets and comforted with its Madeira and Punch, while few could
+refrain from saying so with an eloquence and gratitude that did them
+honour. Benjamin Franklin, keeping up the tradition, was known to feast
+more excellently than a philosopher ought, and his philosophy of food is
+explained by his admission in a letter that he would rather discover a
+_recipe_ for making Parmesan cheese in an Italian town than any ancient
+inscription. The American Philosophical Society could not conduct its
+investigations without the aid of dinners and breakfasts, nor could any
+other Philadelphia Society or Club study, or read, or hunt, or fish, or
+legislate, or pursue its appointed ends, without fine cooking and hard
+drinking--though I hope they were not the inspiration of Thomas
+Jefferson's severe criticism of his fellow Americans who, he said, were
+unable to terminate the most sociable meals without transforming
+themselves into brutes. It was impossible for young ladies and grave
+elders to keep descriptions of public banquets and family feasts and
+friendly tea-drinkings out of their letters and diaries: one reason of
+the fascination their letters and diaries have for Philadelphians who
+read them to-day. And altogether, by the Revolution, to judge from John
+Adams' account of his "sinful feasts" in Philadelphia, and General
+Greene's description of the luxury of Boston as "an infant babe" to the
+luxury of Philadelphia, and the rest of America's opinion of
+Philadelphia as a place of "crucifying expenses," and many more signs of
+the times, the dinners of Philadelphia had become so inseparable from
+any meeting, function, or business, that I am tempted to question
+whether, had they not been eaten, the Declaration of Independence could
+have been signed. But it was signed and who can say, in face of the
+fact, that Philadelphia was any the worse for its feasting? And what if
+it proved a dead weight to John Adams, did Boston, did any other town do
+more in the cause of patriotism and independence?
+
+[Illustration: MORRIS HOUSE, GERMANTOWN]
+
+One inevitable feature of the "sinful feasts" was the Madeira John Adams
+drank at a great rate, but suffered no inconvenience from. I could not
+dispense with it in these old records, such a sober place does it hold
+in my own memories of Philadelphia. The decanter of Madeira on my
+Grandfather's dinner table marked the state occasion, and I would not
+have recognized Philadelphia on my return had the same decanter not been
+produced in welcome. It was an assurance that Philadelphia was still
+Philadelphia, though sky-scrapers might break the once pleasant monotony
+of low, red brick houses and motor horns resound through the once
+peaceful streets.
+
+From the beginning Madeira was one of the things no good Philadelphia
+household could be without--just the sound, dignified, old-fashioned
+wine the Philadelphian would be expected to patronize, respectable and
+upright as himself. Orders for it lighten those interminably long
+letters in the Penn-Logan correspondence, so long that all the time I
+was reading them, I kept wondering which of the three I ought to pity
+the most: Penn for what he had to endure from his people; Logan for
+having to keep him posted in his intolerable wrongs; or myself for
+wading through all they both had to say on the subject. As time went
+on, I do not believe there was an official function at which Madeira did
+not figure. There I always find it--the wine of ceremony, the
+sacrificial wine, without which no compact could be sealed, no event
+solemnized, no pleasure enjoyed. It seems to punctuate every step in the
+career of Philadelphians and of Philadelphia, and I thought nothing
+could be more characteristic, when I read the _Autobiography_ of
+Franklin, than that it should have been over the Philadelphia Madeira
+one Governor of Pennsylvania planned a future for him, and another
+Governor of Pennsylvania later on discoursed provincial affairs with
+him, "most profuse of his solicitations and promises" under its pleasant
+influence. Throughout the old annals I am conscious of that decanter of
+Madeira always at hand, the Philadelphian "as free of it as an Apple
+Tree of its Fruit on a Windy Day in the month of July," one old visitor
+to the town records with a pretty fancy for which, as like as not, it
+was responsible.
+
+And throughout the more modern records, there it is again. Even in the
+old-fashioned Philadelphia boarding-house less than a century ago, the
+men after dinner sat over their Madeira. New generations of visitors,
+like the old, drank it and approved, the Madeira that supported John
+Adams at Philadelphia's sinful feasts helping to steer Thackeray and an
+endless succession of strangers at the gate through Philadelphia's
+course of suppers and dinners. It amuses me to recall, as an instance of
+all it represented to Philadelphia, that for a couple of years at the
+Convent, though a healthier child than I never lived, I was made by the
+orders of my Father, obeyed by no means unwillingly on my part, to drink
+a glass of Madeira, with a biscuit, every morning at eleven. And so
+deep-rooted was its use in the best traditions of Philadelphia
+respectability, that the irreproachable Philadelphia ladies who wrote
+cookery books never omitted the glass of Madeira from the Terrapin, and
+went so far as to quote Scripture and to recommend a little of it for
+the stomach's sake.
+
+
+II
+
+One of these Philadelphia ladies wrote the most famous cookery book to
+this day published in America; a fact which pleases me, partly because,
+with Edward Fitzgerald, I cannot help liking a cookery book, and still
+more because it flatters my pride as a Philadelphian that so famous a
+book should come from Philadelphia. It seems superfluous to add that I
+mean Miss Leslie's _Complete Cookery_. What else could I mean?
+
+There had been cookery books in America before Miss Leslie's. America,
+with Philadelphia to set the standard, could not get on very far without
+them. If in the hurry and flurry of Colonial life, the American did not
+have the leisure to write them, he borrowed them, the speediest way to
+manufacture any kind of literature. There is an American edition of Mrs.
+Glasse, with Mrs. Glasse left out--the American pirate was nothing if
+not thorough. There is an American edition of Richard Briggs who was
+not deprived of the credit of his book, though robbed of his title.
+There are American editions I have no doubt of many besides which I have
+only to haunt the old bookstalls and second-hand book stores of
+Philadelphia assiduously enough to find. But of American cookery books,
+either borrowed or original, before the time of Miss Leslie, I own but
+the stolen Mrs. Glasse and an insignificant little manual issued in New
+York in 1813, an American adaptation probably of an English model to
+which I have not yet succeeded in tracing it.
+
+Nor do I know of any I do not own, and I know as much of American
+cookery books as any of the authorities, and I do not mind saying so, as
+I can without the shadow of conceit. Vicaire includes only two or three
+in his _Bibliographie_; Hazlitt, to save trouble, confined himself to
+English books; Dr. Oxford's interest is frankly in the publications of
+his own country, though, in his first bibliography, he mentions a few
+foreign volumes, and in his second he refers to one American piracy, and
+these are the three chief bibliographers of the Kitchen in Europe.
+American authorities do not exist, when I except myself. It is true that
+G. H. Ellwanger made a list of cookery books, but he threw them together
+anyhow, with no attempt at classification, and his list scarcely merits
+the name of bibliography. The history of the American cookery book is a
+virgin field, and as such I present it to the innumerable American
+students who are turned out from the Universities, year after year, for
+the research work that is frequently of as little use to themselves as
+to anybody else.
+
+[Illustration: THE STATE HOUSE COLONNADE]
+
+But many as may be the discoveries in the future, Miss Leslie cannot be
+dethroned nor deprived of her distinction as the Mrs. Glasse of America.
+Other writers, if there were any, were allowed to disappear; should they
+be dragged out of their obscurity now, it would be as bibliographical
+curiosities, bibliographical specimens. Miss Leslie was never forgotten,
+she survives to-day, her name honoured, her book cherished. She leapt
+into fame on its publication, and with such ardour was the First Edition
+bought up, with such ardour either reverently preserved or diligently
+consulted that I, the proud possessor of Mrs. Glasse in her First
+Edition "pot folio," of Apicius Coelius, Gervase Markham, Scappi, Grimod
+de la Reyniere, and no end of others in their first Editions, cannot as
+yet boast a First Edition of Miss Leslie. I have tried, my friends have
+tried; the most important book-sellers in the country have tried; and in
+vain, until I begin to think I might as well hope for the Elzevir
+_Patissier Francais_ as the 1837 _Complete Cookery_. It may be hidden on
+some unexplored Philadelphia book shelf, for it was as indispensable in
+the Philadelphia household as the decanter of Madeira. I ask myself if
+its appreciation in the kitchen, for which it was written, is the reason
+why I have no recollection of it in the Eleventh and Spruce Street
+house, well as I remember _Lippincott's_ on the back parlour table, nor
+in my Father's library, well as I recall his editions of Scott and
+Dickens, Voltaire and Rousseau, a combination expressive of a liberal
+taste in literature. But never anywhere have I seen that elusive First
+Edition, never anywhere succeeded in obtaining an earlier edition than
+the Fifty-Eighth. The date is 1858--think of it! fifty-eight editions in
+twenty-one years! Can our "Best Sellers" surpass that as a record? Or
+can any American writer on cookery after Miss Leslie, from Mrs. Sarah
+Joseph Hale and Jenny June to Marion Harland and the Philadelphia Mrs.
+Rorer, rank with her as a rival to Mrs. Glasse, as the author of a
+cookery book that has become the rare prize of the collector?
+
+
+III
+
+It is so proud an eminence for a quiet Philadelphia maiden lady in the
+Eighteen-Thirties and Forties to have reached that I cannot but wish I
+knew more of Miss Leslie personally. From her contemporaries I have
+learned nothing save that she went to tea parties like any ordinary
+Philadelphian, that she was interested in the legends and traditions of
+her town, which wasn't like any ordinary Philadelphian, and that she
+condescended to journalism, editing _The Casket_. There is a portrait of
+her at the Academy, Philadelphia decorum so stamped upon her face and
+dress that it makes me more curious than ever to know why she was not
+the mother of children instead of a writer of books. These books explain
+that she had a literary conscience. In her preface to her _Domestic
+Economy_, which is not an unworthy companion to her _Complete Cookery_,
+she reveals an unfeminine respect for style. "In this as in her Cookery
+Book," she writes, a dignity expressed in her use of the third person,
+"she has not scrupled when necessary, to sacrifice the sound to the
+sense; repeating the same words when no others could be found to express
+the purport so clearly, and being always more anxious to convey the
+meaning in such terms as could not be mistaken than to risk obscuring it
+by attempts at refined phraseology or well-rounded periods." Now and
+then the temptation was too strong and she fell into alliteration,
+writing of "ponderous puddings and curdled custards." But this is
+exceptional. As a rule, in her dry, business-like sentences, it would be
+impossible to suspect her of philandering with sound, or concerning
+herself with the pleasure of her readers.
+
+Her subject is one, happily, that can survive the sacrifice. The book is
+a monument to Philadelphia cookery. She was not so emancipated as to
+neglect all other kitchens. _Recipes_ for Soup _a la Julienne_ and
+Mulligatawny, for Bath Buns and Gooseberry Fools, for Pilaus and
+Curries, are concessions to foreign conventions. _Recipes_ for Oysters
+and Shad, for Gumbo and Buckwheat Cakes, for Mint Juleps and Sweet
+Potatoes, for Pumpkins and Mush, show her deference to ideals cultivated
+by Americans from one State or another. But concessions and deference do
+not prevent her book--her two books--from being unmistakably
+Philadelphian:--an undefinable something in the quality and quantity, a
+definable something in the dishes and ingredients. I know that in my
+exile, thousands of miles from home, when I open her _Complete Cookery_,
+certain passages transport me straight back to Philadelphia, to my
+childhood and my youth, to the second-story back-building dining-room
+and the kitchen with the lilacs at the back-yard door. I read of Dried
+Beef, chipped or frizzled in butter and eggs, and, as of old in the
+Eleventh and Spruce Street house, a delicious fragrance, characteristic
+of Philadelphia as the sickly smell of the ailanthus, fills my nostrils
+and my appetite is keen again for the eight o'clock tea, long since
+given way to the eight o'clock dinner. I turn the pages and come to Reed
+Birds, roasted or baked, and at once I feel the cool of the radiant fall
+evening, and I am at Belmont or Strawberry Mansion after the long walk
+through the park, one of the gay party for whom the cloth is laid. Or
+the mere mention of Chicken Salad sets back the clock of the years and
+drops me into the chattering midst of the Philadelphia five o'clock
+reception, in time for the spread that, for sentiment's sake, is dear to
+me in memory, but that, for digestion's sake, I hope never to see
+revived. Or a thrill is in the dressing for the salad alone, in the mere
+dash of mustard that Philadelphia has the independence to give to its
+Mayonnaise. I am conservative in matters of art. I would not often
+recommend a deviation from French precedent which is the most reliable
+and the finest. But Philadelphia may be trusted to deviate, when it
+permits itself the liberty, with discretion and distinction.
+
+[Illustration: THE SMITH MEMORIAL, WEST FAIRMOUNT PARK]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII: PHILADELPHIA AT TABLE--CONTINUED
+
+
+I
+
+So much of Philadelphia is in Miss Leslie that her silence on one or two
+matters essentially Philadelphian is the greater disappointment.
+
+I have said that when I was young it was the business of the man of the
+house to market and to make the Mayonnaise for the dinner's salad, and I
+have searched for the reason in vain. His appropriation of the marketing
+seems to be comparatively modern. If the chronicles are to be trusted,
+it was the woman's business as late as Mrs. Washington's day. But by
+mine, the man's going to market had settled solidly into one of those
+Philadelphia customs taken for granted by Philadelphians simply because
+they were Philadelphia customs. Never in print have I seen any reference
+to this division of family labour except in the Philadelphia stories of
+Thomas A. Janvier who, as a Philadelphian, knew that it became well
+brought up Philadelphia men to attend to the marketing and that duties
+becoming to them were above explanation. Janvier knew also that only in
+Philadelphia, probably, could it occur to the "master of a feast" to
+dress the salad, and that this was the reason "why a better salad is
+served at certain dinner tables in Philadelphia than at any other
+dinner tables in the whole world." Miss Leslie is not without honour in
+her own town and was there reverenced by no one as truly as by Janvier,
+but his reverence for the Art of Cookery was more profound and he shared
+the belief of the initiated that in it man surpasses as hitherto, I
+regret to say, he has surpassed in all the arts.
+
+Janvier himself was the last "master of the feast" it was my good
+fortune to watch preparing the Mayonnaise. It was a solemn rite in his
+hands, and the result not unworthy--his salads were delicious, perfect,
+original, their originality, however, never pushed to open defiance of
+the Philadelphia precedents he respected. One of my pleasantest memories
+of him is of his salad-making at his own dinner table in his London
+rooms, one or two friends informally gathered about him, and the summer
+evening so warm that he appeared all in white--a splendid presence, for
+he was an unusually handsome man, of the rich, flamboyant type that has
+gone out of fashion almost everywhere except in the South of France. The
+white added, somehow, to the effect of ceremony, and he lingered over
+every stage of the preparation and the mixing,--the Philadelphia touch
+of mustard not omitted,--with due gravity and care. How different the
+salad created with this ceremony from the usual makeshift mixed nobody
+knows how or where!
+
+[Illustration: THE BASIN, OLD WATER-WORKS]
+
+That the Philadelphia man should have accepted this responsibility,
+explains better than I could how high is the Philadelphia standard. I
+could not understand Miss Leslie's silence on the subject, did I not
+suspect her of a disapproval as complete as her Cookery. She had no
+new-fangled notions on the position of woman, no desire to dispute man's
+long-established superiority. If she was willing to teach women how to
+become accomplished housewives, it was that they might administer to the
+comfort and satisfy the appetite of their fathers and brothers and
+husbands and sons. The end of woman, according to her creed, is to make
+the home agreeable for man, and it would save us many of to-day's
+troubles if we agreed with her. No man, since it is to his advantage,
+will blame her for being more orthodox as a woman than as a
+Philadelphian, nor is it at very great cost that I forgive her. I prize
+her book too much from the collector's standpoint, if from no other, to
+resent its sentiment. And my joy in my copy--in my Fifty-eighth
+Edition--is none the less because it was presented to me by Janvier who,
+in a few short stories, gave the spirit of the Philadelphia feast as
+Miss Leslie, in two substantial volumes, collected and classified its
+materials.
+
+Another thing I do not find in Miss Leslie is the Oyster Croquette,
+which she could not have ignored had she once eaten it. Therefore I am
+led to see in it the product of a generation nearer my own. In my
+memories of childhood it is inseparable from my Grandmother's eight
+o'clock tea on evenings when the family were invited in state--in my
+memories of youth inseparable from every afternoon or evening party at
+which I feasted fearlessly and well--and it figured at many a Sunday
+high-tea, that exquisite feast which, by its very name, refuses to let
+itself be confounded with its coarser counterpart known to the English
+as a meat-tea. From these facts I conclude, though I have no other data
+to rely upon, that the Oyster Croquette must have been not simply the
+masterpiece, but the creation of Augustine, for the Oyster Croquette
+which the well-brought-up Philadelphian then ate at moments of rejoicing
+was always of his cooking.
+
+
+II
+
+Augustine--the explanation is superfluous for Philadelphians of my
+age--was a coloured man with the genius of his race for cookery and
+probably a drop or more of the white blood that developed in him also
+the genius for organization, so that he was a leader among caterers, as
+well as a master among cooks. It is worth noting that the demand for
+cooks in Philadelphia being great, the greatest cooks in America never
+failed to supply it: worth noting also that the Philadelphia housewife,
+being thus well supplied, had not begun when I was young to amuse
+herself with the chafing-dish as she does now. For many years,
+Augustine's name and creations were the chief distinction of every
+Philadelphia feast. To have entertained without his assistance would
+have been as serious a crime as to have omitted Terrapin--in season--and
+Ice-cream from the Philadelphia menu; as daring as to have gone for
+chocolates anywhere save to Penas' or for smilax anywhere save to
+Pennock's, and this sort of daring in Philadelphia would have been
+deplored not as harmless originality, but as eccentricity in the worst
+possible taste. Thanks to Augustine, Philadelphia became celebrated in
+America for its Oyster Croquettes and Terrapin and Broiled Oysters--what
+a work of genius this, with the sauce of his invention!--as Bresse is in
+France for its Chickens, or York in England for its Hams.
+
+So much I know about him, and no more--but his name should go down in
+history with those of Vatel and Careme and Gouffe: an artist if ever
+there was one! Because he did not commit suicide like Vatel--his oysters
+were never late--because he did not write encyclopedias of cookery like
+Careme and Gouffe, his name and fame are in danger of perishing unless
+every Philadelphian among my contemporaries hastens to lay a laurel leaf
+upon his grave. I fear nothing as yet has been done to preserve his
+memory. His name survives on the simple front of a South Fifteenth
+Street house, where I saw it and rejoiced when I was last at home and,
+in compliment to him, went inside and ate my lunch in the demure light
+of a highly respectable dining-room in the society of a dozen or more
+highly respectable Philadelphians seated at little tables. I could not
+quarrel with my lunch--it was admirably cooked and served--but it was an
+everyday lunch, not the occasional feast--the Augustine of old did not
+cook the ordinary meal and the Fifteenth Street house is too modest to
+be accepted as the one and only monument to his memory.
+
+[Illustration: GIRARD STREET]
+
+The Oyster Croquette could not have sprung up in a day and triumphed
+were Philadelphia as hide-bound with convention as it is supposed to be.
+Philadelphia is conservative in matters of cookery when conservatism
+means clinging to its great traditions; it is liberal when liberality
+means adapting to its own delightful ends the new idea or the new
+masterpiece. It never ceased to be sure of its materials nor of their
+variety, the Philadelphia market half way between North and South
+continuing to provide what is best in both: the meats of the finest--the
+fattest mutton he ever saw, Cobbett, though an Englishman, found in
+Philadelphia--its fruits and vegetables of the most various, its butter,
+good Darlington butter, famed from one end of the land to the other. And
+in the preparation of its materials, for the sake of eating better,
+Philadelphians never have hesitated to take their good where they have
+found it. Dishes we prize as the most essentially Philadelphian have
+sometimes the shortest pedigree. Why, the Ice-cream that is now one of
+Philadelphia's most respected institutions, came so recently that people
+we, of my generation, knew could remember its coming. On my return to
+Philadelphia, with the advantage the perspective absence gives, I could
+appreciate more clearly than if I had stayed at home how well
+Philadelphia eats and how nobly it has maintained its old ideals, how
+nobly accepted new ones. It has not wavered in the practice of eating
+well and taking pleasure in the eating--the reputation of giving good
+dinners is, as in my youth, the most highly prized. To quote Janvier:
+"The person who achieves celebrity of this sort in Philadelphia is not
+unlike the seraph who attains eminence in the heavenly choir." But I am
+conscious of a latitude that would not have been allowed before in the
+choice of a place to eat them in, and amazed at the number of new
+dishes.
+
+
+III
+
+The back-building dining-room was the one scene I knew for the feast. If
+I were a man I could tell a different tale. As a woman I used to
+hear--all Philadelphia women used to hear--of colossal masculine
+banquets at the Philadelphia Club and the Union League, of revels at the
+Clover Club, of fastidious feasts at more esoteric clubs--the State in
+Schuylkill, the Fish-House Club, and what were the others?--clubs
+carrying on the great Colonial traditions, perpetuating the old Colonial
+Punch as zealously as the Vestal Virgins watched their sacred fire,
+observing mystic practices in the Kitchen, the Philadelphia man himself,
+it was said, putting on the cook's apron, presiding over grills and
+saucepans, and serving up dishes of such exquisite quality as it has not
+entered into the mind of mere woman to conceive or to execute: with the
+true delicacy of the gourmet choosing rather to consecrate his talents
+to the one perfect dish than to squander them upon many, shrinking as an
+artist must from the plebeian "groaning-board" of the gluttonous
+display. To stories of these marvels I listened again and again, but my
+only knowledge of them is based on hearsay. I would as soon have
+expected to be admitted to Mount Athos or to the old Chartreuse as to
+banquets and feasts and revels so purely masculine; to ask for the vote
+would have seemed less ambitious than to pray for admission. What folly
+then it would be for me to pretend to describe them! What presumption to
+affect a personal acquaintance I have not and could not have! Into what
+pitfalls of ignorance would I stumble! It is for the Philadelphia man
+some day to write this particular chapter in the history of Philadelphia
+at Table.
+
+As to the Philadelphia woman at the period of which I speak, she had no
+Clubs. It was not supposed to be good form for her to feast outside of
+the back-building dining-room. She might relieve her hunger with Oysters
+in Jones's dingy little shop, or a plate of Ice-cream in Sautter's
+sombre saloon; or, with a boating party in spring or summer, she might
+go for dinner or supper to one of the restaurants in the Park. But for
+more serious entertaining, home, or her friends' home, was the place.
+Not that she was, as the fragile, fainting Angelina type once admired,
+too ethereal to think of food and drink. She could order and eat a
+luncheon, or a dinner, with the best, though she did not do the
+marketing or make the Mayonnaise. But she would rather have gone without
+food than defy the unwritten Philadelphia law.
+
+[Illustration: THE UNION LEAGUE, FROM BROAD AND CHESTNUT STREETS]
+
+Now Philadelphia has changed all that. The wise remain faithful to the
+back-building dining-room and, within its grave and tranquil walls, on
+its substantial leather-covered chairs, Stuart's Washington looking down
+from his place above the mantelpiece, they continue to feast with a
+luxury Lucullus might have envied. Fashion, however, drives the less
+wise to more frivolous scenes. I never thought to see the day when I
+should, in Philadelphia, lunch at a large, well-appointed, luxurious
+woman's club, when I should be invited to feast at the Union League--my
+lunch there was one of the most extraordinary of all my extraordinary
+experiences on my return to Philadelphia--when the cloth for my dinner
+would be laid in a big, gay, noisy, crowded Country Club--and yet the
+miracle had been worked in my absence and I saw not the day, but the
+many days when these things happened. Not only this. In Clubs and
+Country Clubs a degree of privacy is still assured. But it is a degree
+too much, to judge from the way Philadelphia rushes to lunch, and dine,
+and drink the tea it does not want at five o'clock, in hotels and
+restaurants: our little secluded oyster saloons exchanged for dazzling
+lunch counters, the Spruce and Pine and Walnut Street house that could
+not be except in Philadelphia deserted for the Ritz and the Bellevue
+that might be in New York or Chicago, Paris or London, Vienna or Rome.
+The old fashion was to celebrate the feast in cloistered seclusion, to
+let none intrude who was not bidden to share it. Now the fashion is to
+cry out and summon the mob and the multitude to gaze upon Philadelphia
+feasting. I know that this is in a measure the result of a change that
+is not peculiar to Philadelphia alone. All the world to-day, wherever
+you go, dines in public--the modern Dives must always dine where his
+Lazarus cannot possibly mistake the gate. But I could not have believed
+that Philadelphia would come to it--that Philadelphia would step out
+from the sanctuary into the market-place and proclaim to the passer-by
+the luxury he had once so scrupulously kept to himself.
+
+
+IV
+
+Nor is the feast quite what it was, though this is not because it has
+lost, but rather because it has gained. I trembled on my return lest the
+old gods be fallen. My first visit after long years away was one of a
+few hours only. I ran over from New York to lunch with old friends.
+There was a horrid moment of bewilderment when I stepped from the
+Pennsylvania Station into a street where I ought to have been at home
+and was not, and this made me dread that at the luncheon the change
+would be more overwhelming. Certain things belong to, are a part of,
+certain places that can never be the same without them. I met a
+Frenchman the other day in London, who had not been there for ten years,
+and who was in despair because at no hotel or restaurant could he find a
+gooseberry or an apple tart. They were not dishes of which he was warmly
+enamoured; no Frenchman could be; but a London shorn of gooseberry and
+apple tarts was not the London he had known. The dread of the same
+disillusionment was in my heart as I drew near my luncheon, more serious
+in my case because the things I did not want to lose were too good to
+lose. But my dread was wasted. Broad Street might have changed, but not
+the Chicken Salad with the Philadelphia dash of mustard in the
+Mayonnaise, not the Croquettes though Augustine had gone, not the
+Ice-cream rising before me in the splendid pyramid of my childhood with
+the solid base of the Coffee Ice-cream I had never gone to Sautter's
+without ordering. And I knew that hope need not be abandoned when I was
+assured that, though Sautter's have opened a big new place on Chestnut
+Street, where a long _menu_ disputes the honours with their one old
+masterpiece, it is to the gloomy store in the retirement of Broad and
+Locust that the Philadelphia woman, who gives a dinner, sends for her
+Ice-cream.
+
+These things were unaltered--they are unalterable. All the old friends
+reappeared at the breakfasts, luncheons and dinners that followed in the
+course of the longer visit when, not the Fatted Calf, but the Fatted
+Shad, Soft-Shell Crab, Fried Oyster, Squab--how the name mystified my
+friend, George Steevens, though he had but to open an old English
+cookery book in my collection to know that in England, before he was
+born, a Squab was a young Pigeon--Broiled Chicken, Cinnamon Bun, little
+round Cakes with white icing on top, were prepared for the prodigal. But
+there were other dishes, other combinations new to me: Grape Fruit had
+come in during my absence, though long enough ago to have reached
+England in the meanwhile; also the fashion of serving Shad and
+Asparagus together, the _dernier cri_ of the Philadelphia epicure,
+though--may I admit it now as I have not dared to before?--a combination
+in which I thought two delicate flavours were sacrificed, one to the
+other. And there were amazing combinations in the Salads, daring,
+strange, unPhiladelphian, calling for the French Dressing for which my
+Philadelphia had small use. I so little liked the new sign of the new
+Sundae at the new popular lunch-counter and druggist's that, with true
+Philadelphia prejudice, I never sampled it. And there were other
+innovations I would need to write a cookery book to exhaust--sometimes
+successful, sometimes not, but with no violation of the canons of the
+art in which Philadelphia has ever excelled. In every experiment, every
+novelty, the motive, if not the result, was sound.
+
+For this reason I have no fear for the future of Philadelphia cookery,
+if only it has the courage not to succumb unreservedly to cold storage.
+The changes may be many, but Philadelphia knows how to sift them,
+retaining only those that should be retained, for beneath them all is
+the changelessness that is the foundation of art.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII: PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY
+
+
+I
+
+I confess to a good deal of emotion as the train slowed up in the
+Pennsylvania Station, and I think I had a right to it. It is not every
+day one comes home after a quarter of a century's absence, and at the
+first glance everything was so bewilderingly home-like. Not that I had
+not had my misgivings as the train neared Philadelphia. From the car
+windows I had seen my old Convent at Torresdale transformed beyond
+recognition, many new stations with new names by the way, rows and rows
+of houses where I remembered fields, Philadelphia grown almost as big as
+London to get into, a new, strange, unbelievable sky-line to the town,
+the bridges multiplied across the Schuylkill--change after change where
+I should have liked to find everything, every house, field, tree, blade
+of grass even, just as I had left it. But what change there might be in
+the station kept itself, for the moment anyway, discreetly out of sight.
+For all the difference I saw, I might have been starting on the journey
+that had lasted over a quarter of a century instead of returning from
+it.
+
+This made the shock the greater when, just outside in Market Street, I
+was met by a company of mounted policemen. It is true they were there
+to welcome not me, but the President of the United States who was due by
+the next train, and were supported by the City Troop, as indispensable a
+part of my Philadelphia as the sky over my head and the bricks under my
+feet; true also that, well-uniformed, well-mounted, well-groomed as they
+were, I felt they would be a credit to any town. But the shock was to
+find them there at all. Philadelphia in my day could not have run, or
+would not have wanted to run, to anything so officially imposing; that
+it could and did now was a warning there was no mistaking. Whatever
+Philadelphia might have developed, or deteriorated, into, it was not any
+longer the Philadelphia I had known and loved.
+
+It was the same sort of warning all the way after that. Wherever I went,
+wherever I turned, I stumbled upon an equally impossible jumble of the
+familiar and the unfamiliar. At times, I positively ached with the joy
+of finding places so exactly as I remembered them that I caught myself
+saying, just here "this" happened, or "that," as I and my Youth met
+ourselves; at others I could have cried for the absurdity, the tragedy,
+of finding everything so different that never in a foreign land had I
+seemed more hopelessly a foreigner.
+
+[Illustration: BROAD STREET STATION]
+
+I did not have to go farther than my hotel for a reminder that
+Philadelphia, to oblige me, had not stood altogether still during my
+quarter of a century's absence, but had been, and was, busy refashioning
+itself into something preposterously new. From one of my high windows I
+might look down to the Philadelphia Library and the Episcopal
+Academy,--those two bulwarks of Philadelphia respectability--and beyond,
+stretching peacefully away to the peaceful curves of the Delaware, to a
+wide plain of flat red roofs and chimneys, broken by the green lines of
+the trees that follow the straight course of Philadelphia's streets and
+by the small green spaces of the trees that shade Philadelphia's
+back-yards: level and lines and spaces I knew as well as a lesson learnt
+by heart. But, from the midst of this red plain of roofs, huge high
+buildings, like towers, that I did not know, sprang up into the blue
+air, increasing in number as my eye wandered northward until, from the
+other window, I saw them gathered into one great, amazing, splendid
+group with William Penn, in full-skirted coat and broad-brimmed hat,
+springing still higher above them.
+
+When I went down into the streets, I might walk for a minute or two
+between rows of the beloved old-fashioned red brick houses, with their
+white marble steps and their white shutters below and green above, and
+then, just as exultantly I began to believe them changeless as the
+Pyramids and the Sphinx, I would come with a jar upon a Gothic gable, an
+absurd turret, a Renaissance doorway, a facade disfigured by a hideous
+array of fire escapes, a sham Colonial house, or some other upstart that
+dated merely from yesterday or the day before. And here and there a
+sky-scraper of an apartment house swaggered in the midst of the little
+"homes" that were Philadelphia's pride--the last new one, to my dismay,
+rearing its countless stories above the once inviolate enclosure of
+Rittenhouse Square.
+
+When I went shopping in Chestnut Street my heart might rejoice at the
+sight of some of the well remembered names--Dreka, Darlington, Bailey,
+Caldwell, as indispensable in my memory as that of Penn himself--but it
+sank as quickly in the vain search for the many more that have
+disappeared, or indeed, for the whole topsy-turvy order of things that
+could open the big new department stores into Market Street and make it
+the rival of Chestnut as a shopping centre, or that could send other
+stores up to where stores had never ventured in my day: stores in Walnut
+Street as high as Eighteenth, a milliner's in Locust Street almost under
+the shadow of St. Mark's, a stock-broker at the corner of Fifteenth and
+Walnut, Hughes and Mueller--I need tell no Philadelphian who Hughes and
+Mueller are even if they have unkindly made two firms of the old
+one--within a stone's throw of Dr. Weir Mitchell's house; when I saw
+that I felt that sacrilege could go no further.
+
+[Illustration: WANAMAKER'S]
+
+For sentiment's sake, I might eat my plate of ice-cream at the old
+little marble-topped table in the old Locust Street gloom at Sautter's,
+or buy cake at Dexter's at the old corner in Spruce Street, but Mrs.
+Burns with her ice-cream, Jones with his fried oysters, had vanished,
+gone away in the _Ewigkeit_ as irrevocably as Hans Breitmann's Barty or
+the snows of yester-year. And Wyeth's and Hubbell's masqueraded under
+other names, and Shinn, from whom we used to buy our medicines, was
+dead, and the new firm sold cigars with their ice-cream sodas, and my
+Philadelphia was stuffed with saw-dust.
+
+Not a theatre was as I had left it, new ones I had never heard of
+drawing the people who used to crowd the Chestnut, which has rung down
+its curtain on the last act of its last play even as I write; the Arch,
+given over now, alas! to the "Movies" and the "Movies" threaten the end
+of the drama not only at the Arch but at all theatres forever;
+well-patronized houses flourishing in North Broad Street; the staid
+Academy of Music thrown into the shadow by its giddy prosperous upstart
+of a rival up-town.
+
+Vanished were old landmarks for which I confidently looked--the United
+States Mint from Chestnut Street; from Broad and Walnut the old yellow
+Dundas House with the garden and the magnolia for whose blossoming I had
+once eagerly watched with the coming of spring; from Thirteenth and
+Locust the old Paterson House, turned into the new, imposing, very much
+criticised building of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; from
+Eleventh and Spruce, that other garden overlooked by the windows of the
+house my Grandfather built and lived in, as my Father did after him,
+and, to me more cruel, the house itself passed into other hands, grown
+shabby with time, and the sign "For Sale" hanging on its neglected
+walls. Change, change, change--that was what I had come home for!
+
+
+II
+
+I am not sure, however, that I had not the worst shock of all when I
+wandered from the old home, further down Spruce Street, below the
+beautiful Eighteenth Century Hospital, dishonoured now and shut in on
+the Spruce Street side by I hardly know what in the way of new wings and
+wards. As I had left it, this lower part of Spruce and Pine and the
+neighbouring streets, had changed less perhaps than any other part of
+the town--has changed less to-day in mere bricks and mortar. It had
+preserved the appropriate background for its inheritance of history and
+traditions. Numerous Colonial houses remained and upon them those of
+later date were modelled. It had kept also the serenity and repose of
+the Quaker City's early days, the character, dignity, charm. Many old
+Philadelphia families had never moved away. It was clean as a little
+Dutch town with nothing to interrupt the quiet but the gentle jingling
+of the occasional leisurely horse-car.
+
+[Illustration: ST. PETER'S CHURCHYARD]
+
+And what did I find it?--A slum, captured by the Russian Jew, the old
+houses dirty, down-at-the-heel; the once spotless marble steps unwashed,
+the white shutters hanging loose; the decorative old iron hinges and
+catches and insurance plaques or badges rusting, and nobody can say how
+much of the old woodwork inside burned for kindling; Yiddish signs in
+the windows, with here a Jewish Maternity Home, and there a Jewish
+newspaper office; at every door, almost every window, and in groups in
+the street, men, women and children with Oriental faces, here and there
+a man actually in his caftan, bearded, with the little curls in front of
+his ears, and a woman with a handkerchief over her head, and all
+chattering in Yiddish and slatternly and dirty as I remembered them in
+South-Eastern Europe, from Carlsbad and Prague to those remote villages
+of Transylvania where dirt was the sign by which I always knew when the
+Jewish quarter was reached. A few patriotic Philadelphians have recently
+returned hoping to stem the current, and their houses shine with
+cleanliness. In Fourth Street the dignified Randolph House, which the
+family never deserted, seems to protest against the wholesale surrender
+to the foreign invasion. In Pine Street, St. Peter's, with its green
+graveyard, has survived untarnished the surrounding desecration. But I
+could only wonder how long the church and these few houses will be able
+to withstand the triumphing alien, and I abandoned hope when, at the
+very gate of St. Peter's, a woman with a handkerchief tied over her head
+stopped me to ask the way to "_Zweit und Pine_."
+
+
+III
+
+I know that the same thing is going on in almost all the older parts of
+the United States, and the new parts too--I know that some small New
+England towns can support their two and three Polish newspapers, that
+New York swarms with people who talk any and every language under the
+sun except English, and can boast, if it is a thing to boast of, more
+Italians than Rome, more Jews than Jerusalem; that San Francisco has its
+Chinatown, that the Middle West abounds in German and Swedish
+settlements--in a word, I know that everywhere throughout the country,
+the native American is retreating before this invasion of the alien. But
+it is with a certain difference in Philadelphia. Have I not said that
+one of the absurdities of my native town--I can afford to call them
+absurdities because I love them--is that for the Philadelphian who looks
+upon himself as the real Philadelphian, Philadelphia lies between the
+Delaware and the Schuylkill, and is bounded on the north by Market
+Street, on the south by Lombard; that in the ancient rhyming list of its
+streets he recognizes only the line:
+
+    "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine"?
+
+Now, when I left home this narrow section was threatening to grow too
+narrow and it was with some difficulty the Philadelphian kept within it.
+Up till then, however, it was in no danger except from his own
+increasing numbers. The tragedy is that the Russian Jew should have
+descended upon just this section, should now, not so much dispute it
+with him, as oust him from it--the Russian Jew, a Jew by religion but
+not by race, who has been found impossible in every country on the
+Continent of Europe into which he has drifted, so impossible when that
+country is Holland that the Jews who have been there for centuries
+collect among themselves the money to send him post haste on to England
+and poor America, for even the Dutch Jew cannot stand the Russian
+Jew--and, from what I have heard, neither can the decent Pennsylvania
+Jew who has been with us almost from the beginning. Other aliens have
+been more modest and set up their slums where they interfere less with
+Philadelphia tradition. I cannot understand, and nobody has been able to
+explain to me, why the Russian Jew was allowed to push his way in. But
+the indolent never see the thin end of the wedge, and there are
+philanthropists whose philanthropy for the people they do not know
+increases in direct proportion to the harm it does to those they do
+know. I was told more than once to consider what Philadelphia was doing
+for the Russian Jew, to remember that he has paid America the compliment
+of accepting it as the Promised Land, that his race in America has
+produced Mary Antin, and to see for myself what good Americans were
+being made of his children. But though Philadelphia may one day blossom
+like the rose with Mary Antins, though there might have been an
+incipient patriot in every one of the small Russian Jews I met being
+taken in batches across Independence Square to Independence Hall to
+imbibe patriotism at the fount, I could not help considering rather what
+the Russian Jew is just now doing for Philadelphia. For it is as plain
+as a pipe stem to anybody with eyes to see that the Philadelphians to
+whom Philadelphia originally belonged are being pushed by the Russian
+Jew out of the only part of it they care to live in.
+
+[Illustration: CITY HALL FROM THE SCHUYLKILL]
+
+I wondered at first why so many people had fled to the country, why so
+many signs "For Sale" or "For Rent" were to be seen about Spruce and
+Pine and Walnut Streets. Various reasons were given me:--with the Law
+Courts now in the centre of the town and the new Stock Exchange at Broad
+and Walnut, and stores everywhere, nobody could live in town; the noise
+of the trolleys is unbearable; the dirt of the city is unhealthy; soft
+coal has made Philadelphia grimier than London; the motor has destroyed
+distance;--excellent reasons, all of them. But it was not until I
+discovered the Russian Jew that I understood the most important. It is
+the Russian Jew who, with an army of aliens at his back--thousands upon
+thousands of Italians, Slavs, Lithuanians, a fresh emigration of negroes
+from the South, and statistics alone can say how many other
+varieties--is pushing and pushing Philadelphians out of the town--first
+up Spruce Street, nearer and nearer to the Schuylkill, then across the
+Schuylkill into the suburbs, eventually to be swept from the suburbs
+into the country, until who can say where there will be any room for
+them at all? With the Russian Jew's genius for adapting himself to
+American institutions, I could fancy him taking possession of, and
+adding indefinitely to, the little two-story houses that already stretch
+in well-nigh endless rows to the West and the North, Germantown and West
+Philadelphia built over beyond recognition. I remember when, one day in
+a trolley, I had gone for miles and miles between these rows--each
+little house with the same front yard, the same porch, the same awning,
+the same rocking-chairs--I had a horrible waking nightmare in which I
+saw them multiplying--as the alien himself multiplied beyond the most
+ardent dreams of Mr. Roosevelt,--and creeping out further and further,
+across the city limits, across the State, across the Middle West, across
+the prairies, across the Rockies, across the Sierras, until at last they
+joined East to West in one unbroken line--one great, unbroken, unlovely
+monument to the enterprise of the new American, and the philanthropy of
+the old: while only the Russian Jew at the door of the State House, like
+Macaulay's New Zealander under the shadow of St. Paul's, remained to
+muse and moralize on the havoc he had wrought.
+
+[Illustration: CHESTNUT STREET BRIDGE]
+
+This may seem a trifle fantastic, but I should find it hard to give an
+idea of how impossibly fantastic the prevailing presence of the alien in
+Philadelphia appeared to me. To be sure, we had our aliens a quarter of
+a century ago. But they were mostly Irish, Germans, Swedes. The Italian
+at his fruit-stall was as yet rather the picturesque exception, and I
+can remember how, not very long before I left home, the whole town went
+to stare at the first importation of Russian Jews, dumped down under I
+have forgotten what shelter, as if they were curiosities or freaks from
+Barnum's. But now the aliens are mostly Latins, Slavs, Orientals who do
+not fit so unobtrusively into our American scheme of things, and who
+come from the lowest classes in their own countries, so ignorant and
+degraded most of them that, what with their increasing numbers and our
+new negro population from the South, there are people in Pennsylvania
+who are trying to introduce an educational test at the polls--America
+having learned the evil of universal suffrage just as England is
+coquetting with it.
+
+
+IV
+
+The rest of Philadelphia--the rest of America, for that matter--may be
+accustomed to this new emigration to my town as well as to all parts of
+the country. But I had not seen the latter-day alien coming in by every
+steamer, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, establishing himself. The
+advantage, or disadvantage, of staying away from home so long is that,
+on returning, one gets the net result of the change the days and the
+years bring with them. Those who stay at home are broken in to the
+change in its initial stages and can accept the result as a matter of
+course. I could not. To be honest, I did not like it. I did not like to
+find Philadelphia a foreign town.
+
+I did not like to find Streets where the name on almost every store is
+Italian. I did not like to find the new types of negro, like savages
+straight from the heart of Africa some of them looked, who are disputing
+South Street and Lombard Street and that disgraceful bit of Locust
+Street with the decent, old-fashioned, self-respecting Philadelphia
+darkies. I did not like to find the people with foreign manners--for
+instance, to have my hand kissed for a tip in the hotel by a Lithuanian
+chambermaid, though I should add that in a month she had grown American
+enough to accept the same tip stoically with a bare "Thank You." I did
+not like to find the foreigner forcing his way not only into the
+Philadelphian's houses, the Philadelphian's schools, the Philadelphian's
+professions--professions that have been looked upon as the sacred right
+of certain Philadelphia families for almost a couple of centuries. I
+have heard all about his virtues, nobody need remind me of them; I know
+that he is carrying off everything at the University so that rich Jews
+begin to think they should in return make it a gift or bequest, as no
+rich Jew has yet, I believe. I know that the young Philadelphian must
+give up his sports and his gaieties if he can hope to compete with the
+young Russian Jew who never allows himself any recreation on the road to
+success--and perhaps this won't do the young Philadelphian any harm. I
+know that if the Russian Jew keeps on studying law, the Philadelphia
+lawyer will be before long as extinct as the dodo--a probability that if
+it wakes up the Philadelphia lawyer may have its uses. All this, and
+much besides, I know--also, incidentally, I might add the fact that the
+Russian Jew, who is not unintelligent, has mastered in a very short time
+the possibilities of arson and bankruptcy as investments. But if there
+were no other side to his virtues--and of course there is that other
+side too--I should not like to think of the new Philadelphian that is to
+come out of this incredible mixture of Russian Jews and countless other
+aliens as little like us in character and tradition.
+
+The new Philadelphian may be a finer creature far than in my hopes for
+him, finer far than the old Philadelphian I have known--but then he will
+not be that old Philadelphian whom I do not want to lose and whom it
+would be a pity to lose in a country for which, ever since Penn pointed
+the way to the constitution of the United States, he has probably
+accomplished more than any other citizen.
+
+Personally, I might as well say that I do not believe he will be a finer
+creature. It seems to me that he is doing away with the old American
+idea of levelling up and is bent on the levelling down process that is
+going on all over Europe. And so foreign is he making us, that I would
+not think J. very far wrong in declaring himself the only real American
+left, if only he would include me with him.
+
+[Illustration: THE NARROW STREET]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX: PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY--CONTINUED
+
+
+I
+
+It was not only the change that oppressed me those first days of my
+return. As bewildering, as discouraging, were the signs everywhere of
+the horrible haste with which it has been brought about: a haste foreign
+to the Philadelphia habit. But the aliens pouring into Philadelphia have
+increased its population at such a prodigious rate that it has been
+obliged to grow too prodigiously fast to meet or to adapt itself to the
+new conditions without the speed that does not belong to it.
+
+I had left it a big, prosperous, industrial town--Baldwin's, Cramp's,
+Kensington and Germantown mills all in full swing--but it carried off
+its bigness, prosperity, and industry with its old demure and restful
+airs of a country town. The old-fashioned, hard-working, Philadelphia
+business man could still dine at four o'clock and spend the rest of the
+afternoon looking out of the window for the people who rarely passed and
+the things that never happened--nobody would be free to dine at four
+now-a-days, nobody would have the leisure to sit at any hour looking out
+of the window, except perhaps the Philadelphia clubman who clings to
+that amiable pastime, as he does, so far successfully, to his Club
+house, threatened on every side as it is by the advance of the
+sky-scraper. The old-fashioned busy Philadelphia crowds, as I remember
+them, could still take their time in the streets, so that I remember,
+too, my friend, George Steevens' astonishment because a passer-by he
+thanked for information could linger to say "You are very welcome." The
+old-fashioned Philadelphia business, going on at a pace that only New
+York and Chicago could beat, was still accomplished with so little fuss
+that the rest of America laughed at Philadelphia for its slowness and
+sleepiness, and told those old time-worn stories that have passed into
+folk-lore. It was just this that gave Philadelphia such a distinct
+character of its own--that it could be laughed at for slowness and
+sleepiness by the other towns, and all the while be sleepy and slow to
+such good purpose as to make itself into one of the most prosperous and
+influential in the country: to be able to work at the American pace and
+yet preserve its dignity and sedateness.
+
+But the old stories have lost what little point they had. Philadelphia
+does not look slow and sleepy any longer. Things have changed, indeed,
+when a modern traveller like Mr. Arnold Bennett can speak of "spacious
+gaiety" in connection with Philadelphia--with its spacious dulness the
+earlier traveller was more apt to be impressed. At last, however, it has
+given up its country-town airs for the airs of the big town it is--given
+up the calmness that was its chief characteristic for the hurry-flurry
+of the ordinary American town. And there is scarcely a Philadelphian
+who regrets it, that is the saddest part of it--scarcely a Philadelphian
+who does not rejoice that Philadelphia is getting to be like New York.
+
+[Illustration: THE MARKET STREET ELEVATED AT THE DELAWARE END]
+
+I think, of all the innovations, this was the one that distressed me
+most, though I could understand the difficulty of calm in the face of
+the multitude of new housing and traffic problems it has had to tackle,
+at a rate and with a speed that the Philadelphian, left to himself,
+would never have imposed upon it. Somehow, it has had to keep on putting
+up those rows of little two-story houses in sufficient numbers to
+shelter the too rapidly increasing population if it is to maintain its
+reputation as the City of Homes; somehow, it has had to provide subways,
+and elevateds, and new suburban lines with no level crossings, and new
+central Stations and Terminals, and big trolley cars out of all
+proportion to Philadelphia's narrow streets, and taxis too dear for any
+but the millionaire to drive in, if the too-rapidly increasing crowds
+are to be got to work and back again; somehow, new bridges have had to
+cross the Schuylkill, new streets have had to be laid out, so many new
+things have had to be begun and done in the too-rapidly growing town,
+that there is small chance and less time for it to take them calmly or,
+alas! to keep itself clean and tidy.
+
+
+II
+
+In my memory Philadelphia was a model of cleanliness under a clean sky,
+free of the smoke that the use of soft coal has brought with it. Every
+Saturday every servant girl--"maid," Philadelphia calls her now--turned
+out with mops and buckets and hose, for such a washing up of the front
+for a week that, until the next Saturday, Philadelphia could not look
+dirty if it tried. But I do not believe that a legion of servant girls,
+with all the mops, buckets, and hose in the world, could ever wash
+Philadelphia clean again, to such depths of dirt has it fallen. It could
+not have been more of a disgrace to its citizens when Franklin deplored
+the shocking condition of its streets, especially in wet weather, or
+when Washington had to wade through mud to get to the theatre where he
+found his recreation. It has become actually the Filthydelphia somebody
+once called it in jest. Not even in the little Spanish and Italian towns
+whose dirt the American deplores, have I seen such streets--all rivers
+and pools and lakes when it rains, ankle-deep in dust when it is dry,
+papers flying loose, corners choked with dirt, tins of ashes and garbage
+standing at the gutter side all day long--even London, that I used to
+think the dirtiest of dirty towns, knows how to order its garbage better
+than that. We Americans are supposed to be long-suffering, to endure
+almost anything until the crisis comes. But I thought that crisis had
+long since come in the Philadelphia streets. Everybody agreed with me,
+and I was assured that a corrupt government having been got out and a
+reform government got in, already there was tremendous talk of schemes
+for garbage--bags to be hauled off full of garbage, dust-tight on the
+way, and hauled back empty, old paper to be bought up by the city so
+that no thrifty citizen would throw a scrap of paper into the
+street--and as tremendous talk of experiments in garbage, ten patriotic
+citizens promising to contribute one thousand dollars each to make them.
+I was assured also that the reform Mayor has done his best and struggled
+valiantly against the evil, but unfortunately it is not he alone who can
+vote the money for a wholesale spring-cleaning. It occurred to me that,
+in the meanwhile, we might be better off if we returned with much less
+expense, to the hogs that were "the best of scavengers" when William
+Cobbett visited Philadelphia. Or, at no more than the cost of a ticket
+to New York, the reformers might at least learn how to keep garbage tins
+off the front steps of inoffensive, tax-paying citizens at five o'clock
+in the afternoon when they ask their friends to drink tea in that
+English fashion which is as novel in my Philadelphia as the difficulty
+with the garbage.
+
+[Illustration: THE RAILROAD BRIDGES AT FALLS OF SCHUYLKILL]
+
+My own opinion was that Philadelphia had lost its head over the
+magnitude of the task before it. In no other way could I account for the
+recklessness with which old streets were torn up for blocks and repaired
+by inches; new streets built and horrible stagnant pools left on their
+outskirts--the suburbs quite as bad in this respect, so bad that I
+understand associations of citizens are formed to do what the
+authorities don't seem able to; boulevards planned and held up when half
+finished, a monumental entrance designed to the most beautiful Park in
+the world and, on its either side, silly little wooden pergolas set up
+to try the effect, by the dethroned government I believe, and, though
+nobody, from one end of the town to the other, approves, neither the
+time nor the money is found to pull them down again--neither the time
+nor the money found for anything but dirt and untidiness.
+
+
+III
+
+The people, their manners, their life,--everything seemed to me to have
+been caught in this mad whirlwind of change and haste. The crowds in the
+street were not the same, had forgotten the meaning of repose and
+leisureliness; had at last given in to the American habit of leaving
+everything until the last moment and then rushing when there was no
+occasion for rush, and pretending to hustle so that not one man or woman
+I met could have spared a second to say "You are welcome" for anybody's
+"Thank you," or, for that matter, to provide the information for
+anybody's thanks;--indeed, these crowds seemed to me to have mastered
+their new role with such thoroughness that to-day the visitor from
+abroad will carry away the same idea of Philadelphia as Arnold Bennett,
+who, during his sojourn there, never ceased to marvel at its liveliness.
+
+[Illustration: THE PARKWAY PERGOLAS]
+
+And the crowds have migrated from the old haunts--every sign of life now
+gone from Third Street and round about the Stock Exchange, where nobody
+now is ever in a hurry--carts and cars going at snail's pace, the whole
+place looking as if time did not count--the old town business quarter
+deserted for Market Street and Broad Street round the City Hall.
+
+And the crowds do not get about in the same way--no slow, leisurely ride
+in the horse-car to a _Depot_ in the wilds of Frankford, or at Ninth and
+Green, on the way to the suburbs, but a leap on a trolley, or a rush
+through thronged streets to the _Terminal_ at Twelfth and Market, to the
+_Station_ at Broad and Market. And it was another sign of how
+Philadelphia had "moved" since the old days when, in place of the old
+horse-car, which I could rely upon to go in a straight line from one end
+of the long street to the other, I took the new trolley and it twisted
+and turned with me until the exception was to arrive just where I
+expected to, or, if I only stayed in it long enough, not to be landed in
+some remote country town where I had no intention of going. I have been
+told the story of the stay-at-home Philadelphian as puzzled as I, who
+was promised by a motorman, as uncertain as she where he was going, that
+at least he could give her a "nice ride through a handsome part of the
+town." Worse still, the trolley did not stop at the corners where the
+car used to stop so that I, a native Philadelphian, had to be told where
+to wait for it by an interloper with a foreign accent. Nor was it
+crowded at the same hours as the car used to be, so that going out to
+dinner in a Walnut Street trolley I could sit comfortably and not be
+obliged to hang on to a strap, with everybody who got in or out helping
+to rub the freshness from my best evening gown, which would have been my
+fate in the old days.
+
+And the crowds were not managed in the old way--the ordinary policeman
+used to do his best to keep out of sight, and here was the mounted
+policeman prancing about everywhere, and, at congested corners, adding
+to the confusion by filling up what little space the overgrown trolleys
+left in the narrow streets. I am not sure that it was not this mounted
+policeman--unless it was the coloured policemen and the coloured
+postmen--I had most difficulty in getting accustomed to. I came upon him
+every day, or almost every hour, with something of a new shock. Can this
+be really I, I would say to myself when I saw him in his splendour, can
+this be really Philadelphia?
+
+
+IV
+
+The difference I deplored was not confined to the crowds I did not know;
+it was no less marked in the people I did know, in their standards and
+outlook, in the way they lived. It is hard to say what struck me most,
+though nothing more obviously the first few days than that flight to the
+suburbs which had left such visible proofs as those signs "For Rent" and
+"For Sale" everywhere in the streets where I was most at home--a flight
+necessitated perhaps by the inroads of the alien, but only made possible
+by the annihilation of space due to the motor-car.
+
+[Illustration: MARKET STREET WEST OF THE SCHUYLKILL]
+
+Once, when a Philadelphian set up a carriage, it was the announcement
+to Philadelphia that he had earned the fifty thousand dollars which
+fulfilled his ideal of a fortune. In my day Fairman Rogers' four-in-hand
+was the limit, and but few Philadelphians had the money and the
+recklessness to rival him. Now the Philadelphian does not have to earn
+anything at all before he sets up his motor-car, and it is the
+announcement of nothing except that he is bound to keep in the swim. Our
+children begin where we leave off, as one of my contemporaries said to
+me. Everybody has a motor-car. Everybody who can has one in London, I
+know, and there also the signs "To Let" and "For Sale" in such regions
+as Kensington and Bayswater have for some time back explained to me the
+way it has turned London life upside down. But in Philadelphia not
+merely everybody who can, but everybody who can't has one, and the
+Philadelphian would not do without it, if he had to mortgage his house
+as its price. I remember how incredulous I was, one of my first Sunday
+evenings at home, when I was dining with friends in the
+crowded-to-suffocation dining-room at the Bala Country Club and was
+given as an excuse for being rushed from my untasted coffee to catch an
+inconsiderately early last train, that ours was probably the only dinner
+party in the room without a car to take us back to town. But from that
+evening on I had no chance for incredulity, my own movements beginning
+to revolve round the motor-car. If I was asked to dinner and lunch at a
+distance to which nobody would have thought of dragging me by train in
+the old days, a motor was sent to whirl me out in no time at all. If I
+went into a far suburb for an afternoon visit, instead of coming soberly
+back to town on my return ticket, I would take a short cut by flying
+over half the near country, often in the car of people I had never seen
+before, as the most convenient route to the hotel. All Philadelphia life
+is regulated by the motor-car. It makes a ball or a tea or a dinner ten
+miles away as near as one just round the corner was in my time, and so
+half the gaiety is transferred to the suburbs and the suburban country,
+and, to my surprise, I found girls still going to dances at midsummer.
+
+And the motor has made club life for women indispensable. The woman who
+comes up to town in her car must have a Club, and there is the Acorn
+Club in Walnut Street, The New Century, and the College and Civic Clubs,
+jointly housed at Thirteenth and Spruce, and more clubs in other
+streets, probably, which it was not my privilege to be invited to; all,
+to judge by the Acorn, with luxurious drawing-and dining-and smoking-and
+dressing-and bed-rooms, and women coming and going as if they had lived
+in clubs all their lives, when a short quarter of a century before there
+had not been one for them to see the inside of. And for men and women
+both, the car has brought within their reach those amazing Country Clubs
+that have sprung up in my absence. I had read of Country Clubs in
+American novels and short stories, I had seen them on the stage in
+American plays, but I had never paused to think of them as realities in
+Philadelphia until I was actually taken to the Bala and Huntington
+Valley Clubs, and until I ate their admirable dinners--at Bala, with the
+crowds and in the light and to the music that would have made me feel I
+was in a London restaurant, had it not been for the inevitable
+cocktail--and until I saw with my own eyes the luxurious houses so
+comfortably and correctly appointed--even to brass bedroom candlesticks
+on a table in the second-story hall, just as in an old-fashioned English
+inn, though as far as I could make out there was excellent electric
+light everywhere--until I also saw with my own eyes the trim lawns, and
+gardens, and the wide view over the delicate American landscape, and
+women in the tennis courts, and the men bringing out their ponies for
+polo, and the players dotted over the golf course.
+
+And whether the Country Clubs have created the sport or the sport has
+created the Country Clubs, I cannot say, but in the increased attention
+to sport I was confronted with another difference as startling.
+Philadelphia, I know, has always been given to sport. It hunted and
+raced and fished before time and conscience allowed most of the other
+Colonists in the North the chance to amuse themselves out-of-doors, or
+indoors either, poor things! And the old sports, barring the least
+civilized like bull-baiting and cock-fighting, were kept up, and are
+kept up, and had their Clubhouses, which, in some cases, have survived.
+But, in my time, these sports had been limited to the few who had
+country houses in the right districts or the leisure for the
+gentlemanly pursuit of foxes and fishes, and their clubs were primitive
+compared to the palatial Country Clubs, whose luxury women now share
+with men. If you were in the hunting or fishing set, you heard all about
+it; but if you were not, you heard little enough. But you did not have
+to be in any set to keep up with the great Philadelphia game of cricket,
+which was popular, exclusive as the players in their team might be--all
+Philadelphia that did not play scrupulously going on the proper
+occasions to the Germantown Cricket Ground to watch all Philadelphia
+that did. The one alternative as popular was the pastime of rowing, the
+exclusiveness here in the rowing men's choice among the Clubs with the
+little boating clubhouses on the Schuylkill where boats could be stowed.
+And now? The cricket goes on, as gentlemanly and correct a pastime as
+ever. And the boating goes on, but with a delightful exclusive old
+Colonial house, for one Club at least, hidden in thickets of the Park
+where the stranger might pass within a stone's throw and never discover
+it, but where the boating party can dine with a privacy and a
+sumptuousness undreamed of at Belmont, where boating parties dined in my
+young days. And, in addition, time has been prodigal with golf and
+tennis and polo; women, who had begun tennis in my time, now beginning
+golf, games which, I might as well admit, I have no use for and can
+therefore say little about. And I am told that the University foot-ball
+matches are among the most important and lavishly patronized social
+functions of the year. And in town is the big Racquets Club, in a fine
+new building, big enough to shelter any number of sports besides. And
+the Natatorium, in moving from the unpretentious premises in South Broad
+Street, where it has left its old building and name, to the marble
+palace that was once George W. Childs's. Oh, the sacrilege! the house
+where his emperors and princes and lords and authors were
+entertained,--has converted the swimming lesson into the luxury of
+sport. And all told, so many, and so exhaustive, and so universal are
+the provisions for sport that I might have believed the Philadelphian
+had nothing in the world to do, save to invent amusements to help him
+through his empty hours.
+
+[Illustration: MANHEIM CRICKET GROUND]
+
+And, apparently, it is to provide for the same empty hours that those
+elaborate lunch places have multiplied on Chestnut Street, some
+delightful where you feast as only Philadelphia can, some horrible where
+you sit on high stools at counters and fight for your food; that little
+quiet discreet tea-places have sprung up in side streets; that gilded
+restaurants, boasting they reproduce the last London fads and fashions,
+have succeeded the old no restaurant at all; that hotels as big and
+strident as if they had strayed off Fifth Avenue increase in number year
+by year, culminating in the Adelphia, the latest giant, which I have not
+seen; that the old poky hotels of my day have branched out in roof
+gardens where on hot summer evenings you can sit up among the
+sky-scrapers, a near neighbour to William Penn on his tower, and get
+whatever air stirs over the red-hot furnace of Philadelphia; that a huge
+new hotel has appeared up Broad Street where it seems the Philadelphian
+sometimes goes with the feeling of adventure with which he once
+descended upon Logan Square. Even business hours are broken into; the
+lunch of a dozen oysters or a sandwich snatched up anywhere has gone out
+of fashion; the chop, in the Philadelphia imitation of a London
+chop-house that seemed luxurious in my Father's day, has become far too
+simple; and disaster was predicted to me for the Stock Exchange by a
+pessimistic member who knew that, from the new building that has
+followed the Courts to the centre of the town, brokers will be running
+over to lunch at the Bellevue and to incapacitate themselves more or
+less for the rest of the day, and business will go on drifting, as it
+has begun to, to New York and will all be done by telephone. And as if
+the feasting were not enough of a pastime, everywhere lunches, teas and
+dinners are served to the sound of music, so that distraction and
+diversion may be counted upon without the effort to talk for them. When
+I was young, the best Philadelphia could do in the way of combining
+music and eating--or principally drinking--was at the Maeennerchor Garden
+at Ninth and Green, where a pretzel might be had with a glass of beer,
+or a sherry cobbler, or a mint julep--"high-balls" had not been heard
+of--and the Philadelphia girl who went, though it was under the
+irreproachable charge of her brother, could feel that she was doing
+something very shocking and compromising. But in the new Philadelphia,
+it is music whenever the Philadelphian eats or drinks in public, which
+seems to be next to always.
+
+[Illustration: DOCK STREET AND THE EXCHANGE]
+
+It may be said that these are harmless innovations, part of the change
+in town life as lived in any other town as big. But the marvel to me was
+their conquest of Philadelphia, the town that used to pride itself on
+not being like other towns, and there they exaggerated themselves in my
+eyes into nothing short of revolution. The craving for novelty--that was
+at the root of it all: of the restlessness, the willingness to do what
+the old-fashioned Philadelphian would rather have been seen dead than
+caught doing, of the deliberate break with tradition. Nothing now can be
+left peacefully as it was. I felt the foundations of the world crumble
+when I heard that the Dancing Class has taken new quarters over in
+Horticultural Hall and the Assembly in the Bellevue, that Philadelphia
+consents to go up Broad Street for its opera, quieting its conscience by
+the compromise of going in carriages and motors and never on foot. There
+surely was the end of the old Philadelphia, the real Philadelphia. And
+it made matters no better to be assured that so rapidly does
+Philadelphia move with the times that the Philadelphian who stays away
+from home, or who is in mourning, for a year or so, finds on coming
+back, or out of retirement, that Philadelphia society has been as
+completely transformed in the meanwhile as Philadelphia streets. Nor did
+it make matters better to discover the different prices that different
+standards have brought in their train. I could see the new pace at which
+life in public is set, I heard much of the new pace set for it in
+private--servants' wages prohibitive according to old ways of thinking,
+provisions risen to a scale beyond belief, every-day existence as dear
+as in London--in Philadelphia, as elsewhere, people threatened with ruin
+from, not the high cost of living, but the cost of high living.
+
+
+V
+
+And the change is not simply in the outward panoply, in the parade of
+life, it is in the point of view, in the new attitude toward life--a
+change that impressed itself upon me in a thousand and one ways. I have
+already referred to my astonishment at finding Philadelphia occupying
+itself with art and literature. But really there is nothing with which
+it does not occupy itself. Universal knowledge has come into fashion and
+it makes me tired just to think of the struggle to keep up to it. Once
+the Philadelphian thought he knew everything that was necessary to know
+if he could tell you who every other Philadelphian's grandfather was.
+But now he, or I should say she--for it is the women who rule when it
+comes to fashion--is not content unless she knows everything, or thinks
+she does, from the first chapter in Genesis to the latest novelty on the
+Boulevards, the latest club gossip in Pall Mall. And how she can talk
+about it! I have made so many confessions in these pages that it will do
+no harm to add one more to their number, and to own my discomfiture
+when, on finding myself one of a group of Philadelphia women, I have
+been stunned into silence, in my ignorance reduced to shame and
+confusion by their encyclopedic, Baedeker-Murray information and their
+volubility in imparting it. It is wonderful to know so much, but, as the
+philosopher says, what a comfort, to be sure, a dull person may be at
+times.
+
+On the whole, it was the new interest in politics that most astonished
+me. That just when Philadelphia has plunged into incredible frivolity,
+it should develop an interest in problems it calmly shirked in its days
+of sobriety--that is astounding if you will. When I left home, politics
+were still beneath the active interest of the Philadelphian--still
+something to steer clear from, to keep one's hands clean of. A man who
+would rather live on the public than do an honest day's work, was my
+Father's definition of the politician. I remember what a crank we all
+thought one of my Brother's friends who amused himself by being elected
+to the Common Council. It was not at all good form--who of self-respect
+could so far forget himself as to become part, however humble, of the
+machine, a hail-fellow-well-met among the Bosses and liable to be
+greeted as Bill or Tom or Jim by the postman on his rounds or the
+policeman at the corner. Better far let the city be abominably governed
+and the tax-payers outrageously robbed, than to submit to such
+indignities. The Philadelphian who realized what he owed to himself and
+his position was superior to politics. But he is not any longer. I
+found him up to his eyes in politics--taking the responsibility of
+municipal reform, waging war against state corruption, running meetings
+for Roosevelt and Progress at the last Presidential election. And not
+only this. The women are sharing his labours--the women who of old
+hardly knew the meaning of politics, might have been puzzled even to
+know how to spell the unfamiliar word--they too are busy with civic
+reform, and turn a watchful but unavailing eye on the garbage, and run
+settlements in the slums, and qualify as policemen, and demand the
+vote--parade for it, hold public meetings for it, hob-nob with coloured
+women for it, run after the discredited English militant for it,--and
+talk politics on any and every occasion. There were days when I heard
+nothing but politics--politics at lunch, politics at tea, politics at
+dinner--think of it! politics at a Philadelphia dinner party, politics
+over the Soft Shell Crabs and the Shad and the Broiled Chicken and the
+Ice-cream from Sautter's and the Madeira! It is better and wiser and
+more improving, no doubt, than the old vapid talk--but then the old
+vapid talk was part of my Philadelphia, and my Philadelphia was what I
+wanted to come back to.
+
+[Illustration: THE LOCOMOTIVE YARD, WEST PHILADELPHIA]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX: PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY--CONTINUED
+
+
+I
+
+Of course I resented all the changes and, equally of course, it was
+unreasonable that I should. I had not stood stock still for a quarter of
+a century, why should I expect Philadelphia to?
+
+And little by little, as I got my breath again after my first indignant
+surprise, as I pulled myself together after my first series of shocks, I
+began to understand that the wonder was that anything should be left,
+and to see that Philadelphia has held on to enough of its character and
+beauty to impress the stranger, anyway, with the fine serenity that I
+missed at every turn. Philadelphia does not "bristle," Henry James wrote
+of it a very few years ago, by which he meant that it does not change,
+is incapable of changing, though to me it was, in this sense, so
+"bristling" that I tingled all over with the pricks. But, then, I knew
+what Philadelphia had been. That was why I was impressed first with the
+things that had changed, why, also, my pleasure was the keener in my
+later discovery of the things that had not.
+
+I can laugh now at myself for my joy in all sorts of dear, absurd
+trifles simply because of their homely proof that the new Philadelphia
+had saved some relics of the old. What they stood for in my eyes gave
+value to the little iced Cakes of my childhood; to the frequent street
+parade, glorified as it was beyond recognition by the new presence of
+the mounted police; to the City Troop, gorgeous and splendid as of old,
+and as of old turning out to decorate every public ceremony; to the nice
+old-fashioned "ma'am," unheard in England except, I believe, at court;
+to all the town, including my hotel, getting ready for the summer with
+matting and gauze and grey Holland. Old associations, old emotions, were
+stirred by the fragrance of the Cinnamon Bun that is never so fragrant
+out of Philadelphia, and one of the cruelest disappointments of my
+return was not to be able to devour it with the untrammelled appetite of
+youth when it was offered me in an interval between the Soft-Shell Crab
+and Ice-cream of a Philadelphia lunch and the Planked Shad and Broiled
+Chicken of a Philadelphia dinner. The row of heads at the Philadelphia
+Club windows, so embarrassing to me in my youth, borrowed beauty from
+association. I was thrilled by the decanter of Sherry or Madeira on the
+dinner table, where I had not seen it served in solitary grandeur since
+I had last dined in Philadelphia. The old rough kindliness of the
+people--when they were not aliens--in the streets, in the stores, in the
+trolleys, went to my heart. And in larger ways, too, the place filled me
+with pride for its constancy: for the steady development of all that
+made it great from the beginning--its schools, its charities, its
+hospitals, its libraries, its galleries; above all, for retaining what
+it could of its dignified reticence in keeping its private affairs to
+itself. It may live more in public than it did, but it still does not
+shriek all its secrets from the house-top. It does not thrust all its
+wealth down every man's throat. It still hides many of its luxurious
+private palaces behind modest brick fronts. It may have broken out in
+gaudy hotels and restaurants, but Friends still continue to go their
+peaceful way completely apart in their spacious houses and pleasant
+gardens. Nor would any other town be so shy in acknowledging to itself,
+and boasting to others of, its beauty.
+
+[Illustration: THE GIRARD TRUST COMPANY]
+
+
+II
+
+Philadelphia has always been over-modest as to its personal
+appearance,--always on the surface, indifferent to flattery. Nobody
+would suspect it of ever having heard that to a philosopher like
+Voltaire it was, without his seeing it, one of the most beautiful cities
+in the universe, that a matter-of-fact traveller like William Cobbett
+thought it a fine city from the minute he knew it, that all the old
+travel-writers had a compliment for it, and all the new travellers as
+well, down to Li Hung Chang, who described it felicitously as "one of
+the most smiling of cities"--the "Place of a Million Smiles." It was not
+because it had ceased to be beautiful that it assumed this indifference.
+As I recall it in my youth, it was beautiful with the beauty
+Philadelphians searched Europe for, while they were busy destroying it
+at home--the beauty that life in England has helped me to appreciate as
+I never did before, for it has given me a standard I had not when I knew
+only Philadelphia.
+
+Judged by this standard, I found Philadelphia in its old parts more
+beautiful than I remembered it. In a street like Clinton, which has
+escaped the wholesale destruction, or in a block here and there in other
+streets less fortunate, I felt as I never had before the austere
+loveliness of their red brick and white marble and pleasant green shade.
+As never before I realized the Eighteenth-Century perfection of the old
+State House and Carpenter's Hall. I know of no English building of the
+same date that has the dignity, the harmonious proportions, the
+restrained ornament of the State House,--none with so noble a background
+of stately rooms for those stately figures who were the makers of
+history in Philadelphia. And the old churches came as a new revelation.
+I questioned if I ever could have thought an English Cathedral in its
+close lovelier than red brick St. Peter's in its walled graveyard on a
+spring day, with the green in its first freshness and the great
+wide-spreading trees throwing soft shadows over the grassy spaces and
+the grey crumbling gravestones. The pleasure it gave me positively hurt
+when--after walking in the filth of Front Street, where the old houses
+are going to rack and ruin and where a Jew in his praying shawl at the
+door of a small, shabby synagogue seemed the explanation of the filth--I
+came upon the little green garden of a graveyard round the Old Swedes'
+Church, sweet and still and fragrant in the May sunshine, though the
+windows of a factory looked down upon it to one side, and out in front,
+on the railroad tracks, huge heavy freight cars rattled and rumbled and
+shrieked by, and beyond them rose the steam stacks of steamers from
+Antwerp and Liverpool that unload at its door the hordes of aliens who
+not only degrade, but "impoverish" Philadelphia, as the Irish porter in
+my hotel said to me. And what pleasure again, after the walk full of
+memories along Front and Second Streets, with the familiar odours and
+Philadelphia here quiet as of yore, to come upon Christ Church a part of
+the street like any French Cathedral and not in its own little green,
+but with a greater architectural pretension to make up for it, and with
+a gravestone near the sanctuary to testify that John Penn, one at least
+of the Penn family, lies buried in Philadelphia. And what greater
+pleasure in the old Meeting Houses--why had I not known, in youth as in
+age, their tranquil loveliness?--What repose there, down Arch Street, in
+that small simple brick building, with its small simple green, one bed
+of tulips at the door, shut off from the noise and confusion and dirt
+and double trolley lines of Arch Street by the old high brick wall; and
+no less in that equally small and simple brick building in South Twelfth
+Street, an old oasis, or resting place, in a new wilderness of
+sky-scrapers. With these churches and meeting-houses standing, can
+Philadelphians deplore the ugliness of their town?
+
+[Illustration: TWELFTH STREET MEETING HOUSE]
+
+And the old Eighteenth-Century houses? Would I find them as beautiful? I
+asked myself. Would they survive as triumphantly the test of my
+travelled years and more observant eyes? How foolish the question, how
+unnecessary the doubt! More beautiful all of them, because my eyes were
+better trained to appreciate their architectural merit; more peaceful
+all of them, with the feeling of peace so intense I wondered whether it
+came of the Colonial architecture or of associations with it.
+
+Germantown may be built up beyond recognition, its Lanes, many of them,
+turned into Streets for no reason the average man can see, but some of
+the big old estates, are still green and untouched as if miles away, and
+the old houses are more guarded than ever from change. One by one, I
+returned to them:--Stenton restored, but as yet so judicially that Logan
+would to-day feel at home in its halls and rooms, on its stairway,
+outside by the dovecote and the wistaria-covered walls,--at home in the
+garden full of tulips and daisies, and old familiar Philadelphia roses
+and Johnny-jump-ups, enclosed by hedges, every care taken to plant in it
+afresh just the blossoms he loved. But what would he have said to the
+factories opposite? To the rows of little two-story houses creeping
+nearer and nearer? And the Chew House--could the veterans of the
+Revolution return to it, as the veterans of the Civil War return every
+year to Gettysburg, how well they would know their way in the garden,
+how well, in the wide-pillared hall with the old portraits on the white
+wall, and in the rooms with their Eighteenth-Century panelling and
+cornices and fire-places, and in the broad hall upstairs could they
+follow the movements of the enemy that lost for them the Battle of
+Germantown? And Wyck white, cloistered, vine-laden, with fragrant garden
+and shade-giving trees! And the Johnson House, and the Wistar House, and
+the Morris House. And how many other old houses beyond Germantown!
+Solitude, and Laurel Hill, and Arnold's Mansion in the Park, Bartram's
+at Gray's Ferry.
+
+[Illustration: WYCK]
+
+I thought first I would not put Bartram's to the test, no matter how
+bravely the others came out of it--Bartram's, associated with the
+romance of work and the dawn of my new life. But how glad I am that I
+thought twice and went back to it! For I found it beautiful as ever,
+though I could reach it by trolley, and though it was unrecognizably
+spick and span in the little orchard, and under the labelled trees, and
+by the old house and the old stables, and in the garden where gardeners
+were at work among the red roses. But the disorder has not been quite
+done away with in the wilderness below the garden, and there was the
+bench by the river, and there the outlook up and down--had so many
+chimneys belched forth smoke and had the smoke been as black on the
+opposite bank, up the river, in the old days? Certainly there had not
+been so many ghosts--not one of those that now looked at me with
+reproachful eyes, asking me what I had done with the years, for which
+such ambitious plans had been made on that very spot ages and ages ago?
+
+
+III
+
+Philadelphia is not responsible for the ghosts; they are my affair; but
+it has made itself responsible for the beauty, not only at Bartram's but
+at as many other of the old places as it has been able to lay claims
+upon, converting them into what the French would call historic
+monuments. And Philadelphia, with the help of Colonial Dames, and an
+Automobile Club, and those societies and individuals who have learned at
+last to love the Philadelphia monuments though still indifferent to the
+town, has not been too soon in prescribing the desperate remedies their
+desperate case demands. In the new care of these old places, as well as
+in the new devotion to the old names and the old families, in the new
+keenness for historic meetings and commemorations, in the new local
+lectures on local subjects and traditions, in the very recent
+restoration of Congress Hall, in all this new native civic patriotism I
+seemed to see Philadelphia's desperate, if unconscious, struggle against
+the modern invader of the town's ancient beauty and traditions. The
+grown-up aliens who can be persuaded, as I am told they can be, to come
+and listen to papers on their own section of the town, whether it be
+Southwark, or Manayunk, or Frankford, or Society Hill, or the Northern
+Liberties, will probably in the end look up the old places and their
+history for themselves, just as the little aliens will who, in the
+schools, are given prizes for essays on local history:--offer anything,
+even a school prize, to a Russian Jew, and he will labour for it, in
+this case working indirectly for patriotism.
+
+[Illustration: THE MASSED SKY-SCRAPERS ABOVE THE HOUSETOPS]
+
+But I am not sure that the greatest good the Society of Colonial Dames
+is doing is not in emphasizing the value of the past to those who date
+back to it. It has helped one group of Philadelphians to realize that
+there are other people in their town no less old as Philadelphians and
+more important in the history of Philadelphia, what is called society
+luckily not having taken possession of the Colonial Dames in
+Philadelphia as in New York. If all who date back see in the age of
+their families their passport into the aristocracy of Philadelphia and
+therefore of America, they may join together as a formidable force
+against the advance of the formidable alien. Mr. Arnold Bennett was
+amused to discover that every Bostonian came over in the Mayflower, but
+he does not understand the necessity for the native to hold on like grim
+death to the family tree--pigmy of a tree as it must seem in Europe--if
+America is to remain American. My one fear is lest this zeal, new to me,
+is being overdone, for I fancy I see an ill-concealed threat of a new
+reaction, this time against it. What else does the Philadelphian's
+toying with the cause of the "loyalists" during the Revolution and his
+belated espousal of it mean, unless perhaps the childish Anglomania
+which fashion has imposed upon Philadelphia? People are capable of
+anything for the sake of fashion. The ugliest blot on the history of
+Philadelphia is its running after the British when they were in
+possession of the town that winter we ought to try to forget instead of
+commemorating its feasts--that winter when Philadelphia danced and
+Washington and his troops starved. Now Philadelphia threatens another
+blot as ugly by upholding the citizens who would have kept the British
+there altogether. However, this is as yet only a threat, Philadelphians
+are too preoccupied in their struggle for survival.
+
+
+IV
+
+Not only the new patriotism, but the new architecture is Colonial. For
+long after Colonial days Philadelphia kept to red brick and white
+facings in town, to grey stone and white porches in Germantown, often
+losing the old dignity and fine proportions, but preserving the unity,
+the harmony of Penn's original scheme, and the repose that is the
+inevitable result of unity. But there were many terrible breaks before
+and during my time--breaks that gave us the Public Buildings and
+Memorial Hall and many of the big banks and insurance offices down town,
+and a long list of regrettable mistakes;--breaks that burdened us with
+the brown stone period fortunately never much in favour, and the Furness
+period which I could wish had been less in favour so much too lavish was
+its gift of undesirable originality, and the awful green stone period of
+which a church here and a big mansion there and substantial buildings
+out at the University, too substantial to be pulled down for many a day,
+rise, a solid reproach to us for our far straying from righteousness;
+breaks that courted and won the admiration of Philadelphia for
+imitations of any and every style that wasn't American, especially if it
+was English, Philadelphia tremendously pleased with itself for the bits
+borrowed from the English Universities and dumped down in its own
+University and out at Bryn Mawr, there as unmistakable aliens as our own
+Rhodes Scholars are at Oxford.
+
+[Illustration: SUNSET. PHILADELPHIA FROM ACROSS THE DELAWARE]
+
+But from the moment Philadelphia began to look up its genealogy and
+respect it, the revival of Colonial was bound, sooner or later, to
+follow. It meant a change from which I could not escape, had I
+deliberately refused to see the many others. I was face to face with it
+at every step I took, in every direction I went--from the Navy Yard on
+League Island to the far end of North Broad Street; from Germantown, the
+old grey stone here returned to its own again, to West Philadelphia;
+from the University where the Law School building looks grave and
+distinguished and genuine in the midst of sham Tudor and sham I hardly
+know what, and deplorable green stone, to the Racquets Club in town;
+from the tallest sky-scraper to the smallest workman's dwelling--it was
+Colonial of one sort or another: sometimes with line results, at others
+with Colonial red brick and white facings and Colonial gables and
+Colonial columns and Colonial porches so abused that, after passing
+certain Colonial abortions repeated by the dozens, the hundreds, the
+thousands, in rows upon rows of two-story houses, all alike to the very
+pattern of the awning and the curves of the rocking chair on the
+invariable porch. I had it in my heart to wish that Philadelphia had
+never heard the word Colonial. However, on the whole, more good has been
+done than harm. The original model is a fine one, it belongs to
+Philadelphia, and in reviving it the Philadelphia architect is working
+along legitimate lines.
+
+But even as I write this, I realise that it is not to the revival of
+Colonial that Philadelphia owes all its new beauty. Indeed, the
+architecture that has done most for it in its new phase is that from
+which least would be expected by those who believe in appropriateness or
+utility as indispensable to architectural beauty. A town that has plenty
+of space to spread out indefinitely has no reason whatever to spread up
+in sky-scrapers, and this is precisely what Philadelphia has done and,
+moreover, looks all the better for having done. Its sky-scrapers compose
+themselves with marvellous effectiveness as a centre to the town, though
+they threaten by degrees to become too scattered to preserve the present
+composition; they provide an astounding and ever-varying arrangement of
+towers and spires from neighbouring corners and crossings; they give new
+interest as a background to some simple bit of old Philadelphia, as
+where Wanamaker's rises sheer and high above the little red brick
+meeting-house in Twelfth Street; they add to the charm of some ambitious
+bit of new Philadelphia as where the little Girard Trust
+Building--itself a happy return to standards that gave us Girard
+College and the Mint and Fairmount Water-Works--stands low among the
+clustered towers, just as many a town in the Alps or Apennines lies low
+in the cup of the hills, and is the lovelier for it; they redeem from
+ugliness buildings of later periods, as where they give the scale in the
+most surprising fashion to the Union League; from far up or down the
+long straight line of Broad Street they complete the perspective as
+impressively as the Arc de Triomphe completes that other impressive
+perspective from the Garden of the Tuileries in Paris. They are as
+beautiful when you see them from the bridges or from the Park, a great
+group of towers high above the houses, high above the lesser towers and
+spires, high above the curls and wisps of smoke that now hang over
+Philadelphia; and from the near country they give to the low-lying town
+a sky-line that for loveliness and grandeur is not to be surpassed by
+the famous first view of Pisa across the Italian plain.
+
+[Illustration: THE UNION LEAGUE BETWEEN THE SKY-SCRAPERS]
+
+Philadelphia is, in truth, such a beautiful town that I am surprised the
+world should be so slow in finding it out. The danger to it now is the
+Philadelphian's determination to thrust beauty upon it at any cost, not
+knowing that it is beautiful already. There is too much talk everywhere
+about town-planning as a reform, as a part of the whole tiresome
+business of elevating the masses. As I have said, Penn talked no
+nonsense of that kind, nor did Sir Christopher Wren when he made the
+fine design that London had not the sense to stick to, nor L'Enfant when
+he laid out Washington. For the town that gets into the clutches of the
+reformer, I feel much as Whistler did for art--"What a sad state the
+slut is in an these gentlemen can help her." A town, like a woman,
+should cultivate good looks and cannot be too fastidious in every
+detail. But that is no reason why it should confuse this decent personal
+care with a moral mission. There is too much reform in Philadelphia just
+now for my taste, or its good. The idea of the new Parkway; with fine
+buildings like the new Free Library and the new Franklin Institute,
+along its route through the town; with the City Hall at one end and the
+fine new Art Gallery in the Park at the other; promises well, and I
+suppose that eventually the silly little wooden pergolas will disappear
+and the new buildings go up in their place. But though I know it sounds
+like shocking heresy, I should feel more confidence if its completion
+were in the hands of the old corrupt government we never tired of
+condemning, which may have stolen some of our money but at least gave us
+in return a splendidly planned and thoroughly well-kept Park, one of the
+most beautiful in the world. I believe that not only this monumental,
+but more domestic experiments are in view, the workman this time to
+profit--our old self-reliant American workman to have a taste of the
+benevolent interference that has taken the backbone out of the English
+workman. Rumours have reached me of emissaries sent to spy out the land
+in the Garden Cities of Germany and England. But what have we, in our
+far-famed City of Homes, to learn from other people's Garden Cities?
+For comfort, is the workman anywhere better off at a lower rent than in
+the old streets of neat little two-story brick houses, or in the new
+streets of luxurious little Colonial abortions? And what does he want
+with the reformer's gardens when he lives in the green country town of
+Philadelphia?
+
+[Illustration: UP BROAD STREET FROM LEAGUE ISLAND]
+
+
+V
+
+Philadelphia might have lost more of its old architecture and been less
+successful with its new, and would still be beautiful, for as yet it has
+not ceased to respect Penn's wish to see it fair and green. It is not so
+green as it was, I admit--not so green as in the days of my childhood to
+which, in looking back, the spring always means streets too well lined
+with trees for my taste, since in every one those horrid green measuring
+worms were waiting to fall, crawling, upon me. There are great stretches
+in some streets from which the trees have disappeared, partly because
+they do not prosper so well in the now smoke-laden air; partly because
+every one blown down or injured must be replaced if replaced at all by
+some thrifty citizen held responsible for whatever damage it may do
+through no fault of his; partly, I believe, because at one time street
+commissioners ordered one or two in front of a house to be cut down,
+charged the landlord for doing it, and found too much profit not to
+persevere in their disastrous policy. Still, though Philadelphians in
+summer fly to little European towns to escape the streets they deplore
+as arid in Philadelphia, I know of no other town as large that is as
+green. The notes I made in Philadelphia are full of my surprise that I
+should have forgotten how green and shady are its streets, how tender is
+this green in its first spring growth under the high luminous sky, how
+lovely the wistaria-draped walls in town and the dogwood in the suburbs.
+Walk or drive in whatever direction I chose, and at every crossing I
+looked up or down a long green vista, so that I understood the
+Philadelphia business man who described to me his daily walk from his
+Spruce Street house to the Reading Terminal as a lesson in botany. On
+the other side of the Schuylkill, in any of the suburbs, every street
+became a leafy avenue. There were evenings in that last June I spent in
+Philadelphia, when, the ugly houses bathed in golden light and the trees
+one long golden-green screen in front of them, I would not have
+exchanged Walnut or Spruce Street in West Philadelphia or many a Lane in
+Germantown, for any famous road or boulevard the world over. Really, the
+trees convert the whole town into an annex, an approach to that Park
+which is its chief green beauty and which, to me, was more than
+sufficient atonement for the corrupt government Philadelphia is said to
+have groaned under all the years Fairmount was growing in grace and
+beauty. And beyond the Park, beyond the suburbs, the leafy avenues run
+on for miles through as beautiful country as ever shut in a beautiful
+town.
+
+[Illustration: FROM GRAY'S FERRY]
+
+
+VI
+
+After all, there is beauty enough left to last my time, and I suppose
+with that I should be content. But I cannot help thinking of the future,
+cannot help wondering, now that I see the change the last quarter of a
+century has made, what the next will do for Philadelphia--whether after
+twenty-five years more a vestige of my Philadelphia will survive. I do
+not believe it will; I may be wrong, but I am giving my impressions for
+what they are worth, and nothing on my return impressed me so much as
+the change everywhere and in everything. I think any American, from no
+matter what part of the country, who has been away so long, must, on
+going back, be impressed in the same way--must feel with me that America
+is growing day by day into something as different as possible from his
+America. For my part, I am just as glad I shall not live to see the
+Philadelphia that is to emerge from the present chaos, since I have not
+the shadow of a doubt that, whatever it may be, it will be as unlike
+Philadelphia as I have just learned to know it again, as this new
+Philadelphia is unlike my old Philadelphia, the beautiful, peaceful town
+where roses bloomed in the sunny back-yards and people lived in dignity
+behind the plain red brick fronts of the long narrow streets.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Abbey, Edwin A., 393
+
+  Academy of Fine Arts, 64, 231, 376, 379, 380, 389, 395, 402, 405, 407,
+      412, 428
+
+  Academy of Music, 206, 459
+
+  Academy of Natural Sciences, 64
+
+  Acorn Club, 494
+
+  Adams, John, 6, 50, 161, 297, 385, 418-422
+
+  Addams, Clifford, 407
+
+  Adelphia, the, 499
+
+  Adirondacks (mountains), 169
+
+  Aitken, Robert, 310
+
+  Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 243
+
+  Alexander, John W., 393
+
+  _Alhambra, The_, 315
+
+  Alicia, Mother, 371
+
+  Allen's, 125
+
+  America, new and old, 471
+
+  _American_, the (weekly), 249
+
+  American Army crossing the Delaware, 375
+
+  American Philosophical Society, 418
+
+  Angelo, Michael, 373
+
+  Annabel, Miss, school, 258
+
+  Annals, Watson's, 314
+
+  Antin, Mary, 467
+
+  Appian etchings, 395
+
+  _Arabian Nights, The_, 64
+
+  Arc de Triomphe, 405
+
+  Arch Street Meeting House, 120, 517
+
+  Arch Street Theatre, 67, 459
+
+  Ardea, Father, 191, 192
+
+  Arnold, Matthew, 161, 342-344
+
+  Arnold's Mansion, 521
+
+  _Arrah-na-Pogue_, 67
+
+  Art Gallery in the Park, proposed, 534
+
+  Art (Industrial) School, 257, 330, 332, 405
+
+  _Art Nouveau_, 408
+
+  Assembly, the (social), 153-174, 206, 216, 254, 260, 304, 316, 503
+
+  Atlantic City, 170, 246, 298
+
+  _Atlantic Monthly_, 243, 244, 257
+
+  Augustine's, 60, 148, 151, 153, 281, 438, 439, 449
+
+  Bailey, Banks & Biddle, 125, 456
+
+  Bala Country Club, 493, 495
+
+  Baldwin's Locomotive Works, 228, 477
+
+  Bank, Philadelphia, 49
+
+  Baptists, 176, 183
+
+  Bar Harbor, 169
+
+  Barber, Alice, 396
+
+  Barcelona (churches of), 199
+
+  Barrett, Lawrence, 324
+
+  Barrie (publisher of art books), 376
+
+  Bartram, John, 31, 300, 521
+
+  Bartram's Garden, 31, 42, 299-303, 337, 521, 522
+
+  Bayswater, England, 493
+
+  Beau Nash, 145
+
+  Beaux, Cecilia, 406
+
+  Beaux-Arts (school), 407
+
+  Beidleman (architecture), 361
+
+  Bellamy (_Looking Backward_), 338
+
+  Bellevue-Stratford (hotel), 148, 162, 414, 447, 500, 503
+
+  Belmont (Fairmount Park), 210, 299, 430, 496
+
+  Bennett, Arnold, 478, 486, 525
+
+  Bibliotheque Nationale, 12
+
+  Biddle, Miss Julia, 399
+
+  Biddles, 50, 145, 214-216
+
+  _Biglow Papers_, 320
+
+  _Black Crook, The_, 67
+
+  Blanchard (publisher), 313
+
+  Blitz, Signor, 91
+
+  Blum, Robert, artist, 246, 393
+
+  Board of Education, 257
+
+  Bobbelin, Father, 192
+
+  Boker, George H., 316, 323-325
+
+  Booth, Edwin, 68
+
+  Borghesi collection (art), 406
+
+  Borie, C. L. Jr., architect, 407
+
+  Bories, the, 31, 107
+
+  Borrow, George Henry, 320
+
+  Boswell, James, 290
+
+  Boudreau, Father, 193
+
+  Boudreau, Mother, 97
+
+  Bowie, Mrs., social leader, 146, 147
+
+  Boyle, John, sculptor, 396
+
+  Bradstreet, Anne, 309
+
+  _Breitmann Ballads_, 320, 456
+
+  Brennan, artist, 393
+
+  Brewster, Benjamin Harris, 342
+
+  Briggs, Richard, 424
+
+  Brillat-Savarin, 414
+
+  British Museum, 12, 309
+
+  Broad and Locust Streets, 257, 258, 259, 449
+
+  Broad and Walnut, 42
+
+  Broad Street, 324, 449, 489, 499-503, 529, 533
+
+  Broad Street, North, 459, 529
+
+  Broad Street Station, 12
+
+  Brook Farm, 347
+
+  Brown, Charles Brockden, 313, 363
+
+  Browning Societies, 352
+
+  Bryn Mawr, 98, 104, 173, 307, 364, 529
+
+  Bullitts, the, 107
+
+  Bunyan, John, 308
+
+  Burns's, 126, 210, 456
+
+  Burr, Anna Robeson, 363
+
+  Burr, Charles, 363
+
+  _Burton's Gentleman's Magazine_, 314
+
+  Business and Professional Club, 352
+
+
+  Cadwallader-Biddle, 343
+
+  Cadwalladers, 50, 145, 216
+
+  Caldwell, J. E. & Co., 125, 456
+
+  _Callista_, 59
+
+  Callowhill, Hannah, 417
+
+  Callowhill Street Bridge, 281
+
+  Camac Street, 351
+
+  Camden (N. J.), 293, 324-329
+
+  Campanini, opera singer, 401
+
+  Campbell, Helen, 338
+
+  Cape May, 170
+
+  Carlyle, Thomas, 243
+
+  Carpenter's Hall, 514
+
+  Carson, Hampton L., 6, 363
+
+  Cary (publisher), 313
+
+  _Casket, The_, 314, 428
+
+  Cassatt, Mary, 393
+
+  Castleman, Richard, 6
+
+  Cathedral, the, 120, 183, 184, 187, 198, 200, 203
+
+  Catholics, 176, 177-204, 258
+
+  Cavalcaselle, Giovanni B., 402
+
+  Centennial Exposition, 205-232, 233, 234, 253, 267, 276, 277, 357,
+      375, 390
+
+  _Century, The_, 337
+
+  Champs-Elysees, 405
+
+  Chapman, Miss, school, 258
+
+  Charles the Bold, 337
+
+  Chartres Cathedral, 199
+
+  Chartreuse, the old, 444
+
+  Chase, William M., 246
+
+  Chester, 54, 152
+
+  Chestnut Hill, 78, 123, 129, 170, 258
+
+  Chestnut Street, 125, 144, 226, 227, 325, 342, 368, 449, 456, 459, 499
+
+  Chestnut Street Theatre, 67, 459
+
+  "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine," 119, 123, 151, 158, 182, 263,
+      297, 464
+
+  Chew House, 297, 298, 518
+
+  Childs, George W., 113, 342, 499
+
+  Chippendale furniture, 289
+
+  Christ Church, 114, 120, 183, 188, 277, 517
+
+  Christ Church Burial Ground, 120, 281
+
+  Church (painting), 246
+
+  Church of England, 183
+
+  Cimabue, Giovanni, 402
+
+  City Companies in London, 152
+
+  City Hall, 259, 260, 405, 489, 526, 534
+
+  City of Homes, 481, 534
+
+  City Troop, 64, 452, 510
+
+  Civic Club, 494
+
+  Civil War, the, 130, 146, 518
+
+  Claghorn's collection of old prints, 376, 394
+
+  Clements, Gabrielle, 396
+
+  Clinton Street, 514
+
+  Clover Club, 152, 443
+
+  Club (Art), South Broad Street, 406
+
+  Coates, Mrs. Florence Earle, 336, 362
+
+  Cobbett, William, 440, 485, 513
+
+  Coghlan, Father, 193
+
+  Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 324
+
+  College Club, the, 494
+
+  Colonial (American) art, 381, 389
+
+  Colonial Congress, 253, 267
+
+  Colonial Dames, 219, 221, 361, 522, 525
+
+  Colonial days, 283, 526
+
+  Colonial doorways, 361
+
+  Colonial history, 9
+
+  Colonial houses, 6, 36, 73, 158, 282, 297, 298, 382, 443, 460, 496,
+      518, 526, 529
+
+  Colonial life and society, 6, 443
+
+  Colonists, 495
+
+  Colonnade (hotel), 148
+
+  Columbia (College), 364
+
+  Comegys, Mrs., school, 258
+
+  _Complete Cookery_ (Miss Leslie), 423-430
+
+  Concord (Mass.), 347-348
+
+  Coney Island, 213
+
+  Conflans (convent), 175
+
+  Congress Hall, 522
+
+  Connor, Mrs., social leader, 147
+
+  Contemporary Club, 352
+
+  _Continent, Our_, 293
+
+  Continental (hotel), 148
+
+  Convent, 27, 31, 36, 47, 55, 59, 63, 67, 68, 72 sq., 104, 117, 126,
+      133-137, 175 sq., 205, 238, 241, 258, 368, 372, 373, 374, 451
+
+  Convent at Paris, 222
+
+  Cooper, Colin Campbell, 396
+
+  Cope, Walter, architect, 407
+
+  Copley, John Singleton, 389
+
+  Country Clubs, 152, 162, 447, 494-496
+
+  Courts (of law), 468, 500
+
+  Cox, Kenyon (painting), 246
+
+  Cramp's shipyard, 228, 477
+
+  "Crazy Norah," 27, 35, 375
+
+  Crowe, Joseph Archer, 402
+
+  Cruikshank drawings, 375
+
+  Curtis Publishing Co. Building, 355
+
+  Cushman, Charlotte, 68
+
+
+  Dana, William P. W., artist, 393
+
+  Dancing Class, 138, 139, 143-145, 147, 148, 157, 182, 184, 203, 254,
+      260, 304, 316, 503
+
+  Darlington butter, 440
+
+  Darlington, J. G. & Co., 125, 456
+
+  Darwin, Charles, 242
+
+  Daughters of Pennsylvania, 219, 221
+
+  Davenports, the (actors), 64
+
+  Davis, Clarke, 246
+
+  Davis, Mrs. Rebecca Harding, 336
+
+  Davis, Richard Harding, 336
+
+  Day, Frank Miles, architect, 407
+
+  Declaration of Independence, 158, 214, 227, 253, 267, 418
+
+  Decorative Art Club, 399
+
+  Delaware River, 278, 294, 308, 455
+
+  Dexter's, 35, 88, 126, 456
+
+  Dickens, Charles, 6, 59, 375, 427
+
+  Dickinson, Jonathan, 15, 313
+
+  Dillaye, Blanche, 396
+
+  _Domestic Economy_ (Miss Leslie), 428
+
+  Drama-Reforming Societies, 352
+
+  Dreka Co. (engraver), 125, 148, 151, 456
+
+  Drew, Mrs. John (actress), 68
+
+  Drexel, Anthony J., 342
+
+  Drexel Institute, 405
+
+  Duclaux, Mme (Mary Robinson), 260
+
+  Duke of Westminster's collection (art), 406
+
+  Dundas house, 42, 108, 459
+
+  Dutch descent, 219
+
+  Dutch in New York, 16
+
+  Dutch Jew, 467
+
+
+  Earle's, 125
+
+  Eastern Shore, Maryland, 219, 245, 246
+
+  Eberlein, Harold Donaldson, 6, 361
+
+  Education, Board of, 257
+
+  Eleventh Street, 48
+
+  Eleventh and Spruce (streets), 44, 47, 48 sq., 94, 102, 104, 314, 427,
+      430
+
+  Eliot, George, 401
+
+  Eliphas, Levi, 242
+
+  Elkins art collection, 406
+
+  Ellwanger, G. H., 424
+
+  Elwood, Thomas, 15, 308
+
+  Episcopal Academy, 143, 162, 181, 258, 455
+    Head Master of, 181
+
+  Episcopalians, 176 177, 183, 187
+
+  _Evening Telegraph_, 246, 341
+
+  Ewing, Miss Julia, 341
+
+  Exposition, Centennial, 205, 232
+
+  Eyre, Wilson, 407
+
+
+  _Fabiola_, 59
+
+  Fairmount Park, 64, 129, 173, 210, 213, 281, 299, 444, 486, 496, 521,
+      533, 534, 538
+
+  Fairmount Water-Works, 299, 533
+
+  _Faith Gartney's Girlhood_, 59, 335
+
+  Ferris, Stephen, 394
+
+  Fildes, Luke, 231
+
+  Fisher, Sydney George, 6, 309, 358
+
+  Fishers, the, 31
+
+  Fish-House Club, 152, 443
+
+  Fitzgerald, Edward, 423
+
+  _Fool's Errand_, 338
+
+  _Forget-Me-Not_, 348
+
+  Fourth of July, 63
+
+  Fox, George, 15, 308
+
+  _Francesca da Rimini_, 324
+
+  Frankford, 81, 489, 522
+
+  Franklin, Benjamin, 24, 166, 215, 216, 253, 263, 281, 290, 355, 310,
+      313, 358, 386, 389, 400, 417, 422, 482
+
+  Franklin Inn, 351
+
+  Franklin Institute, 263, 534
+
+  Free Public Library, 307, 534
+
+  _French Revolution_ (Thiers), 375
+
+  Friends, 1, 9, 15, 16, 20, 92, 134, 166, 197, 203, 258, 283, 289, 290,
+      294, 307, 309, 357, 380, 386, 389, 513
+
+  Friends' School (Germantown), 258
+
+  Fromuth, marine painter, 406
+
+  Front Street, 278, 281, 290, 326, 514, 517
+
+  Frost, Arthur B., artist, 393
+
+  Furness (architecture), 407, 526
+
+  Furness, Dr. Horace Howard, 332, 335
+
+  Furness, Horace Howard, Jr., 362, 363
+
+  Furness, William Henry, D.D., 332, 335
+
+
+  Garber, Daniel, 407
+
+  Gebbie and Barrie, 125, 376
+
+  German mystics, 176
+
+  Germans (immigrants), 471
+
+  Germantown, 91, 123, 124, 258, 294, 297, 336, 468, 477, 496, 518, 521,
+      526, 529, 538
+
+  Germantown Cricket Ground, 496
+
+  Gettysburg (battle-fields), 518
+
+  Gibson collection, 379
+
+  _Gift, The_, 314
+
+  Gilchrist, Mrs. Alexander, 119, 284, 287
+
+  Gillespie, Mrs., social leader, 215, 216, 253
+
+  Giotto di Bondone, 402
+
+  Girard College, 123, 379, 533
+
+  Girard House, 148
+
+  Girard Trust Building, 530
+
+  Gissing, George, 239
+
+  Glackens, William J., illustrator, 406
+
+  Glackmeyer, Father, 193
+
+  Glasse, Mrs. (Cookery Book), 314, 423-428
+
+  _Godey's Lady's Book_, 314, 337
+
+  Gough Square (London), 324
+
+  Grafly, Charles, sculptor, 407
+
+  _Graham's_ (Magazine), 314, 337
+
+  Grants, the, 31
+
+  Gray's Ferry, 281, 299, 521
+
+  Green, Elizabeth Shippen, 406
+
+  Greene, General, 418
+
+  Grelaud, Miss, 107
+
+  Griggs (publisher), 313
+
+  Groton (school), 162
+
+
+  Haden, Seymour, etchings, 395, 396
+
+  Hale, Mrs. Sarah Josepha, 314, 428
+
+  Hallowell, Mrs. Sarah, 341
+
+  Hamilton, J. McLure, 393
+
+  Handy, Moses P., 245
+
+  _Hans Breitmann_, 320, 456
+
+  Harland, Marion, 428
+
+  _Harper's_ (magazine), 238, 337
+
+  Harrison, Alexander, 393
+
+  Harrison, Birge, 393
+
+  Harrison, John, 405
+
+  Harrison, Mrs. (Art Club), 399
+
+  Harvard (College), 162
+
+  Hassler's band, 140, 148
+
+  Haverford (school), 258
+
+  Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 347
+
+  Hawthorne, Rose, 347
+
+  Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 6, 157, 216, 220, 290, 307, 315,
+      364, 459
+
+  Hogarth's engravings, 376
+
+  Holloway, Edward Stratton, 406
+
+  Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 243
+
+  Holmesburg, 258
+
+  Holy Trinity (church), 183
+
+  Home Arts School (London), 257
+
+  Homer and Colladay's, 125
+
+  Hooper, Mrs. Lucy, 341
+
+  Hopkins, the, 31
+
+  Hopkins, Dr. (dentist), 64
+
+  Horticultural Hall, 347, 503
+
+  Hospital, Pennsylvania, 24, 114, 277, 358, 460
+
+  Hotel Meurice, 222
+
+  Howells, William Dean, 259, 401
+
+  Howland's Hotel at Long Branch, 103
+
+  Hubbell's, 126, 459
+
+  Hudson River School, 390
+
+  _Hugh Wynne_, 357, 358, 363
+
+  Hughes and Mueller, 456
+
+  Huguet, Madame, 77, 85
+
+  Hunt, Holman, 372, 373
+
+  Huntington Valley Club, 495
+
+  Hutchinson Ports, 363
+
+
+  Impressionists (artists), 390
+
+  Independence Hall, 467
+
+  Independence Square, 355, 467
+
+  Industrial Art School, 257, 330, 396, 399
+
+  Ingersolls, the, 145
+
+  _Initials, The_, 59
+
+  International expositions, 213, 231, 253
+
+  Irish immigrants, 471
+
+  Irving, Henry, 401
+
+  Irving, Washington, 315
+
+  Irwin, Miss, school, 140, 175, 258
+
+  Italians (immigrants), 464, 468
+
+
+  James, Henry, 6, 16, 401, 509
+
+  Janauschek (actress), 348
+
+  Janvier, Thomas Allibone, 169, 363, 433-437, 443
+
+  Jastrow, Dr. Morris, 364
+
+  Jefferson, Thomas, 50, 386, 418
+
+  Jenkins, Howard, 249
+
+  Jesuits, 191, 193, 197
+
+  Jew, Dutch, 467
+
+  Jew, Pennsylvania, 467, 514
+
+  Jew, Russian, 214, 282, 283, 297, 361, 460, 464-473, 525
+
+  Jews, religious liberty of, 177
+
+  Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 324
+
+  Johnson House, 297, 521
+
+  Johnson's, John G., art collection, 406
+
+  Jones's, 126, 210, 444, 456
+
+  Jourdain, M., 282
+
+  June, Jenny, 428
+
+
+  _Kate Vincent_, 178
+
+  Keatings, the, 31
+
+  Kellogg, Clara Louise, 67
+
+  Kensington, 228, 297, 477
+
+  Kensington, England, 493
+
+  Keppel, Frederick, 376
+
+  Kings, the, 31
+
+  Kirk, John Foster, 337
+
+  Kirkbride's Insane Asylum, 263
+
+  Kneller, portrait-painter, 389
+
+  Knight, Ridgway, 393
+
+  Kuegler, Franz, 402
+
+
+  _La Belle Helene_, 68
+
+  _La Grande Duchesse_, 68
+
+  La Pierre House, 148
+
+  _Ladies' Home Journal_, 355
+
+  Ladies of the Sacred Heart, 72, 93
+    Convent, 72 sq.
+
+  _Lady of Shalott_, 27, 373
+
+  Lalanne etchings, 395
+
+  Lamb, Charles, 126, 324
+
+  _Lamplighter, The_, 56
+
+  Long, John Luther, 363
+
+  Lathrop, Mr. and Mrs. George, 347
+
+  Latin Quarter, 411
+
+  Laurel Hill, 521
+
+  Law Courts, 468, 500
+
+  Law School, building, 529
+
+  Lea, Henry Charles, 313, 363
+
+  League Island, 529
+
+  Leary's, 126
+
+  _Ledger_ (newspaper), 113, 341, 355
+
+  Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 260
+
+  Leland, Charles Godfrey, 42, 234-238, 240-244, 254, 257, 263, 272,
+      275, 276, 316, 319-330, 332, 335, 344-348, 396, 399, 405
+
+  Leland, Charles Godfrey, _Memoirs_ of, 276
+
+  L'Enfant (architect), 533
+
+  Leslie, Margaret (artist), 396
+
+  Leslie, Miss, Cookery Book, 313, 423-437
+
+  Levi, Eliphas, 242
+
+  Lewises, 50
+
+  Li Hung Chang, 20, 513
+
+  Library, Bryn Mawr College, 307
+
+  Library of Congress, 309
+
+  Library, Free Public, 307, 534
+
+  Library, Friends', Germantown, 307
+
+  Library, Historical Society, 307
+
+  Library, Mercantile, 114, 241
+
+  Library, Philadelphia, 24, 114, 241, 290, 307, 455
+
+  Library, Ridgway, 241, 307, 364
+
+  _Life of Blake_, 119
+
+  Lionardo da Vinci, 402
+
+  Lippincott, Horace Mather, 6, 361
+
+  Lippincott, J. B., 124, 313
+
+  Lippincott's (book-store), 125, 313, 315
+
+  _Lippincott's Magazine_, 243, 314, 315, 337, 341, 427
+
+  Lithuanians (immigrants), 468, 473
+
+  "Little England" of Kensington, 19
+
+  "Little Street of Clubs, the," 351, 406
+
+  _Lives of the Artists_, 373
+
+  Locust Street, 472
+
+  Logan, Deborah, 309
+
+  Logan, James, 31, 177, 184, 241, 307, 417, 421, 518
+
+  Logan Square, 120, 162, 500
+
+  Loganian Library (see Ridgway), 364
+
+  Lombard Street, 472
+
+  Long Branch, 169
+
+  Longfellow, Henry W., 320, 329
+
+  _Looking Backward_, 338
+
+  _Lost Heiress, The_, 59
+
+  Lowell, James Russell, 316
+
+
+  Macalisters, the, 31
+
+  McCalls, the, 158
+
+  McCarter, Henry, artist, 407
+
+  MacVeagh, Wayne, 343
+
+  Madeira (wine), 55, 153, 417-423, 506, 510
+
+  Maeennerchor Garden, 500
+
+  Main Line, 31, 123, 297
+
+  Main Street in Germantown, 297
+
+  Manayunk, 522
+
+  Maria, Father de, 191
+
+  Marion, General Francis, 216
+
+  "Market, Arch, Race and Vine," 281
+
+  Market Street, 119, 120, 123, 157, 281, 294, 310, 329, 451, 456, 489
+
+  Martin, Madame, 137, 138
+
+  Maryland, Eastern Shore of, 219
+
+  Matisse, artist, 402
+
+  Mayflower (ship), 219, 525
+
+  Meeting-Houses, 188, 281, 517
+
+  _Meg Merrilies_, 27, 68, 375
+
+  Memorial Hall, 213, 405, 526
+
+  Mennonites in Germantown, 176
+
+  Mercantile Library, 114, 241, 307
+
+  Merritt, Mrs. Anna Lea, 393
+
+  Methodists, 183
+
+  Mifflin, Mrs. (Art Club), 399
+
+  Millais, John Everett, 275
+
+  Miller, Leslie, 396
+
+  Milton, John, 308
+
+  Mint, United States, 108, 130, 379, 459, 533
+
+  _Mischief in the Middle Ages_, 243
+
+  Mitchell, Dr. S. Weir, 6, 357, 363, 456
+
+  Moore, Mrs. Bloomfield, 379
+
+  Moran family, 394
+
+  Moravians, monasteries of, 176
+
+  Morrises, the, 216
+
+  Morris, Gouverneur, 133
+
+  Morris, Harrison S., 362
+
+  Morris House, 297, 521
+
+  Morris, William, 400, 408
+
+  Mother Goose, 242
+
+  Mount Airy, 170
+
+  Mount Pleasant, 31, 299
+
+  Moxon's _Tennyson_, 372
+
+  Moyamensing Prison, 263
+
+  Murillo (painting), 372
+
+  Mustin's, 125
+
+
+  Napoleon, pictures of, 374
+
+  Narragansett Pier, 169
+
+  Nash, Richard ("Beau"), 145
+
+  Natatorium, 139, 140, 145, 499
+
+  _Nation_, the (New York), 249
+
+  _National Observer_, 294
+
+  Navy Yard, 529
+
+  New Century Club, 494
+
+  New Testament (German), 310
+
+  New Year's Day, 152
+
+  New York magazines, 337
+
+  Newman's _Callista_, 59
+
+  Nilsson, Christine, 401
+
+  Ninth and Green (streets), 489, 500
+
+  Nordau, Max, 402
+
+  Norrises, the, 216
+
+  Norris, Isaac, 15, 417
+
+  _North American_, the, 355
+
+  Northern Liberties, 522
+
+
+  Oakdale Park, 293
+
+  Oakley, Thornton, 406
+
+  Oakley, Violet, 406
+
+  _Old Mam'selle's Secret_, 335
+
+  Old Swedes Church, 114, 120
+
+  Orpheus Club, 153
+
+  Ouida's Guardsman, 275
+
+  _Our American Cousin_, 67
+
+  _Our Continent_, 337, 341
+
+  _Our Convent Days_, 88, 358
+
+  _Ours_, 67
+
+  Oxford (England), 86, 529
+
+  Oxford, Dr. (cookery books), 424
+
+
+  Page, George Bispham, architect, 407
+
+  Paget, Violet (Vernon Lee), 260
+
+  Park (see Fairmount), 534, 538
+
+  Parkway, the new, 405, 534
+
+  Parrish, Maxfield, 406
+
+  Parrish, Stephen, 396
+
+  Patterson, General, house of, 108, 459
+
+  Peale, Charles Wilson, 389
+
+  Pegasus Societies, 352
+
+  Penn Club, 351
+
+  Penn, John, 517
+
+  Penn, William, 2, 9, 10, 15, 24, 31, 35, 36, 74, 85, 117, 219, 260,
+      282, 287-289, 290, 294, 375, 382, 408, 417, 421, 455, 456, 474,
+      500, 526, 533
+
+  Penn, William, statue of, 9
+
+  Pennell, Joseph, 1, 24, 203, 219, 237, 246, 268, 271-303, 308, 337,
+      338, 341, 348, 351, 357, 368, 376, 380, 393-395, 474
+
+  Pennock Brothers, 144, 439
+
+  Pennsbury, 31
+
+  Pennsylvania Historical Society, 6, 157, 216, 290, 315, 364
+
+  Pennsylvania Hospital, 24, 114, 277, 358, 460
+
+  Pennsylvania Jew, 467
+
+  Pennsylvania, promotion of science by, 309
+
+  Pennsylvania Railroad, 276
+
+  Pennsylvania Railroad Station, 276, 448, 451
+
+  Pennsylvania, University of, 143, 162, 173, 258, 358, 364, 473, 496,
+      526
+
+  Pennypacker, Governor, 307
+
+  Peppers, the, 50, 399
+
+  _Peterson's_ (magazine), 314, 337
+
+  Philadelphia Art Club, 324
+
+  Philadelphia Bank, 49
+
+  Philadelphia Club, 153, 316, 443, 510
+
+  Philadelphia Library, 24, 114, 241, 290, 307, 313, 315, 455
+
+  _Philadelphia Saturday Museum_, 314
+
+  Phillips, John S., 376
+
+  Philosophical Society, American, 418
+
+  Picasso, artist, 402
+
+  Plastic Club, 406
+
+  Pocahontas, 9
+
+  Poe, Edgar Allan, 27, 316
+
+  Poor Richard (club), 352
+
+  Poor Richard's Almanac, 310
+
+  Poore, Harry, 271, 272
+
+  Pope of Rome, 120
+
+  Pope's Head, 310
+
+  Porter and Coates, 125, 315
+
+  Post-Impressionists, 381
+
+  Powhatan, 9
+
+  Pre-Raphaelites, 373, 390
+
+  Presbyterian Building, 271
+
+  Presbyterians, 176, 183
+
+  _Press_, the, 245
+
+  Provence, 60
+
+  Public Buildings (see City Hall), 10, 526
+
+  Public Industrial Art School, 405
+
+  _Punch_ (London), 250
+
+  Puritans (New England), 417
+
+  Putnam (N. Y. publisher), 315
+
+  Pyle, Howard, 249, 393
+
+
+  Quakers (see Friends), 15
+
+  _Queechy_, 59, 335
+
+
+  Race (Sassafras) Street, 281
+
+  Racquets Club, 499, 529
+
+  Rafael (pictures), 372, 375
+
+  Ralph (Franklin's friend), 310
+
+  Randolph House, 463
+
+  Reading Terminal, 538
+
+  Redfield, Edward W., artist, 407
+
+  Rembrandt (painting), 246, 406
+
+  Renaissance, period of, 11
+
+  Repplier, Agnes, 6, 88, 358
+
+  Revolution (American), 382, 389, 418, 518, 525
+
+  Rhodes scholars, 80, 529
+
+  Richards, William T., artist, 393
+
+  Ridgway Library, 241, 307, 364
+
+  Rittenhouse Smiths, 363
+
+  Rittenhouse Square, 24, 91, 120, 139, 198, 456
+
+  Ritz-Carlton (hotel), 148, 414, 447
+
+  _Robin Hood_ (Howard Pyle's), 249
+
+  Robins, Edward, Jr., 358
+
+  Robins, Edward, Sr., 1, 50, 54, 56, 74, 81, 107, 111, 123, 130, 138,
+      178, 181, 183, 187, 200, 239, 244, 259, 260, 263, 294, 307, 323,
+      371, 372, 374, 375, 423, 427, 459, 500, 505
+
+  Robins, Grant, 139, 140, 147, 165, 216, 505
+
+  Robins, Mrs. Thomas, 40, 41, 43, 53, 54, 50, 60, 61, 183, 239, 268,
+      437
+
+  Robins, Thomas, 1, 35-36, 41, 43, 48-63, 107, 178, 183, 219, 222, 307,
+      314, 357, 373-375, 413, 421, 459
+
+  Robinson, Mary (Mme. Duclaux), 260
+
+  Rogers, Fairman, 493
+
+  "Rogers Group," 39, 374, 375
+
+  Romanticists (artists), 390
+
+  Roosevelt, Theodore, 506
+
+  Rorer, Mrs. (cookery book), 428
+
+  Ross, Betsy, house of, 281
+
+  Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 119, 372, 373
+
+  Rossetti, William Michael, 119, 284
+
+  _Routledge_, 59
+
+  Royal Academy, 389, 411
+
+  Royal Exchange, 411
+
+  _Rubaiyat_, the, 401
+
+  Rubens (painting), 246
+
+  Rue de Rivoli, 225
+
+  Rush, Dr. Benjamin, 241, 307
+
+  Rush, Mrs., social leader, 146
+
+  Ruskin, John, 287, 400, 402
+
+  Russian Jew, 214, 282, 283, 297, 361, 460, 464-471, 473
+
+
+  Sacred Heart, Ladies of the, 72
+    Convent of, 72 sq., 258
+
+  St. Andrew's (church), 184
+
+  St. Augustine's (church), 198
+
+  St. Clement's (church), 184, 278
+
+  St. James's (church), 183
+
+  St. John's (church), 183, 199, 200, 203
+
+  St. Joseph's (church), 64, 91, 183, 184, 187, 188, 191, 193-199
+
+  St. Mark's (church), 183, 200
+
+  St. Mary's (church), 184, 198, 199, 278
+
+  St. Michael's (church), 198
+
+  St. Patrick's (church), 91, 183, 199, 200, 203
+
+  St. Paul's (school), 162
+
+  St. Peter's (church), 108, 114, 183, 188, 277, 463, 514
+
+  Salons (Paris), 411
+
+  Sargent, John S., artist, 393
+
+  Sartain, Miss Emily, 338, 393
+
+  Sartain, William, 393
+
+  _Sartain's Union Magazine_, 314
+
+  Sassafras (Race) Street, 281
+
+  Saturday Club, 152
+
+  _Saturday Evening Post_, 355
+
+  Saur's New Testament, 310
+
+  Sautter's, 126, 444, 449, 456, 506
+
+  Schaumberg, Emily, 107
+
+  School Board, 259
+
+  School of Industrial Arts, 257, 330, 332, 405
+
+  Schools, Public, 335
+
+  Schuylkill (river), 173, 276, 281, 294, 299, 362, 451, 468, 481, 496,
+      538
+
+  Scott, Walter, 59
+    heroines of, 27, 375
+    novels of, 197, 335, 336, 427
+
+  Second Street, 42, 137, 147, 148, 166, 277, 517
+
+  Second Street Market, 114, 120, 277
+
+  Seminary at Villanova, 198
+
+  Senat, Prosper, 395
+
+  Seville (churches of), 199
+
+  Shakespeare Societies, 352
+
+  Shakespeare, William, 68, 332, 363, 401
+
+  Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 145, 313
+
+  Sheppard, J. B. & Sons, 125
+
+  Shinn (apothecary), 459
+
+  Shippen, Edward, 42
+
+  Shippen, Peggy, 31, 162
+
+  "Shippen, Peggy," 162, 356
+
+  Shippens, the, 158
+
+  Simses, the, 158
+
+  Sketch Club, 406
+
+  Sky-scrapers, 355, 530
+
+  Slavs (immigrants), 468, 471
+
+  Smarius, Father, 193
+
+  Smedley, William T., artist, 393
+
+  Smith, Albert, 263
+
+  Smith, Jessie Wilcox, 406
+
+  Smith, Lloyd, 242
+
+  Smith, Logan Pearsall, 364
+
+  Smith, Provost, house of, 281
+
+  Society Hill, 522
+
+  _Solon Shingle_, 67
+
+  Sons of Pennsylvania, 219, 221
+
+  Sothern, Edward Askew, 68
+
+  South Kensington, England, 408
+
+  South Street, 472
+
+  Southwark, 522
+
+  Southworth, Mrs. Emma D. E. Nevitt, 59
+
+  _Souvenir, The_, 314
+
+  Springett, Guli, 15
+
+  Spruce Street, 28, 42, 48 sq., 60, 63, 104, 107, 108, 113, 114, 215,
+      245, 253, 282, 460, 468, 538
+
+  State House, the, 113, 158, 220, 277, 358, 382, 471, 514
+
+  State in Schuylkill, 443
+
+  Station (Broad and Market), 489
+
+  Stations and terminals, 12, 28, 276, 481, 489, 538
+
+  Stations (railroad), 481, 489, 538
+
+  Steadmans, the, 31
+
+  Steevens, George, 449, 478
+
+  Stenton, 31, 297, 298, 518
+
+  Stephens (artist), 396
+
+  Stephens, Alice Barber, 396
+
+  Stephens, Charles H., 396
+
+  Stevenson, Mrs. Cornelius, 364
+
+  Stewardson, John, architect, 407
+
+  Stewart, Jules, 393
+
+  Stock Exchange, 54, 107, 111, 468, 486, 500
+
+  Stockton, Frank R., 336, 338
+
+  Stockton, Louise, 338
+
+  Stokes, Frank W., artist, 406
+
+  Strawberry Mansion, 210, 299, 430
+
+  Strawbridge and Clothier, 125
+
+  Stuart, Gilbert, artist, 389
+
+  Stuart, Gilbert, picture of Washington by, 41, 374, 375, 447
+
+  Swarthmore (school), 258
+
+  Swedes (immigrants), 471
+
+  Swedes Church, Old, 114, 277, 514
+
+
+  _Telegraph, Evening_, 246
+
+  Temple, the (London), 324
+
+  Tennyson's Poems, 27, 372, 373
+
+  Terminals (railroad), 12, 481, 489, 538
+
+  Terry, Ellen, 401
+
+  Thackeray (William Makepeace), 151, 294, 422
+
+  Thanksgiving Day, 63
+
+  Theatre Francais, 68
+
+  Theatres, 67
+
+  Thiers' _French Revolution_, 375
+
+  Third Street, 28, 107, 111, 113, 134, 137, 187, 206, 278, 290, 486
+
+  Thomas, George C., 307
+
+  Thompson, "Aunt Ad," 342
+
+  Thouron, Henry, 406
+
+  Torresdale, 28, 31, 72 sq., 123, 191, 258, 278, 451
+
+  Tourgee, Judge Albion W., 338
+
+  Traubel, Horace, 364
+
+  _Traveller, The_, 315
+
+  Treaty with the Indians (Penn), 375
+
+  Tree, Beerbohm, 68
+
+  Trollope, Anthony, 401
+
+  Trotter, Mary, 396
+
+  Trumbauer, Horace, architect, 407
+
+  Tuileries (Paris), 222, 533
+
+  Twelfth and Market, 489
+
+  Twelfth Street Market, 54
+
+
+  Union League, 152, 443, 447, 533
+
+  University of Pennsylvania, 143, 162, 173, 258, 307, 364, 473, 496,
+      526, 529
+
+  University, Provosts of, 119
+
+  University School (architecture), 407
+
+
+  Van Rensselaer, Mrs. John King, 363
+
+  Van Tromp, Miss, miniatures, 395
+
+  Vaux, Richard, 342
+
+  Vicaire (_Bibliographie_), 424
+
+  Vienna Cafes (Centennial), 210, 227
+
+  Villanova Seminary, 198
+
+  Villon, Francois, essay on, 238
+
+  Virginia Company, the first, 219
+
+  Virginia, early settlers in, 216, 219
+
+  Voltaire (author), 428, 513
+
+
+  Walnut Lane, 298, 538
+
+  Walnut Street, 184, 203, 297, 468, 489, 494, 538
+
+  Walnut Street Theatre, 67
+
+  Wanamaker's, 530
+
+  War, Civil, the, 130
+
+  Ward, Genevieve, 348
+
+  Wardle, Thomas (bookseller), 313
+
+  Washington (city), 226, 534
+
+  Washington, George, 44, 119, 215, 290, 482, 526
+
+  Washington's Birthday, 63
+
+  Washington's household, 44, 433
+
+  Washington, statue of, 386
+
+  Waterloo (eve of), 254
+
+  Water-Works (Fairmount), 64, 67, 299, 533
+
+  Watson, John, 6, 356, 357, 413
+
+  Watts, Harvey M., 362
+
+  Waugh, Frederick J., marine painter, 406
+
+  Welsh, John, 50
+
+  West, Benjamin, 64, 389
+
+  West Philadelphia, 126, 294, 297, 468, 529, 538
+
+  Wharton, Anne Hollingsworth, 6, 361
+
+  Whartons, the, 50, 145, 216
+
+  Whelans, the, 31
+
+  Whistler, James A. McNeill, 16, 395, 396, 405, 534
+
+  White, Ambrose, 78, 120
+
+  White, Bishop, 290
+
+  White, Dr. (dentist), 64
+
+  White, William, 144
+
+  White, Willie, 144, 145
+
+  Whitefield, George, 177
+
+  Whitman, Walt, 119, 316, 324-331, 336, 337, 344, 347, 364
+
+  Whittier, John G., 320
+
+  _Wide, Wide World, The_, 59, 335
+
+  Widener, Peter A. B., 307, 406
+
+  Wilde, Oscar, 344, 347
+
+  Williams, Dr. Francis Howard, 336, 362
+
+  Williams, Dr. Talcott, 364
+
+  Willing's Alley, 184
+
+  Willings, the, 158
+
+  Willis, N. P., 316
+
+  Willow Grove, 213
+
+  Wilstach Collection, 405
+
+  Wise, Herbert C., 361
+
+  Wissahickon (creek), 177, 298, 299
+
+  Wistar House, 297, 521
+
+  Wistar parties, 146
+
+  Wister, Mrs., authoress, 335, 336
+
+  Wister, Owen, 363
+
+  "Wister, Sally," 162, 356
+
+  Wisters, the, 107
+
+  Woman in White (German mystics), 176
+
+  Woman's School of Design, 405
+
+  Wood, Bishop, 200, 203
+
+  Woodland's, 126
+
+  Wren, Sir Christopher, 283, 289, 533
+
+  Wyck, 297, 521
+
+  Wyeth's, 126, 456
+
+
+  Yale (college), 162
+
+  Yearly Meeting, 289
+
+  _Yellow Buskin_, the, 405
+
+
+  Zantzinger, C. C., architect, 407
+
+  Zola, Emile, 259
+
+
+
+
+               IN THE LAND OF TEMPLES
+
+               By JOSEPH PENNELL
+
+               Reproductions of a series of lithographs
+               by him, together with impressions and
+               notes by the artist and an introduction by
+               W. H. D. ROUSE, M.A., L.H.D.
+
+               _Crown Quarto, printed on dull finished
+               paper, lithograph by Mr. Pennell on cover.
+               $1.25 net._
+
+
+               JOSEPH PENNELL'S PICTURES OF THE PANAMA
+               CANAL
+
+               Reproductions of a series of twenty-eight
+               lithographs made on the Isthmus of Panama,
+               January-March, 1912, with Mr. Pennell's
+               introduction, giving his experiences,
+               impressions, and full description of each
+               picture.
+
+               _Volume 7-1/4 by 10 inches. Beautifully
+               printed on dull finished paper. Lithograph
+               by Mr. Pennell on cover. $1.25 net._
+
+
+               LIFE OF JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
+
+               By ELIZABETH R. and JOSEPH PENNELL
+
+               The Pennells have thoroughly revised the
+               material in their Authorized Life, and
+               added much new matter, which for lack of
+               space they were unable to incorporate in
+               the elaborate two-volume edition now out
+               of print. Fully illustrated with 96 plates
+               reproduced from Whistler's works, more
+               than half reproduced for the first time.
+
+               _Crown octavo. Fifth and revised edition.
+               Whistler binding, deckle edge, $3.50 net.
+               Three quarters grain levant, $7.50 net._
+
+
+               J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
+               PUBLISHERS     PHILADELPHIA
+
+
+
+
+  +----------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Notes:                                           |
+  |                                                                |
+  | Obvious punctuation errors repaired.                           |
+  |                                                                |
+  | Printer errors corrected. These include:                       |
+  | - Page 74, Illustration caption "Loudorn" corrected to be      |
+  |   "Loudoun" (LOUDOUN, MAIN STREET GERMANTOWN)                  |
+  | - Page 152, word "Fast" corrected to be "East" (Italy and the  |
+  |   East)                                                        |
+  | - Page 157 and 313, word "Pensylvania" corrected to be         |
+  |   "Pennsylvania" (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)          |
+  | - Page 170, word "Philadephia" corrected to be "Philadelphia"  |
+  |   (reception in Philadelphia)                                  |
+  | - Page 174, word "to" corrected to be "too" (all too short at  |
+  |   the best)                                                    |
+  | - Page 402, word "Nordan" corrected to be "Nordau" (from       |
+  |   Lionardo to Nordau)                                          |
+  | - Page 486, word "Your" corrected to be "You" (You are welcome)|
+  |                                                                |
+  | Index entries that do not match their referred text corrected  |
+  | (except if the referred text is an obvious typo). These        |
+  | include:                                                       |
+  | - Index entry "Beidelman" corrected to be "Beidleman"          |
+  | - Index entry "Cimabue" corrected to be "Cimabue"              |
+  | - Index entry "Francesco da Rimini" corrected to be "Francesca |
+  |   da Rimini"                                                   |
+  | - Index entry "Greland" corrected to be "Grelaud"              |
+  | - Index entry "Hughes and Muller" corrected to be              |
+  |   "Hughes and Mueller"                                          |
+  | - Index entry "Kugler" corrected to be "Kuegler"                |
+  | - Index entry "Maennerchor" corrected to be "Maeennerchor"      |
+  | - Index entry "Racquet Club" corrected to be "Racquets Club"   |
+  | - Index entry "Tourgee" corrected to be "Tourgee"              |
+  | - Index entry "Vieaire" corrected to be "Vicaire"              |
+  |                                                                |
+  | Index page references that erroneously lead to pages without   |
+  | text (blank or illustration only) were removed.                |
+  |                                                                |
+  | The author's variable spelling has been kept. This includes:   |
+  | - Both "ailantus" and "ailanthus"                              |
+  | - Both "baptised" and "baptized"                               |
+  | - Both "bookseller" and "book-seller"                          |
+  | - Both "colored" and "coloured"                                |
+  | - Both "Delancey" and "De Lancey"                              |
+  | - Both "dreamt" and "dreamed"                                  |
+  | - Both "encyclopaedia" and "encyclopedia"                       |
+  | - Both "everyday" and "every-day"                              |
+  | - Both "football" and "foot-ball"                              |
+  | - Both "forefathers" and "fore-fathers"                        |
+  | - Both "halfway" and "half-way"                                |
+  | - Both "learnt" and "learned"                                  |
+  | - Both "neighborhood" and "neighbourhood"                      |
+  | - Both "nowadays" and "now-a-days"                             |
+  | - Both "realise" and "realize"                                 |
+  | - Both "refashioning" and "re-fashioning"                      |
+  | - Both "reunion" and "re-union"                                |
+  | - Both "role" and "role"                                       |
+  | - Both "splendor" and "splendour"                              |
+  | - Both "uptown" and "up-town"                                  |
+  | - "Waterworks," "Water Works," and "Water-Works"               |
+  |                                                                |
+  | Some advertisements for other books published by J. B.         |
+  | Lippincot were moved from page ii to the end of the text.      |
+  |                                                                |
+  +----------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Our Philadelphia, by Elizabeth Robins Pennell
+
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