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thought they could not be published without accompanying text.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.