to Wayne Junction and we missed our bright Arcadia.  We had wanted to see again the little cottage at Meadowbrook (so like the hunting lodge in the forest in “The Prisoner of Zenda”) which a suasive real-estate man once tried to rent to us. (Philadelphia realtors are no less ingenious than the New York species.) We wanted to see again the old barn, rebuilt by an artist, at Bethayres, which he also tried to rent to us.  We wanted to see again the queer “desirable residence” (near the gas tanks at Marathon) which he did rent us.  But we had to content ourself with the scenery along the cut-off, which is pleasant enough in its way—­there is a brown-green brook along a valley where a buggy was crawling down a lane among willow trees in a wealth of sunlight.  And the dandelions are all out in those parts.  Yes, it was a lovely morning.  We found ourself pierced by the kind of mysterious placid melancholy that we only enjoy to the full in a Reading smoker, when, for some unknown reason, hymn tunes come humming into our head and we are alarmed to notice ourself falling in love with humanity as a whole.

We could write a whole newspaper page about travelling to Philly on the Reading.  Consider those little back gardens near Wayne Junction, how delightfully clean, neat, domestic, demure.  Compare entering New York toward the Grand Central, down that narrow frowning alleyway of apartment house backs, with imprisoned children leaning from barred windows.  But as you spin toward Wayne Junction you see acres and acres of trim little houses, each with a bright patch of turf.  Here is a woman in a blue dress and white cap, busily belabouring a rug on the grass.  The bank of the cutting by Wayne Junction is thick with a tangle of rosebushes which will presently be in blossom; we know them well.  Spring Garden Street:  if you know where to look you can catch a blink of Edgar Allan Poe’s little house.  Through a jumble of queer old brick chimneys and dormers, and here we are at the Reading Terminal, with its familiar bitter smell of coal gas.

Of course we stop to have a look at the engine, one of those splendid Reading locos with the three great driving wheels.  Splendid things, the big Reading locos; when they halt they pant so cheerfully and noisily, like huge dogs, much louder than any other engines.  We always expect to see an enormous red tongue running in and out over the cowcatcher.  Vast thick pants, as the poet said in “Khubla Khan.”  We can’t remember if he wore them, or breathed them, but there it is in the poem; look it up.  Reading engineers, too, always give us a sense of security.  They have gray hair, cropped very close.  They have a benign look, rather like Walt Whitman if he were shaved.  We wrote a poem about one of them once, Tom Hartzell, who used to take the 5:12 express out of Jersey City.

Philadelphia, incidentally, is the only large city where the Dime Museum business still flourishes.  For the first thing we see on leaving the Terminal is that the old Bingham Hotel is now The World’s Museum, given over to Ursa the Bear Girl and similar excitements.  But where is the beautiful girl with slick dark hair who used to be at the Reading terminal news-stand?