At ten that evening we were in Philadelphia, the Captain at the house of the friends so often referred to, and I the guest of Charley, my kind companion.  The Quaker element gives an irresistible attraction to these benignant Philadelphia households.  Many things reminded me that I was no longer in the land of the Pilgrims.  On the table were Kool Slaa and Schmeer Kase, but the good grandmother who dispensed with such quiet, simple grace these and more familiar delicacies was literally ignorant of Baked Beans, and asked if it was the Lima bean which was employed in that marvellous dish of animalized leguminous farina!

Charley was pleased with my comparing the face of the small Ethiop known to his household as “Tines” to a huckleberry with features.  He also approved my parallel between a certain German blonde young maiden whom we passed in the street and the “Morris White” peach.  But he was so good-humored at times, that, if one scratched a lucifer, he accepted it as an illumination.

A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impression of the outside of that great city, which has endeared itself so much of late to all the country by its most noble and generous care of our soldiers.  Measured by its sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would stand at the head of our economic civilization.  It provides for the comforts and conveniences, and many of the elegances of life, more satisfactorily than any American city, perhaps than any other city anywhere.  Many of its characteristics are accounted for to some extent by its geographical position.  It is the great neutral centre of the Continent, where the fiery enthusiasms of the South and the keen fanaticisms of the North meet at their outer limits, and result in a compound which neither turns litmus red nor turmeric brown.  It lives largely on its traditions, of which, leaving out Franklin and Independence Hall, the most imposing must be considered its famous water-works.  In my younger days I visited Fairmount, and it was with a pious reverence that I renewed my pilgrimage to that perennial fountain.  Its watery ventricles were throbbing with the same systole and diastole as when, the blood of twenty years bounding in my own heart, I looked upon their giant mechanism.  But in the place of “Pratt’s Garden” was an open park, and the old house where Robert Morris held his court in a former generation was changing to a public restaurant.  A suspension bridge cobwebbed itself across the Schuylkill where that audacious arch used to leap the river at a single bound,—­an arch of greater span, as they loved to tell us, than was ever before constructed.  The Upper Ferry Bridge was to the Schuylkill what the Colossus was to the harbor of Rhodes.  It had an air of dash about it which went far towards redeeming the dead level of respectable average which flattens the physiognomy of the rectangular city.  Philadelphia will never be herself again until another Robert Mills and another Lewis Wernwag have shaped her a new palladium.  She must leap the Schuylkill again, or old men will sadly shake their heads, like the Jews at the sight of the second temple, remembering the glories of that which it replaced.