Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/120

 gathers her mantle of dusk about her. Sometimes he halts his curricle in some favorite nook, climbs back into the broad, well-cushioned tonneau seat and lies there smoking a cigarette and watching the lights along the river. The Park is his favorite relaxation. He carries its contours and colors and sunsets in the spare locker of his brain, and even on the most trying day at his office he is a little happier because he knows the Wissahickon Drive is but a few miles away. Wise Soothsayer! He should have been one of the hermits who came from Germany with Kelpius in 1694 and lived bleakly on the hillsides of that fairest of streams, waiting the millennium they expected in 1700.

The Soothsayer had long been urging me to come and help him worship the Wissahickon Drive, and when luck and the happy moment conspired I found myself carried swiftly past the Washington Monument at the Park entrance and along the margin of the twinkling Schuylkill. At first there was nothing of the hermit in the Soothsayer's conversation. He was bitterly condemning the handicraft of a certain garage mechanic who had done something to his "clutch." He included this fallacious artisan in the class of those he deems most degraded: The People Who Don't Give a Damn. For intellectual convenience, the Soothsayer tersely ascribes all ills that befall him to Bolshevism. If the waitress is tardy in delivering his cheese omelet, she is a bolshevixen. If a motortruck driver skims his polished fender, he is