Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/247

 "But, my dear fellow," said one of these silver-headed wights to Madrigal when he had written the poem—"it wasn't chicken, it was catfish that was famous in the Wissahickon suppers." "All right," said Madrigal, "will you please have the name of the creek changed to Wissahatfish to fit the rhyme?" The necessities of poets must be consulted, unless we are to go over, pen, ink and blotter, to the blattings of vers libre.

But a plague on the talk about "the good old days!" Certainly in those times the road along the creek was never such a dreaming haunt of quietness as it is today. An occasional proud damsel, cantering on horse, accompanied by a sort of Lou Tellegen groom; a rambling carriage or two, a few children paddling in the stream, and a bronzed fellow galloping along with eager face—just enough movement to vary the solitude. The creek pours smoothly over rocky shelves, churning in a white soapy triangle of foam below a cascade, or slipping in clear green channels through an aisle of buttonwoods and incredibly slender tulip-poplars. Here and there is a canoe, teetering gently in a nook of shade, while Colin and Amaryllis are uttering bashful pleasantries each to other—innocent plagiarisms as old as Eden, that seem to themselves so gorgeously new and delicious. The road bends and slopes, under cliffs of fern and evergreen, where a moist pungency of balsam and turpentine breathes graciously in the nose of the sneezer. Gushing springs splash on the steep bank.