Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/68

  to his home at 260 South Ninth street, and to Mrs. Walter M. James, his bereaved mistress.

The little notice about the recreant Master Taffy was strangely appropriate for this queer little district of Hutchinson, Delhi, Irving and Manning streets, for it is just what in London would be known as a "mews." It is a strange huddle of old brick houses, full of stables and carpenters' workshops, with agreeable vistas of chimneys, attic windows, and every now and then a gentleman of color leisurely bestraddling a horse and clumping along the quiet pavements. Small brown dogs of miscellaneous heritage sit sunning themselves on doorsteps; on Hutchinson street a large cart was receiving steaming forkloads of stable straw. In the leisurely brightness of mid-afternoon, with occasional old clo' men chanting their litany down the devious alleyways, it seems almost village-like in its repose. A great place to lead a fat detective a chase! The next time George Gibbs or John Mclntyre writes a tale of mystery and sleuthing, I hope he will use the local color of Delhi street. Why do our native authors love to lay the scenes of their yarns in Venice, Madrid, Brooklyn or almost anywhere except Philadelphia?

On Ninth street below Pine one comes upon a poem in a window which interested me because the author, Mr. Otis Gans Fletcher, has evidently had difficulty with those baffling words "Ye" and "Thou," which have puzzled even greater