Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/346

326 there as Walt Whitman himself in Philadelphia, for it was an old portrait, dark and dingy, of an ancestor; and I wondered if an ancestor so ancient as to grow dark and dingy in a frame did not make it easier to play the democrat and call every man comrade—or Camerado, I should say, as Walt Whitman said, with his curious fondness for foreign words and sounds. But though I saw him at home, he is more associated in my memory with the ferry-boat for Camden when my Uncle and I were on our way to the Gypsy's camping place near the reservoir; and with the corner of Front and Market and the boot-black's big chair by the Italian's candy and fruit stand where he loved to sit, and where I loved to see him, though, Philadelphian at heart, I trembled for his audacity; and with the Market Street horse-car, where he was already settled in his corner before it started and where the driver and the conductor, passing through, nodded to him and called him "Walt," and where he was as happy as the modern poet in his sixty-horse-power car. He was happiest when sitting out in front with the driver, and I have rarely been as proud as the afternoon he gave up that privileged seat to stay with my Uncle and myself inside. His greeting was always charming. He would take a hand of each of us, hold the two in his for a minute or so beaming upon us, never saying very much. I remember his leading us once, with our hands still in his, from the fruitstand to the tobacconist's opposite to point out to my