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 CHAPTER XVIII: PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY

I

CONFESS to a good deal of emotion as the train slowed up in the Pennsylvania Station, and I think I had a right to it. It is not every day one comes home after a quarter of a century's absence, and at the first glance everything was so bewilderingly home-like. Not that I had not had my misgivings as the train neared Philadelphia. From the car windows I had seen my old Convent at Torresdale transformed beyond recognition, many new stations with new names by the way, rows and rows of houses where I remembered fields, Philadelphia grown almost as big as London to get into, a new, strange, unbelievable sky-line to the town, the bridges multiplied across the Schuylkill—change after change where I should have liked to find everything, every house, field, tree, blade of grass even, just as I had left it. But what change there might be in the station kept itself, for the moment anyway, discreetly out of sight. For all the difference I saw, I might have been starting on the journey that had lasted over a quarter of a century instead of returning from it.

This made the shock the greater when, just outside in Market Street, I was met by a company of mounted