Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/497

 CHAPTER XIX: PHILADELPHIA AFTER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY—CONTINUED

I

T was not only the change that oppressed me those first days of my return. As bewildering, as discouraging, were the signs everywhere of the horrible haste with which it has been brought about: a haste foreign to the Philadelphia habit. But the aliens pouring into Philadelphia have increased its population at such a prodigious rate that it has been obliged to grow too prodigiously fast to meet or to adapt itself to the new conditions without the speed that does not belong to it.

I had left it a big, prosperous, industrial town—Baldwin's, Cramp's, Kensington and Germantown mills all in full swing—but it carried off its bigness, prosperity, and industry with its old demure and restful airs of a country town. The old-fashioned, hard-working, Philadelphia business man could still dine at four o'clock and spend the rest of the afternoon looking out of the window for the people who rarely passed and the things that never happened—nobody would be free to dine at four now-a-days, nobody would have the leisure to sit at any hour looking out of the window, except perhaps the Philadelphia clubman who clings to that amiable pastime, as he does, so far successfully, to his Club house, threatened on every