Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/506

486 entrance designed to the most beautiful Park in the world and, on its either side, silly little wooden pergolas set up to try the effect, by the dethroned government I believe, and, though nobody, from one end of the town to the other, approves, neither the time nor the money is found to pull them down again—neither the time nor the money found for anything but dirt and untidiness.

III

The people, their manners, their life,—everything seemed to me to have been caught in this mad whirlwind of change and haste. The crowds in the street were not the same, had forgotten the meaning of repose and leisureliness; had at last given in to the American habit of leaving everything until the last moment and then rushing when there was no occasion for rush, and pretending to hustle so that not one man or woman I met could have spared a second to say "Your are welcome" for anybody's "Thank you," or, for that matter, to provide the information for anybody's thanks;—indeed, these crowds seemed to me to have mastered their new role with such thoroughness that to-day the visitor from abroad will carry away the same idea of Philadelphia as Arnold Bennett, who, during his sojourn there, never ceased to marvel at its liveliness.

And the crowds have migrated from the old haunts—every sign of life now gone from Third Street and round about the Stock Exchange, where nobody now is ever in