Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/538

518 more observant eyes? How foolish the question, how unnecessary the doubt! More beautiful all of them, because my eyes were better trained to appreciate their architectural merit; more peaceful all of them, with the feeling of peace so intense I wondered whether it came of the Colonial architecture or of associations with it.

Germantown may be built up beyond recognition, its Lanes, many of them, turned into Streets for no reason the average man can see, but some of the big old estates, are still green and untouched as if miles away, and the old houses are more guarded than ever from change. One by one, I returned to them:—Stenton restored, but as yet so judicially that Logan would to-day feel at home in its halls and rooms, on its stairway, outside by the dovecote and the wistaria-covered walls,—at home in the garden full of tulips and daisies, and old familiar Philadelphia roses and Johnny-jump-ups, enclosed by hedges, every care taken to plant in it afresh just the blossoms he loved. But what would he have said to the factories opposite? To the rows of little two-story houses creeping nearer and nearer? And the Chew House—could the veterans of the Revolution return to it, as the veterans of the Civil War return every year to Gettysburg, how well they would know their way in the garden, how well, in the wide-pillared hall with the old portraits on the white wall, and in the rooms with their Eighteenth-Century panelling and cornices and fire-places, and in the broad hall upstairs