Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/541

Rh could they follow the movements of the enemy that lost for them the Battle of Germantown? And Wyck—white, cloistered, vine-laden, with fragrant garden and shade-giving trees! And the Johnson House, and the Wistar House, and the Morris House. And how many other old houses beyond Germantown! Solitude, and Laurel Hill, and Arnold's Mansion in the Park, Bartram's at Gray's Ferry.

I thought first I would not put Bartram's to the test, no matter how bravely the others came out of it—Bartram's, associated with the romance of work and the dawn of my new life. But how glad I am that I thought twice and went back to it! For I found it beautiful as ever, though I could reach it by trolley, and though it was unrecognizably spick and span in the little orchard, and under the labelled trees, and by the old house and the old stables, and in the garden where gardeners were at work among the red roses. But the disorder has not been quite done away with in the wilderness below the garden, and there was the bench by the river, and there the outlook up and down—had so many chimneys belched forth smoke and had the smoke been as black on the opposite bank, up the river, in the old days? Certainly there had not been so many ghosts—not one of those that now looked at me with reproachful eyes, asking me what I had done with the years, for which such ambitious plans had been made on that very spot ages and ages ago?