Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/558

538 Philadelphia, I know of no other town as large that is as green. The notes I made in Philadelphia are full of my surprise that I should have forgotten how green and shady are its streets, how tender is this green in its first spring growth under the high luminous sky, how lovely the wistaria-draped walls in town and the dogwood in the suburbs. Walk or drive in whatever direction I chose, and at every crossing I looked up or down a long green vista, so that I understood the Philadelphia business man who described to me his daily walk from his Spruce Street house to the Reading Terminal as a lesson in botany. On the other side of the Schuylkill, in any of the suburbs, every street became a leafy avenue. There were evenings in that last June I spent in Philadelphia, when, the ugly houses bathed in golden light and the trees one long golden-green screen in front of them, I would not have exchanged Walnut or Spruce Street in West Philadelphia or many a Lane in Germantown, for any famous road or boulevard the world over. Really, the trees convert the whole town into an annex, an approach to that Park which is its chief green beauty and which, to me, was more than sufficient atonement for the corrupt government Philadelphia is said to have groaned under all the years Fairmount was growing in grace and beauty. And beyond the Park, beyond the suburbs, the leafy avenues run on for miles through as beautiful country as ever shut in a beautiful town.