Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/53

Rh if the women could keep books. Still their principal office is in the home, as the instructors of youth. I saw lately a young girl of about twenty give a lesson in elocution to a class of young men, some of whom were above twenty. Her talent was remarkable in this branch of art, and the youths obeyed her directions like good children. They had voluntarily formed this class that they might be taught by her.

I shall now shortly leave this friendly City of the Friends, to go to Washington, where Congress is now sitting, and where a furious war is going forward about California and slavery. You know already from description that Philadelphia is remarkable for its regularity and order. It has in this respect the character of the Quakers, and is a quiet city in comparison with New York, has no palaces or remarkable buildings, but is everywhere well built, has beautiful broad streets planted with trees, and behind these, broad causeways and many magnificent private houses, with marble steps and doorways, and particularly so in the fashionable streets. In each of the great quarters there is a large, green market, planted with trees like a park, where it is delightful to walk or sit.

Behind this exterior of order, cleanliness, and regularity, there is, I understand, a considerable proportion of irregularity; and quarrels and affrays not unfrequently take place between the less civilised portion of the population, in particular between the lower class of workpeople and the free negroes, who are mostly fugitive slaves, and often very disorderly.

A portion of the male youth in the Quaker city, seem like certain fermenting drinks in bottles which make the cork fly out of the bottle when it becomes too small for them; I tell that which has been told to me; and the thing seems natural enough. If my spirit had been bottled up in the strict Quaker formula, I should have