at neutral centre of the Continent, where the fiery
enthusiasms of the South and the keen fanaticisms of the North meet at
their outer limits, and result in a compound that turns neither litmus
red nor turmeric brown. It lives largely on its traditions, of which,
leaving out Franklin and Independence Hall, the most imposing must
be considered its famous water-works. In my younger days I visited
Fairmount, and it was with a pious reverence that I renewed my
pilgrimage to that perennial fountain. Its watery ventricles were
throbbing with the same systole and diastole as when, the blood of
twenty years bounding in my own heart, I looked upon their giant
mechanism. But in the place of "Pratt's Garden" was an open park, and
the old house where Robert Morris held his court in a former generation
was changing to a public restaurant. A suspension-bridge cobwebbed
itself across the Schuylkill where that audacious arch used to leap the
river at a single bound,--an arch of greater span, as they loved to tell
us, than was ever before constructed. The Upper Ferry Bridge was to the
Schuylkill what the Colossus was to the harbor of Rhodes. It had an air
of dash about it which went far towards redeeming the dead level of
respectable average which flattens the physiognomy of the rectangular
city. Philadelphia will never be herself again until another Robert
Mills and another Lewis Wernwag have shaped her a new palladium. She
must leap the Schuylkill again, or old men will sadly shake their heads,
like the Jews at the sight of the second temple, remembering the glories
of that which it replaced.

There are times when Ethiopian minstrelsy can amuse, if it does not
charm, a weary soul,--and such a vacant hour there was on this same
Friday evening. The "opera-house" was spacious and admirably ventilated.
As I was listening to the merriment of the sooty buffoons, I happened to
cast my eyes up to the ceiling, and through an open semicircular window
a bright solitary star looked me calmly in the eyes. It was a strange
intrusion of the vast eternities beckoning from the infinite spaces.
I called the attention of one of my neighbors to it, but "Bones" was
irresistibly droll, and Areturus, or Aldebaran, or whatever the
blazing luminary may have been, with all his revolving worlds, sailed
uncared-for down the firmament.

On Saturday morning we took up our line of march for New York. Mr.
Felton, President of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Balti