uminous farina!

Charley was pleased with my comparing the face of the small Ethiop known
to his household as "Tines" to a huckleberry with features. He also
approved my parallel between a certain German blonde young maiden whom we
passed in the street and the "Morris White" peach. But he was so
good-humored at times, that, if one scratched a lucifer, he accepted it
as an illumination.

A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impression of the outside of
that great city, which has endeared itself so much of late to all the
country by its most noble and generous care of our soldiers. Measured by
its sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would stand at the head of our
economic civilization. It provides for the comforts and conveniences,
and many of the elegances of life, more satisfactorily than any American
city, perhaps than any other city anywhere. Many of its characteristics
are accounted for to some extent by its geographical position. It is the
great 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 which neither turns 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