e time that Grant Robertson got off one of his
annual gags to the effect that, according to the principle of strict
legitimacy, there were in Europe several hundred (we forget the figure)
people with a greater right to the British throne than the family at
present occupying it. The roomful of students roared with genial mirth,
and the unhappy prince blushed in a way that young girls used to in the
good old days of three-piece bathing suits.

A CITY NOTEBOOK

(_Philadelphia_)

It would be hard to find a more lovely spot in the flush of a summer
sunset than Wister Woods. Old residents of the neighbourhood say that
the trees are not what they were fifteen and twenty years ago; the
chestnuts have died off; even some of the tall tulip-poplars are a
little bald at the top, and one was recently felled by a gale. But still
that quiet plateau stands in a serene hush, flooded with rich orange
glow on a warm evening. The hollyhocks in the back gardens of Rubicam
Street are scarlet and Swiss-cheese-coloured and black; and looking
across the railroad ravine one sees crypts and aisles of green as though
in the heart of some cathedral of the great woods.

Belfield Avenue, which bends through the valley in a curve of warm thick
yellow dust, will some day be boulevarded into a spick-and-span highway
for motors. But now it lies little trafficked, and one might prefer to
have it so, for in the stillness of the evening the birds are eloquent.
The thrushes of Wister Woods, which have been immortalized by T. A. Daly
in perhaps the loveliest poem ever written in Philadelphia, flute and
whistle their tantalizing note, while the song sparrow echoes them with
his confident, challenging call. Down behind the dusty sumac shrubbery
lies the little blue-green cottage said to have been used by Benjamin
West as a studio. In a meadow beside the road two cows were grazing in
the blue shadow of overhanging woodland.

[Illustration]

Over the road leans a flat outcrop of stone, known locally as "The Bum's
Rock." An antique philosopher of those parts assured the wayfarer that
it is named for a romantic vagabond who perished there by the explosion
of a can of Bohemian goulash which he was heating over a small fire of
sticks; but one doubts the tale. Our own conjecture is that it is named
for Jacob Boehm, the oldtime brewer of Germantown, who predicted in his
chronicles that the world would come to an end in July, 1919. From his
point of view