he was not so far wrong.

Above Boehm's Rock, in a grassy level among the trees, a merry little
circle of young ladies was sitting round a picnic supper. The twilight
grew darker and fireflies began to twinkle. In the steep curve of the
Cinder and Bloodshot (between Fisher's and Wister stations) a cheerful
train rumbled, with its engine running backward just like a country
local. Its bright shaft of light wavered among the tall tree trunks. One
would not imagine that it was less than six miles to the City Hall.

* * * * *

A quarter to one A. M., and a hot, silent night. As one walks up
Chestnut Street a distant roaring is heard, which rapidly grows louder.
The sound has a note of terrifying menace. Then, careering down the
almost deserted highway, comes a huge water-tank, throbbing like an
airplane. A creamy sheet of water, shot out at high pressure, floods the
street on each side, dashing up on the pavements. A knot of belated
revellers in front of the Adelphia Hotel, standing in mid-street, to
discuss ways and means of getting home, skip nimbly to one side, the
ladies lifting up their dresses with shrill squeaks of alarm as the
water splashes round them. Pedestrians plodding quietly up the street
cower fearfully against the buildings, while a fine mist envelops them.

After the tank comes, more leisurely, a squad of brooms. The street is
dripping, every sewer opening clucks and gurgles with the falling water.
There is something unbelievably humorous in the way that roaring
Niagara of water dashes madly down the silent street. There is a note of
irony in it, too, for the depressed enthusiasts who have been sitting
all evening in a restaurant over lemonade and ginger ale. Perhaps the
chauffeur is a prohibitionist gone mad.

* * * * *

While eating half a dozen doughnuts in a Broad Street lunchroom at one
o'clock in the morning, we mused happily about our friends all tucked
away in bed, sound asleep. There is one in particular on whom we thought
with serene pleasure. It was charming to think of that delightful,
argumentative, contradictory, volatile person, his active mind stilled
in the admirable reticence of slumber. He, so endlessly speculatory, so
full of imaginative enthusiasms and riotous intuitions and troubled
zeals concerning humanity, lost in a beneficent swoon of
unconsciousness! We could not just say why, but we broke into chuckles
to think