er Kase, but the good grandmother who dispensed with such quiet,
simple grace these and more familiar delicacies was literally ignorant
of Baked Beans, and asked if it was the Lima bean which was employed in
that marvellous dish of animalized leguminous 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
w