lse. It is "our" home. The home
is a tryst--the place where we retire and shut the world out. Lovers make
a home, just as birds make a nest, and unless a man knows the spell of
the divine passion I hardly see how he can have a home at all. He only
rents a room.

Camden is separated from the city of Philadelphia by the Delaware River.
Camden lies low and flat--a great, sandy, monotonous waste of straggling
buildings. Here and there are straight rows of cheap houses, evidently
erected by staid, broad-brimmed speculators from across the river, with
eyes on the main chance. But they reckoned ill, for the town did not
boom. Some of these houses have marble steps and white, barn-like
shutters, that might withstand a siege. When a funeral takes place in one
of these houses, the shutters are tied with strips of mournful, black
alpaca for a year and a day. Engineers, dockmen, express-drivers and
mechanics largely make up the citizens of Camden. Of course, Camden has
its smug corner where prosperous merchants most do congregate: where they
play croquet in the front yards, and have window-boxes, and a piano and
veranda-chairs and terra-cotta statuary; but for the most part the houses
of Camden are rented, and rented cheap.

Many of the domiciles are frame and have the happy tumbledown look of the
back streets in Charleston or Richmond--those streets where the white
trash merges off into prosperous colored aristocracy. Old hats do duty in
keeping out the fresh air where Providence has interfered and broken out
a pane; blinds hang by a single hinge; bricks on the chimney-tops
threaten the passersby; stringers and posts mark the place where proud
picket fences once stood--the pickets having gone for kindling long ago.
In the warm, Summer evenings, men in shirt-sleeves sit on the front steps
and stolidly smoke, while children pile up sand in the streets and play
in the gutters.

Parallel with Mickle Street, a block away, are railway-tracks. There
noisy switch-engines that never keep Sabbath, puff back and forth, day
and night, sending showers of soot and smoke when the wind is right (and
it usually is) straight over Number 328, where, according to John
Addington Symonds and William Michael Rossetti, lived the mightiest seer
of the century--the man whom they rank with Socrates, Epictetus, Saint
Paul, Michelangelo and Dante.

It was in August of Eighteen Hundred Eighty-three that I first walked up
that little street--a hot, sultry S