ht, and I can well remember how our negro servants, when it had gone
out, were used early on winter mornings to borrow a shovelful of coals
from the cook of our next-door neighbour, and how it was handed over the
garden fence, the recipient standing on our pump handle and the donor on
hers.

I forget in what year the railroad (with locomotives) was first built
from Philadelphia to Columbia, a distance of sixty miles. I believe it
was the first real road of the kind in America. On the day when the
first train ran, the City Council and certain honoured guests made the
journey, and among them was my father, who took me with him. There were
only a few miles of the road then completed. It was a stupendous marvel
to me, and all this being drawn by steam, and by a great terrible iron
monster of a machine. And there was still in all souls a certain
unearthly awe of the recently invented and as yet rather rare steamboats.
I can (strangely enough) still recall this feeling by a mental
effort--this meeting the Horror for the first time! My father
remembered, and had been in the first steamboat which was a success on
the Delaware. I saw its wreck in after years at Hoboken. The earlier
boat made by John Fitch is still preserved in Bordentown.

I can remember that when gas was introduced to light the city, it was
done under a fearful opposition. All the principal people signed a
petition against it. I saw the paper. It would burst and kill myriads;
it was poisonous; and, finally, it would ruin the oil trade. However, we
got it at last. Somebody had invented hand gas-lamps; they were sold in
the Arcade; and as one of these had burst, it was naturally supposed that
the gasworks would do the same.

The characteristics of old Philadelphia were in those days so marked, and
are, withal, so sweet to the memory, that I cannot help lingering on
them. As Washington Irving says of the Golden Age of Wouter van Twiller,
"Happy days when the harvest moon was twice as large as now, when the
shad were all salmon, and peace was in the land." Trees grew abundantly
in rows in almost every street--one before every house. I had two before
mine till 1892, when the Street Commissioners heartlessly ordained that
one must be cut down and removed, and charged me ten dollars for doing
it. It is needless to say that since Street Commissioners have found
this so profitable, trees have disappeared with sad rapidity. Then at
twilight the _pea-a