those annoying intermediate stops at Newark, Trenton, and so on,
none of that long detour through West Philadelphia, starts you off
with a ferry ride and a background of imperial campaniles and
lilac-hazed cliffs and summits in the superb morning light. And the
Reading route, also, takes you through a green Shakespearean land of
beauty, oddly different from the flat scrubby plains traversed by
the Pennsy. Consider, if you will, the hills of the idyllic
Huntington Valley as you near Philadelphia; or the little white town
of Hopewell, N.J., with its pointing church spire. We have often
been struck by the fact that the foreign traveller between New York
and Washington on the P.R.R. must think America the most flat,
dreary, and uninteresting countryside in the world. Whereas if he
would go from Jersey City by the joint Reading-Central New
Jersey-B.&O. route, how different he would find it. No, we are not
a Reading stockholder.

We went over to Philly, after having been unfaithful to her for too
many months. Now we have had from time to time, most menacing
letters from indignant clients, protesting that we have been
unfaithful to all the tenets and duties of a Manhattan journalist
because we have with indecent candour confessed an affection for
both Brooklyn and Philadelphia. We lay our cards on the table. We
can't help it. Philadelphia was the first large city we ever knew,
and how she speaks to us! And there's a queer thing about
Philadelphia, hardly believable to the New Yorker who has never
conned her with an understanding eye. You emerge from the Reading
Terminal (or, if you will, from Broad Street Station) with just a
little superbness of mood, just a tinge of worldly disdain, as
feeling yourself fresh from the grandeur of Manhattan and showing
perhaps (you fondly dream) some pride of metropolitan bearing. Very
well. Within half an hour you will be apologizing for New York. In
their quiet, serene, contented way those happy Philadelphians will
be making you a little shame-faced of the bustling madness of our
heaven-touching Babel. Of course, your secret adoration of
Manhattan, the greatest wild poem ever begotten by the heart of man,
is not readily transmissible. You will stammer something of what it
means to climb upward from the subway on a spring morning and see
that golden figure over Fulton Street spreading its shining wings
above the new day. And they will smile gently, that knowing, amiable
Philadelphia smile