brook along a valley where a
buggy was crawling down a lane among willow trees in a wealth of
sunlight. And the dandelions are all out in those parts. Yes, it was
a lovely morning. We found ourself pierced by the kind of mysterious
placid melancholy that we only enjoy to the full in a Reading
smoker, when, for some unknown reason, hymn tunes come humming into
our head and we are alarmed to notice ourself falling in love with
humanity as a whole.

We could write a whole newspaper page about travelling to Philly on
the Reading. Consider those little back gardens near Wayne Junction,
how delightfully clean, neat, domestic, demure. Compare entering New
York toward the Grand Central, down that narrow frowning alleyway of
apartment house backs, with imprisoned children leaning from barred
windows. But as you spin toward Wayne Junction you see acres and
acres of trim little houses, each with a bright patch of turf. Here
is a woman in a blue dress and white cap, busily belabouring a rug
on the grass. The bank of the cutting by Wayne Junction is thick
with a tangle of rosebushes which will presently be in blossom; we
know them well. Spring Garden Street: if you know where to look you
can catch a blink of Edgar Allan Poe's little house. Through a
jumble of queer old brick chimneys and dormers, and here we are at
the Reading Terminal, with its familiar bitter smell of coal gas.

Of course we stop to have a look at the engine, one of those
splendid Reading locos with the three great driving wheels. Splendid
things, the big Reading locos; when they halt they pant so
cheerfully and noisily, like huge dogs, much louder than any other
engines. We always expect to see an enormous red tongue running in
and out over the cowcatcher. Vast thick pants, as the poet said in
"Khubla Khan." We can't remember if he wore them, or breathed them,
but there it is in the poem; look it up. Reading engineers, too,
always give us a sense of security. They have gray hair, cropped
very close. They have a benign look, rather like Walt Whitman if he
were shaved. We wrote a poem about one of them once, Tom Hartzell,
who used to take the 5:12 express out of Jersey City.

Philadelphia, incidentally, is the only large city where the Dime
Museum business still flourishes. For the first thing we see on
leaving the Terminal is that the old Bingham Hotel is now The
World's Museum, given over to Ursa the Bear Girl and similar
excitements. But where is the beauti