Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/137

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THE PAOLI LOCAL
121

along that line. The railroad will run specially decorated trains and distribute souvenirs among commuters of more than forty years' standing. The campus of Haverford College will be the scene of a mass-meeting. There will be reminiscent addresses by those who recall when the tracks ran along Railroad avenue at Haverford and up through Preston. An express agent will be barbecued, and there will be dancing and song and passing of the mead cup until far into the night.

The first surprise the Paoli local gives one never fails to cause a mild wonder. Just after leaving West Philadelphia Station you see William Penn looming up away on the right. As you are convinced that you left him straight behind, and have not noticed any curve, the sensation is odd. At Fifty-second street rise the shallow green slopes of George's Hill, with its Total Abstinence fountain. Nearer the track are wide tracts of vacant ground where some small boys of the sort so delightfully limned by Fontaine Fox have scooped military dug-outs, roofed over with cast-off sheets of corrugated iron, very lifelike to see.

At Overbrook one gets one's first glimpse of those highly civilized suburbs. It is a gloriously sunny May afternoon. Three girls are sitting under a hedge at the top of the embankment reading a magazine. The little iron fences, so characteristic of the Main Line, make their appearance. A lady tubed in a tight skirt totters valiantly down the road toward the station, and the courteous