Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/138

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122
THE PAOLI LOCAL

train waits for her. If the director general of railroads were a bachelor perhaps he would insert a new footnote in his time-tables: "Sk," will not wait for ladies in hobble skirts. The signal gives its blithe little double chirp and we are off again.

Toward Merion we skirt a brightly sliding little brook under willow trees, with glimpses of daintily supervised wilderness. It is all so trimly artificed that one is surprised to see that the rubbery stalks of the dandelion have evaded the lawn-mower just as they do in less carefully razored suburbs. Honeysuckles sprawl along the embankments, privet hedges bound neat gardens. There is a new station at Merion. In old bucolic days the Main Line station masters lived and kept house in the depots, and if one had to wait for a train one could make friends with the station master's little girl and pet cat. But all those little girls are grown up now and are Bryn Mawr alumnæ.

At Narberth one sees clustered roofs embowered in trees, in the hollow below the railway, and a snatch of plowed land. Now one is really in the country. Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford—so it runs, like a chapter of begats. At Wynnewood, if you are sitting on the right, you see an alluring vista of a long alley through sun-speckled greenery. The baggage agent has nailed an old chair seat to a little wooden box which provides a meditating throne for such small leisure as a Main Line baggage agent gets. Ardmore—strange to think that it used to call itself Athens-