he will find many a little court or cul-de-sac where hardly a stone or a window has changed for a hundred years. One does not need to travel abroad to find red walls with all the mellow stain that one associates with Tudor manors. There is an old wagon yard on the north side of Callowhill, near Fifth, where an artist might trance himself with the plain lines of old houses, the clear sunlight falling athwart the flattened archway and the decrepit vehicles with their weary wheels.
It is a perpetual delight to wander in such byways, speculating on the beauty of those rows of houses in days gone by. What a poetry there is in the names of our streets—Nectarine, Buttonwood, Appletree, Darien, Orianna! Even the pawnbrokers are romantics. There is a three-ball establishment on Ninth street where the uncle keeps a great rookery of pigeons in his back yard. They coo seductively to embarrassed wanderers. I can hardly keep my watch in my pocket when I hear their soft suggestions. What a city of sober dignity and clean comfort Philadelphia must have been in the forties—say when Mr. and Mrs. James Russell Lowell came to the northeast corner of Fourth and Arch on their honeymoon, in 1845. "My cheeks are grown so preposterously red," wrote Lowell, "that I look as if I had rubbed them against all the brick walls in the city."
As I turned off Callowhill street, at the oblique junction of York avenue, leaving behind the castellated turrets of a huge brewery, I came upon
