BROAD STREET STATION
Broad street station is to me a place of extraordinary fascination. Among the cloudy memories of early childhood it stands solidly, a home of thunders and shouting, of gigantic engines with their fiery droppings of coal and sudden jets of steam. It was a place which in a delighted sense of adventure was closely mixed with fear. I remember being towed along, as a very small urchin, among throngs of hasty feet and past the prodigious glamour of those huge wheels and pistons. (Juvenile eyes are very close to the ground.) Then, arrived within, the ramping horses carved opposite the head of the stairs and the great map on the northern wall were a glorious excitement to my wondering gaze. Nowadays, when I ramble about the station its enchantment is enhanced by the recollection of those early adventures. And as most people, when passing through a station, are severely intent upon their own problems and little conscious of scrutiny, it is the best of places to study the great human show. Mr. Joseph Pennell, in a thrilling drawing, has given a perfect record of Broad street's lights and tones that linger in the eye—the hurdling network of girders, the pattering files of passengers, the upward eddies of smoke.
A sense of baffling excitement and motion keeps the mind alert as one wanders about the station. In the dim, dusky twilight of the trainshed this is
