from their offices to their houses on the river. Philadelphians did not wait for the Main Line to be invented to settle in the suburbs. They have always had a fancy for the near country ever since Penn lived in state at Pennsbury, and Logan at Stenton; ever since Bartram planted his garden on the banks of the Schuylkill, and Arnold brought Peggy Shippen as his bride to Mount Pleasant; ever since all the Colonial country houses we are so proud of were built. I have the haziest memory of the places where the boat stopped between Philadelphia and Torresdale and of the people who got out there. But I cannot help remembering Torresdale for it was as prominent a stopping-place in my journey through youth as it is in the journey up the Delaware. The Convent was my home for years, and I had many friends in the houses down by the riverside and scattered over the near country. Their names are among the most familiar in my youthfid recollections: the Macalisters, the Grants—one of my brothers named after the father—the Hopkins—another of my brothers marrying in the family—the Fishers, Keatings, Steadmans, Kings, Bories, Whelans. It was not often I could go or come without meeting somebody I knew on board. I am a cockney myself, I love the town, but I can understand that Philadelphians whose homes were in the country, especially if that country lay along the shores of the Delaware, liked to get back early enough to profit by it; that, busy and full of affairs as they might be, they not only liked but managed to, shows how far hustling
