Philadelphia until I was actually taken to the Bala and Huntington Valley Clubs, and until I ate their admirable dinners—at Bala, with the crowds and in the light and to the music that would have made me feel I was in a London restaurant, had it not been for the inevitable cocktail—and until I saw with my own eyes the luxurious houses so comfortably and correctly appointed—even to brass bedroom candlesticks on a table in the second-story hall, just as in an old-fashioned English inn, though as far as I could make out there was excellent electric light everywhere—until I also saw with my own eyes the trim lawns, and gardens, and the wide view over the delicate American landscape, and women in the tennis courts, and the men bringing out their ponies for polo, and the players dotted over the golf course.
And whether the Country Clubs have created the sport or the sport has created the Country Clubs, I cannot say, but in the increased attention to sport I was confronted with another difference as startling. Philadelphia, I know, has always been given to sport. It hunted and raced and fished before time and conscience allowed most of the other Colonists in the North the chance to amuse themselves out-of-doors, or indoors either, poor things! And the old sports, barring the least civilized like bull-baiting and cock-fighting, were kept up, and are kept up, and had their Clubhouses, which, in some cases, have survived. But, in my time, these sports had been limited to the few who had country houses in the right dis-
