Page:Historic towns of the middle states (IA historictownsofm02powe).pdf/354

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disregard of a less wise past, can rob us of our appointed place in the advancing files of time.

Franklin's busy march through these streets bridged two great periods. His half-century before the Revolution, fifty-two years from his landing to Lexington, was a season of prodigious material expansion whose signs are all about the city. Then were built those pleasant places in the Park, and homes like that of John Penn's in the Zoölogical Garden, ending in the privateer's house which was later to be Arnold's headquarters, to-day Mt. Pleasant. John Bartram built his stone house, set up its pillars and laid out his Botanical Garden, both happily standing and city property, his cypress alone dead,—slow failing through the years in which one lover has each spring sought it,—but much of his sylvan wealth remains, still a record of his science and of the economic conditions which gave him means for his long and costly trips. For when there were neither roads nor railroads the "distance-rent" of farm land near a city was enormous. The farm hard by swept in all the profit of days of teaming of which the railroad has long since robbed it and diffused it over a wide area, levelling up, as is our American way. The