ness of his town to the sun, not a Philadelphian on the spot, sweltering through its midsummer heat, has ever yet shared his gratitude. And I learnt how beautiful Philadelphia is as it grows mild again after winter has done its worst, or as it cools off in the friendlier autumn sun. And not to know these facts is not to know Philadelphia.
IV
In the Convent regulation of daily life lay the unconquerable difference. Philadelphia has its laws and traditions that guide the Philadelphian through every hour and duty of the day, and the Philadelphian, who from the cradle does not obey these traditions and laws, can never be quite as other Philadelphians. The Sacred Heart is a French order, and the nuns imported their laws and traditions from France, qualified, modified, perhaps, on the way, but still with an unmistakable foreign flavour and tendency that could not pass unquestioned in a town where the first article of faith is that everybody should do precisely what everybody else does. I remember when the Rhodes scholars were first sent from America to Oxford a friend of mine professed serious concern for the future of the University should they introduce buckwheat cakes on Oxford breakfast tables. And, really, he was not as funny as he thought. A man is a good deal what his food makes him. The macaroni-fed Italian is not as the sausage-and-sauerkraut-fed German, nor the Hindu who thrives on rice as the Irishman bred upon
