times we walked for no more practical purpose than pleasure in Philadelphia. And we could walk for days, we could walk for miles, and exhaust neither the pleasure nor the town that I once fancied I knew by heart if I walked from Market to Pine and from the Delaware to the Schuylkill.
I remember as a remarkable incident my discovery of the suburbs. With the prejudice borrowed from my Father, I had cultivated for all suburbs something of the large sweeping contempt which, in the Eighteen-Nineties, Henley and the National Observer, carrying on the tradition of Thackeray, made it the fashion to profess for the suburbs of London. West Philadelphia and Germantown were no less terms of opprobrium in my mouth than Clapham and Brixton in Henley's. But Henley, though it was a mistake to insist upon Clapham with its beautiful Common and old houses and dignified air, was expressing his splendid scorn of the second-rate, the provincial, in art and in letters. I was only expressing, parrot-like, a pose that did not belong to me, but to my Father in whose outlook upon life and things there was a whimsical touch, and who carried off his prejudices with humour.
I was the more foolish in this because few towns, if any, have lovelier suburbs than Philadelphia. Their loveliness is another part of our inheritance from William Penn who set no limits to his dream of a green country town, and from the old Friends who, in deference to his desire, lined not only their streets but their roads with trees. This is
