only as it should be, I thought when, reading the letters of John Adams, I came upon his description of the road to Kensington and beyond, "straight as the streets of Philadelphia, on each side . . . beautiful rows of trees, button-woods, oaks, walnuts, cherries, and willows." In our time, scarcely a road out of Philadelphia is without the same beautiful rows, if not the same variety in the trees, and while much of the open country it ran through in John Adams' day has been built up with town and suburban houses, the trees still line it on each side. Everybody knows the beauty of the leafy roads of the Main Line, quite a correct thing to know, the Main Line being the refuge of the Philadelphian pushed out of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine" by business and the Russian Jew combined. But the Main Line has not the monopoly of suburban beauty, though it may of suburban fashion. The Main Street in Germantown, with its peaceful old grey stone houses and great overshadowing trees, has no rival at home or abroad, and I have seen as commonplace a street as Walnut in West Philadelphia, its uninteresting houses screened behind the two long lines of trees, become in the golden light of a summer afternoon as stately an avenue as any at Versailles or St. Germain.
Not only the trees, but the past went with us to Germantown. Has any other American suburb so many old houses to boast? Stenton, the Chew House, the Johnson House, the Morris House, the Wistar House, Wyck—are there any other Colonial houses with nobler interiors,
