Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/132

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116
ON THE WAY TO BALTIMORE

cleaned out his stock every time. They had all evidently just bought new and very narrow-toed cordovan shoes in New York; there was hardly one who did not have his footgear off to nurse his tortured members. The negro soldier has a genius for injudicious purchase. We saw some of them the other day in a "pawn-brokers' outlet" on Market street laying down their fives and tens for the most preposterous gold watches, terrible embossed and flashy engines of inaccuracy, with chains like brass hawsers, obviously about as reliable as a sundial at night.

It was a gray and green day, quite cool—for it was still early forenoon—and we looked out on vanishing woodlands and bosky valleys with a delight too eager to express. Why (we thought) should any sane being waste his energy bedeviling the Senate when all a lifetime spent in attempting to describe the beauty of earth—surely an innocent ambition—would be insufficient? Statesmen, we thought, are but children of a smaller growth; and with a superbly evacuated mind we gazed upon the meadows and dancing streams near Leslie, just over the Maryland border. There were glimpses of that most alluring vista known to man: a strip of woodland thin enough to let through a twinkle of light from the other side. What a mystery there is about the edge of a wood, as you push through and wonder just what you may be coming to. In that corner of Cecil county there are many Forest of Arden glimpses, where