Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/150

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134
TO LEAGUE ISLAND AND BACK

test. Then we turned upstream. It had been raining on and off all afternoon. From the Jersey shore came the delicious haunting smell of warm, wet pinewoods, of moist tree-trunks and the clean whiff of sandy soil and drenched clover fields.

Our Humorist visitors admitted that they had never realized that Philadelphia is a seaport. The brave array of shipping as we came up the river was an interesting sight. Among several large Dutch steamers lying in the stream below Kaighn's Point I noticed the Remscheid, which bore on her side in large white letters the inscription:


WAFFENSTILLSTAND ARMISTICE


Waffenstillstand is the German for armistice. This struck me as particularly significant. Probably the cautious Dutch owner of the Remscheid, sending his ship to sea soon after November 11, feared there might still be U-boats at large that had not learned of the truce and would not respect a neutral flag.

Among other ships we noticed the Edgemoor and Westfield of Seattle, the four-masted schooner Charles S. Stanford of Bangor, the Naimes of London, the Meiningen of Brest, the Perseveranza of Trieste, and Iskra of Dubrovnik (which W. M. explains to me is the Slavic name for Ragusa). Thus, in the names on the sterns along Philadelphia piers one reads echoes of the war. And most appealing of all the ships we passed was the little white Danish bark Valdivia, just such a craft as