Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/208

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192
DARBY CREEK

coats, you will be glad to resume your acquaintance with a bowl of steaming bivalves, swimming in milk, with little clots of yellow butter twirling on the surface of the broth. An oyster stew, a glass of light beer and a corncob pipe will keep your blue eyes blue to any weather, as a young poet of our acquaintance puts it.


DARBY CREEK

The other day we had an adventure that gave us great joy, and, like all great adventures, it was wholly unexpected.

We went out to spend an evening with a certain Caliph who lives at Daylesford—how many Main Line commuters, by the way, know that it is named for Daylesford in Gloucestershire, the home of Warren Hastings?—and after supper the Caliph took us for a stroll round the twilight. In a green hollow below the house, only a few paragraphs away from the room where this Caliph sits and writes essays (he is the only author in Philadelphia who has never received a rejection slip), he showed us a delicious pool, fed by several springs and lying under great willows. From this pool tinkled a modest brook, splashing over a dam and winding away down an alluring valley. A white road ran beside it, through agreeable thickets and shrubbery, starting off with a twist that suggested all manner of pleasant surprises for the wayfarer. It