Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/60

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46
MAROONED IN PHILADELPHIA

engraved on the case. We have always admired these hugely, but never felt any overwhelming desire to own one. They are sold for $14.95, being worth $150.

Sometimes even the most domestic man is marooned in town for the evening. It is always, after the first pang of homesickness is over, an enlarging experience. Instead of the usual rush for train or trolley he loiters after leaving the office, strolling leisurely along the pavements and enjoying the clear blue chill of the dusk. Perhaps the pallid radiance of a barber's shop, with its white bowls of light, lures him in for a shave, and he meditates on the impossibility of avoiding the talcum powder that barbers conceal in the folds of a towel and suddenly clap on his razed face before they let him go. It avails not to tell a barber "No powder!" They put it on automatically. We know one man who thinks that heaven will be a place where one may lie back in a barber's chair and have endless hot towels applied to a fresh-shaved face. It is an attractive thought.

But the most delightful haunt of man, about 7 o'clock of a winter evening, is the popular lunch room. This admirable institution has been hymned often and eloquently, but it can never be sufficiently praised. To sit at one of those white-topped tables looking over the evening paper (and now that the big silver-plated sugar bowls have come back again there is once more something large enough on the table to prop the newspaper