Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/530

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OUR PHILADELPHIA

iced Cakes of my childhood; to the frequent street parade, glorified as it was beyond recognition by the new presence of the mounted police; to the City Troop, gorgeous and splendid as of old, and as of old turning out to decorate every public ceremony; to the nice old-fashioned "ma'am," unheard in England except, I believe, at court; to all the town, including my hotel, getting ready for the summer with matting and gauze and grey Holland. Old associations, old emotions, were stirred by the fragrance of the Cinnamon Bun that is never so fragrant out of Philadelphia, and one of the cruelest disappointments of my return was not to be able to devour it with the untrammelled appetite of youth when it was offered me in an interval between the Soft-Shell Crab and Ice-cream of a Philadelphia lunch and the Planked Shad and Broiled Chicken of a Philadelphia dinner. The row of heads at the Philadelphia Club windows, so embarrassing to me in my youth, borrowed beauty from association. I was thrilled by the decanter of Sherry or Madeira on the dinner table, where I had not seen it served in solitary grandeur since I had last dined in Philadelphia. The old rough kindliness of the people—when they were not aliens—in the streets, in the stores, in the trolleys, went to my heart. And in larger ways, too, the place filled me with pride for its constancy: for the steady development of all that made it great from the beginning—its schools, its charities, its hospitals, its libraries, its galleries; above all, for retaining what it could of its dignified reticence in keeping its private affairs