" Mr. Newton took me everywhere, even to the little
seventeenth-century Swedish church, which architecturally may be
described as the antipodes of Philadelphia's newer glory, the Curtis
Building, where editors are lodged like kings and can be attained to (if
at all) only through marble halls. We went to St. Peter's, where,
suddenly awaking during the sermon, one would think oneself to be in a
London city church, and to the Historical Museum, where I found among
the Quaker records many of my own ancestors and was bewildered amid such
a profusion of relics of Penn, Washington and Franklin. In the old
library were more traces of Franklin, including his famous electrical
appliance, again testifying to the white flame with which American hero-
worship can burn; and we found the sagacious Benjamin once more at the
Franklin Inn Club, where the simplicity of the eighteenth century
mingles with the humour and culture of the twentieth. We then drove
through several miles of Fairmount Park, stopping for a few minutes in
the hope of finding the late J. G. Johnson's Vermeer in the gallery
there; but for the moment it was in hiding, the walls being devoted to
his Italian pictures.
Finally we drew up at the gates of that strange and imposing Corinthian
temple which might have been dislodged from its original site and hurled
to Philadelphia by the first Quaker, Poseidon--the Girard College.
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