India houses which founded so many Philadelphia fortunes, but there were
also two or three of whom we knew little, and who went and came as they
liked.

It was a quiet lodging-house, where, because of being on the outskirts
and away from the fashion and stir of the better streets, chiefly those
came who could pay but little, and among them some of the luckless ones
who are always to be found in such groups--stranded folks, who for the
most part have lost hope in life. The quiet, pretty woman who kept the
house was of an ancient Quaker stock which had come over long ago in a
sombre Quaker Mayflower, and had by and by gone to decay, as the best of
families will. When I first saw her and some of her inmates it was on a
pleasant afternoon early in September, and I recall even now the simple
and quiet picture of the little back parlor where I sat down among them
as a new guest. I had been tranquilly greeted, and had slipped away into
a corner behind a table, whence I looked out with some curiosity on the
room and on the dwellers with whom my lot was to be cast for a long
while to come. I was a youth shy with the shyness of my age, but, having
had a share of rough, hardy life, ruddy of visage and full of that
intense desire to know things and people that springs up quickly in
those who have lived in country hamlets far from the stir and bustle of
city life.

The room I looked upon was strange, the people strange. On the floor was
India matting, red and white in little squares. A panel of painted white
wood-work ran around an octagonal chamber, into which stole silently the
evening twilight through open windows and across a long brick-walled
garden-space full of roses and Virginia creepers and odorless
wisterias. Between the windows sat a silent, somewhat stately female,
dressed in gray silk, with a plain frilled cap about the face, and with