GOING TO PHILADELPHIA


I

Every intelligent New Yorker should be compelled, once in so often,
to run over to Philadelphia and spend a few days quietly and
observantly prowling.

Any lover of America is poor indeed unless he has savoured and
meditated the delicious contrast of these two cities, separated by
so few miles and yet by a whole world of philosophy and metaphysics.
But he is a mere tyro of the two who has only made the voyage by the
P.R.R. The correct way to go is by the Reading, which makes none of
those annoying intermediate stops at Newark, Trenton, and so on,
none of that long detour through West Philadelphia, starts you off
with a ferry ride and a background of imperial campaniles and
lilac-hazed cliffs and summits in the superb morning light. And the
Reading route, also, takes you through a green Shakespearean land of
beauty, oddly different from the flat scrubby plains traversed by
the Pennsy. Consider, if you will, the hills of the idyllic
Huntington Valley as you near Philadelphia; or the little white town
of Hopewell, N.J., with its pointing church spire. We have often
been struck by the fact that the foreign traveller between New York
and Washington on the P.R.R. must think America the most flat,
dreary, and uninteresting countryside in the world. Whereas if he
would go from Jersey City by the joint Reading-Central New