. Our Philadelphia. wild, the thicket below was a wilderness. It is rightthat the place should be cared for. The city could notafford to lose the beauty one of its most famous citizens,who was one of the most famous botanists of his day,built up, and his family preserved, for it, and when Ireturned I welcomed the sign this new care gave of Phila-delphias interest, so long in the awakening. But Bar-trams was more beautiful in its neglect, as an old churchis more beautiful before the restorer pulls down the ivyand scrapes and polishes the stone. Many were the Sun-day afternoons J. and I spent th
. Our Philadelphia. wild, the thicket below was a wilderness. It is rightthat the place should be cared for. The city could notafford to lose the beauty one of its most famous citizens,who was one of the most famous botanists of his day,built up, and his family preserved, for it, and when Ireturned I welcomed the sign this new care gave of Phila-delphias interest, so long in the awakening. But Bar-trams was more beautiful in its neglect, as an old churchis more beautiful before the restorer pulls down the ivyand scrapes and polishes the stone. Many were the Sun-day afternoons J. and I spent there, and many the hourswe sat talking on the little bench at the lower end of thewilderness, where we looked out on the river and plannednew articles. When our walks together had become too strong ahabit to be broken and we decided to make the habit onefor life, we went back again and again to Bartrams andon that same little bench, looking out upon the river, weplanned work for the long years we hoped were ahead of. BARTRAMS THE ROMANCE OF WORK 303 us: perhaps seeing the future in the more glowing coloursfor the contrast with the past about us, the ashes of thelife and beauty from which our phoenix was to soar. Thework then planned carried and kept us thousands of milesaway, but it belongs none the less to the old scenes, whereit was inspired, and I like to think that, though the chancesof this work have made us exiles for years, the memory ofour life as we have lived it is inseparable from the memoryof Bartrams or, indeed, of Philadelphia which, throughwork, I learned to see and to love. CHAPTER XII: PHILADELPHIAAND LITERATURE ON the principle that nothing interests a man—or awoman—so much as shop, I had no soonerbegmi to write than I saw Philadelphia dividednot between the people who could and could not go to theAssembly and the Dancing Class, but between the peoplewho could and could not write; and, after I began to writefor illustration, between the people who could and
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