. Our Philadelphia. Historical Society of Pennsylvania has gathered theold material together; our indispensable antiquary, JohnWatson, has gleaned the odds and ends left by the way;and no end of modern writers in Philadelphia have ran-sacked their stores of information: Dr. Weir Mitchellmaking novels out of them, Mr. Sydney Fisher and MissAgnes Repplier, history; Mr. Hampton Carson usingthem as the basis of further research; Miss Anne HoUings-worth Wharton resurrecting Colonial life and society andfashions from them, Mr. Eberlein and Mr. Lippincott, thegenealogy of Colonial houses; othe
. Our Philadelphia. Historical Society of Pennsylvania has gathered theold material together; our indispensable antiquary, JohnWatson, has gleaned the odds and ends left by the way;and no end of modern writers in Philadelphia have ran-sacked their stores of information: Dr. Weir Mitchellmaking novels out of them, Mr. Sydney Fisher and MissAgnes Repplier, history; Mr. Hampton Carson usingthem as the basis of further research; Miss Anne HoUings-worth Wharton resurrecting Colonial life and society andfashions from them, Mr. Eberlein and Mr. Lippincott, thegenealogy of Colonial houses; other patriotic citizens help-ing themselves in one way or another; until, among themall, they have filled a large library and prepared a suffi-ciently formidable task for the historian of Philadelphia ingenerations to come without my adding to his burden. Ill It is an amusing library, as Philadelphians may be-lieve now they are getting over the bad habit into whichthey had fallen of belittling their town, much in their. ?PORTICO ROW SPRUCE STREET AN EXPLANATION 9 towns fashion of belittling them. I am afraid it waspartly their fault if the rest of America fell into the samehabit. As I recall my old feelings and attitude, it seemsto me that in my day we must have been brought up tolook down upon Philadelphia. The town surely cut apoor figure in my school books, and the purplest patchesin Colonial history must have been there reserved forNew England or New York, Virginia or the Carolinas,for any and every colony rather than the Province ofPennsylvania, or I would not have left school betterposted in the legends of Powhatan and Pocahontas thanin the life of William Penn, and more edified by the burn-ing of witches and the tracking of Indians than by thestruggles of Friends to give every man the liberty to goto Heaven his own way. The amiable contempt in whichPhiladelphians held William Penn revealed itself in theirfree-and-easy way of speaking of him, if they spoke ofhim at all, as B
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