A SLICE OF SUNLIGHT
About a quarter to 9 in the morning, at this time of year, a slice of our pale primrose-colored March sunlight cuts the bleak air across the junction of Broad and Chestnut streets and falls like a shining knife blade upon the low dome of the Girard Trust Building. Among those towering cliffs of masonry it is hard to see just where this shaving of brightness slips through, burning in the gray-lilac shadows of that stone valley. But there it is, and it always sets me thinking.
Man has traveled far in his strange pilgrimage and solaced himself with many lean and brittle husks. It is curious to think how many of his ingenious inventions are merely makeshifts to render tolerable the hardships and limitations he has imposed upon himself in the name of "civilization." How often his greatest cunning is expended in devising some pathetic substitute for the joy that once was his by birthright! He shuts himself up in beetling gibraltars of concrete, and thinks with pride of the wires, fans and pipes that bring him light, air and warmth. And yet sunshine and sky and the glow of blazing faggots were once common to all! He talks to his friends by telephone, telegraph or machine-written letters instead of in the heart-easing face-to-face of more leisured times. He invents printing presses to do his thinking for him, reels of translucent celluloid
