WILLOW GROVE
Speaking as a foreigner—every man is a foreigner in Philadelphia until he has lived here for three generations—I should say that no place is more typical of the Philadelphia capacity for enjoying itself in a thoroughly genteel and innocent way than Willow Grove. Cynics have ascribed the placid conduct of Willow Grove's merrymakers to the fact that eighty minutes or so standing up in a crowded trolley blunt human capacity for abandonment and furious mirth. Physiologists say that the unprecedented quantity of root beer and hard-boiled eggs consumed at the Grove account for the staid bearing of the celebrants. Be that how it may, Willow Grove has the genial and placid flavor of a French amusement park. Contrary to popular theory the French, like ourselves, are comely behaved on an outing. People to whom enjoyment is a habit do not turn their picnics into an orgy.
It takes practically as long to get to Willow Grove as it does to Atlantic City, but the sunburn does not keep one awake all night and asleep at the office the next day. That rolling watershed where the creeks run alternately into the Delaware and the Schuylkill is well hilled, watered and aired. There is no surf, it is true; but a superb panorama of the white combers of the sky, the clouds. And fields of plumed and tasseled corn, flickering in
