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OUR PHILADELPHIA

who got in or out helping to rub the freshness from my best evening gown, which would have been my fate in the old days.

And the crowds were not managed in the old way—the ordinary policeman used to do his best to keep out of sight, and here was the mounted policeman prancing about everywhere, and, at congested corners, adding to the confusion by filling up what little space the overgrown trolleys left in the narrow streets. I am not sure that it was not this mounted policeman—unless it was the coloured policemen and the coloured postmen—I had most difficulty in getting accustomed to. I came upon him every day, or almost every hour, with something of a new shock. Can this be really I, I would say to myself when I saw him in his splendour, can this be really Philadelphia?


IV

The difference I deplored was not confined to the crowds I did not know; it was no less marked in the people I did know, in their standards and outlook, in the way they lived. It is hard to say what struck me most, though nothing more obviously the first few days than that flight to the suburbs which had left such visible proofs as those signs "For Rent" and "For Sale" everywhere in the streets where I was most at home—a flight necessitated perhaps by the inroads of the alien, but only made possible by the annihilation of space due to the motor-car.

Once, when a Philadelphian set up a carriage, it was