We wrote a poem about one of them once, Tom Hartzell,
who used to take the 5:12 express out of Jersey City.
Philadelphia, incidentally, is the only large city where the Dime
Museum business still flourishes. For the first thing we see on
leaving the Terminal is that the old Bingham Hotel is now The
World's Museum, given over to Ursa the Bear Girl and similar
excitements. But where is the beautiful girl with slick dark hair
who used to be at the Reading terminal news-stand?
How much more we could tell you about travelling on the Reading! We
would like to tell you about the queer assortment of books we
brought back with us. (There were twelve men in the smoker, coming
home.) We could tell how we tried to buy, without being observed, a
magazine which we will call _Foamy Fiction_, in order to see what
the new editor (a friend of ours) is printing. Also, we always buy a
volume of Gissing when we go to Philly, and this time we found "In
the Year of Jubilee" in the shop of Jerry Cullen, the delightful
bookseller who used to be so redheaded, but is getting over it now
in the most logical way. We could tell you about the lovely old
whitewashed stone farmhouses (with barns painted red on behalf of
Schenk's Mandrake Pills) and about the famous curve near Roelofs, so
called because the soup rolls off the table in the dining car when
they take the curve at full speed; and about Bound Brook, which has
a prodigious dump of tin cans that catches the setting sunlight----
It makes us sad to think that a hundred years hence people will be
travelling along that road and never know how much we loved it.
Pages:
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87