I forget in what year the railroad (with locomotives) was first built from Philadelphia to Columbia, a distance of sixty miles. I believe it was the first real road of the kind in America. On the day when the first train ran, the City Council and certain honoured guests made the journey, and among them was my father, who took me with him. There were only a few miles of the road then completed. It was a stupendous marvel to me, and all this being drawn by steam, and by a great terrible iron monster of a machine. And there was still in all souls a certain unearthly awe of the recently invented and as yet rather rare steamboats. I can (strangely enough) still recall this feeling by a mental effort--this meeting the Horror for the first time! My father remembered, and had been in the first steamboat which was a success on the Delaware. I saw its wreck in after years at Hoboken. The earlier boat made by John Fitch is still preserved in Bordentown. I can remember that when gas was introduced to light the city, it was done under a fearful opposition. All the principal people signed a petition against it. I saw the paper. It would burst and kill myriads; it was poisonous; and, finally, it would ruin the oil trade. However, we got it at last. Somebody had invented hand gas-lamps; they were sold in the Arcade; and as one of these had burst, it was naturally supposed that the gasworks would do the same. The characteristics of old Philadelphia were in those days so marked, and are, withal, so sweet to the memory, that I cannot help lingering on them. As Washington Irving says of the Golden Age of Wouter van Twiller, "Happy days when the harvest moon was twice as large as now, when the shad were all salmon, and peace was in the land." Trees grew abundantly in rows in almost every street--one before every house. I had two before mine till 1892, when the Street Commissioners heartlessly ordained that one must be cut down and removed, and charged me ten dollars for doing it. It is needless to say that since Street Commissioners have found this so profitable, trees have disappeared with sad rapidity. Then at twilight the _pea-ak_ of the night-hawk could be heard all over Arasapha, which is the Indian name for the place where our city stands; there were in Coaquannoc, or the Schuylkill, abundant gold fish and perch, of which I angled divers. Yes, there was, and still is, a Fisher Club, which claims to be the oldest gentleman's club in Anglo-Saxony, and which has for two centuries brewed for itself a "fish-house punch" as delicious as that of London civic banquets. There be no fish in the fair river now; they have all vanished before the combined forces of petroleum and the offal of factories and mines, but the Fish-House Club still has its merry banquets in its ancient home; for, as the French say, "_Chacun peche a sa maniere_." In graveyards lone or over gardens green glittered of summer