But to our story. It was in Philadelphia the old machinist lived; he had been born and had grown old there; but there are only one or two days in his life you would care to hear about: August days, in the summer of '59, the culmination and end of all the years gone before for him. You know what a quiet place Philadelphia is? One might fancy that the first old Quaker, sitting down among its low, flattish hills, had left a spell of thoughtful reticence behind him. The hills never dare to rise into abrupt earnestness; the two broad, bright-faced rivers that hold it in lapse with a calm consciousness into the sleepy, oyster-bedded bay; even the accretion of human life there never has been able to utter itself in the myriad rebellious phases of a great city, but falls gravely into the drilled monotony of its streets. Brick and mortar will not yield themselves there to express any whim in the mind of their owner: the house-fronts turn the same impassive, show-hating faces on the sidewalks from the Delaware to the Schuylkill. Give the busiest street a moment's chance and it broods down into a solitary reverie, saying,--"You may force me into hotels and market-places, if you will, but I know the business of this town is to hold its tongue." Even the curiously beautiful women wrap themselves in the uniform of gray, silent color; the cast of thought of the people is critical, attentive, self-controlled. When a covered, leaden day shuts the sun out, and the meaning of the place in, hills and city and human life, one might fancy, utter the old answer of the woman accused of witchcraft:--"While I hold my thought, it is my own; when I speak it, it is my master." Out in the near hills the quietude deepens, loosening and falling back out of the rigid reserve of the city into the unconscious silence of a fresh Nature: no solitudes near a large town are so solitary as these. There is one little river in especial, that empties into the Schuylkill, which comes from some water-bed under the shady hills in Montgomery County,--some pool far underground, which never in all these ages has heard a sound, or seen the sun, nor ever shall; therefore the water flowing from it carries to the upper air a deeper silence than the spell left by the old Quaker on the hills, or even the ghostly memory of the Indian tribes, who, ages long ago, hunted and slowly faded away in these forests on its shores.