After lunch and a good rest the last stages of the journey. The little towns grow more closely together; there are more houses, more intersecting cross-roads. It will be worth your while not to miss the signs upon these. The very names on the sign-posts--Plymouth Meeting, Wheel Pump, Spring House, Bird-in-hand--seem to proclaim that this is a venerable country indeed. More closely do the houses grow together, the farms disappear, an ancient mile-post thrusts itself into your vision. It is stone, but, after the fashion of these Pennsylvania Dutch, white-washed and readable. It tells you: P 10-1/2 C.H. 1 M. But Philadelphia in reality is no ten miles away. For here is Chestnut Hill, the houses numbered, city-fashion and the yellow trolley cars multiplied within the busy highway which has become a city street without you having realized the transition. The smart looking policeman at the corner will tell you that Chestnut Hill is today one of the wards of Philadelphia. The city at last! You may turn at the top of a long hill and for a final instant confront the country beyond, rolling, fertile, prosperous, the gentle wooded hills giving soft undulation to the horizon. Then look forward and face the busy town. For a long time yet your way shall be down what seems to be the main street of a prosperous village, with its great homes set away back in green lawns from the noisy pavement and the public sidewalk. There are shops but they are distinctly local shops and the churches bear the names of the brisk towns that were submerged in the making of a larger Philadelphia--Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy, Germantown. And down this same busy street history has marched before you. Some of it has been recorded here and there in bronze tablets along the street. In front of one old house, one learns that General Washington conferred with his officers at the eve of the battle of Germantown and on the door-steps of another--set even today in its own deep grounds--Redcoat and Buff struggled in a memorable conflict. For this was the mansion of Judge Chew, transformed in an instant of an autumn day from country-house to fortress. It was from the windows of this old house that six companies of Colonel Musgrave's Fortieth regiment poured down a deadly fire upon Mad Anthony Wayne and his men even as they attempted to set fire to it. The house stood and so stood the Fortieth regiment. General Washington lost his chance to enter Philadelphia that autumn, and Valley Forge was so writ into the pages of history.