The Wissahickon Drive is a joy that does not come to every Philadelphian. That winding road is barred to sight-seeing cars and automobiles of indiscriminate sort because the quality of the town prefers to keep it to itself. So runs Philadelphia; a town which is in many ways sordid, which has probably the full share of suffering that must come to every large city, but which bars its fine drive to the proletariat while Rittenhouse square blandly wonders why Socialism makes progress across the land. Philadelphia does not progress--in any broad social sense. She plays cricket--splendidly--is one of the few American towns in which that fine English game flourishes--and she dispenses her splendid charity in the same senseless fashion as sixty years ago. But she does not understand the trend of things today--and so she bars her Wissahickon Drive except to those who drive in private carriages or their own motor car, and delivers the finest of the old Colonial houses within her Fairmount Park area to clubs--of quality. Personally we much prefer John Bartram's house to any of those splendid old country-seats within Fairmount. To find Bartram's Gardens you need a guide--or a really intelligent street-car conductor. For there is not even a marking sign upon its entrance, although Philadelphia professes to maintain it as a public park. Little has been done, however, to the property, and for that he who comes to it almost as a shrine has reason to be profoundly thankful. For the old house stands, with its barns, almost exactly as it stood in the days of the great naturalist. One may see where his hands placed the great stone inscribed "John-Ann Bartram 1731" within its gable; on the side wall another tablet chiseled there forty years later, and reading: "Tis God alone, almighty Lord, The holy one by me adored." Neglect may have come upon the gardens but even John Bartram could not deny the wild beauty of these untrammeled things. The gentle river is still at the foot of the garden, within it, most of the shrubs and trees he planted are still growing into green old age. And next to his fine old simple house one sees the tangled yew-tree and the Jerusalem "Christ's-thorn" that his own hands placed within the ground. * * * * * Philadelphia prides herself upon her dominant Americanism--and with no small reason. She insists that by keeping the doorways to her houses sharply barred she maintains her native stock, her trained and responsible stock, if you please, dominant. She avers that she protects American institutions. New York may become truly cosmopolitan, may ape foreign manners and foreign customs. Philadelphia in her quiet, gentle way prefers to preserve those of her fathers.