But what Philadelphia loves most of all is a public festival. It does not matter so very much just what is to be celebrated as long as there can be a fine parade up Broad street--which just seems to have been really designed for fine parades. On New Year's Eve while New York is drinking itself into a drunken stupor, Philadelphia masks and disguises--and parades. On every possible anniversary, on each public birthday of every sort she parades--with the gay discordancies of many bands, with long files of stolid and perspiring policemen or firemen or civic societies, with rumbling top-heavy floats that mean whatever you choose to have them mean. Rittenhouse square does not hold aloof from these festivals. Oh, no, indeed! Rittenhouse square disguises itself as grandfather or grandmother or as any of the many local heroes and rides within the parade--more likely upon the floats. The parades are invariably well done. And the proletariat of Philadelphia comes out from the side streets and makes a double black wall of humanity for the long miles of Broad street. There is something reminiscent of Bourbon France in the way that Bourbon Rittenhouse square dispenses these festivals unto the rest of the town. It is all very diaphanous and very artificial but it is very sensuous and beautiful withal, and perhaps the rest of the town for a night forgets some of its sordidness and misery. And the picture that one of these celebrations makes upon the mind of a stranger is indelible. Like all of such _fêtes_ it gains its greatest glory at dusk. As twilight comes the strident colors of the city fade; it becomes a thing of shapes and shadows--even the restless crowd is tired and softened. Then the genius of electricity comes to transform workaday land into fairyland and all these shapes and shadows sharpen--this time in living glowing lines of fire. It is time for men to exult, to forget that they have ever been tired. Such is the setting that modern America can give a parade. Father Penn stands on his tall tower above it all, the most commanding figure of his town. Below him the searchlights play and a million incandescents glow; the shuffling of the crowds, the faint cadences of the band, the echoes of the cheering crowd come up to him. But he does not move. His hands, his great bronze hands, are spread in benediction over the great gay sturdy city which he brought into existence these long years ago. 5 THE MONUMENTAL CITY