Philadelphia is the noisiest city in North America. If you walk about any of the narrow streets of this cold-storage abode of Brotherly Love you will soon see tottering on its legs the venerable New York joke concerning the cemetery-like stillness of the abode of brotherly love. Over there the nerve shock is ultra-dynamic. As for sleep, it is out of the question. Why, then, will ask the puzzled student of national life, does the venerable witticism persist in living? The answer is that in the United States a truth promulgated a century ago never dies. We are a race of humourists. Noise-breeding trolley-cars, constricted streets that vibrate with the clangour of the loosely jointed machinery, an army of carts and the cries of vegetable venders, a multitude of jostling people making for the ferries on the Delaware or the bridges on the Schuylkill rivers, together with the hum of vast manufactories, all these and a thousand other things place New York in a more modest category; in reality our own city emits few pipes in comparison with the City of Brotherly Noise which sprawls over the map of Pennsylvania. Yet it is called dead and moss-grown. The antique joke flourishes the world over; in Philadelphia it is stunned by the welter and crush of life and politics. Oscar Hammerstein first crossed the Rubicon of Market Street. The mountain of "society" was forced to go northward to this Mahomet of operatic music; else forego Richard Strauss, Debussy, Massenet, Mary Garden, and Oscar's famous head-tile. What a feat to boast of! For hundreds of years Market Street had been the balking-line of supernice Philadelphians. Above the delectable region north of the City Hall and Penn's statue was Cimmerian darkness. Hammerstein, with his opera company, accomplished the miracle. Perfectly proper persons now say "Girard Avenue" or "Spring Garden" without blushing, because of their increased knowledge of municipal topography. Society trooped northward. Motor-cars from Rittenhouse Square were seen near Poplar Street. Philadelphia boasts a much superior culture in the crustacean line. The best fried oysters in the world are to be found there. Terrapin is the local god. And Dennis McGowan of Sansom Street hangs his banners on the outer walls; within, red-snapper soup and deviled crabs make the heart grow fonder.