Philadelphia was the city to which Gottlieb Pfeiffer was bound; and after a tedious beating up stream from the Capes of Delaware, we saw its neat brick rows, its trim rectangles, and its lone steeple, in one of the last years of the last century. Pfeiffer was always talking of a certain regenerator of education whom he called Basedow—a type of Pestalozzi and Fellenberg, only with a dash of crazyhood, and a streak of jacobinism. My young German was going to a village called Germantown, I forget how many miles from the city; where his uncle was a leader among the sectaries called Mennonites, or vulgarly Menneeses. He was a very Quixote in education, and was about to rear the tender youth without bench, birch, or berating, and almost without book. He was to teach more Socratico out of doors, by sheer talk, along the romantic Wissahiccon and the slopes of Chestnut Hill. I gave him my adieux, as he sallied out on his first lesson, with a covey of younglings under his guidance. Poor fellow! he was carried off by the yellow fever.

The Philadelphia which I remember was a sweet and gentle city. Many a boy and girl was then to be met, in all the rigor of plain dress, pacing to Arch Street Meeting. Shade trees were abundant in the great streets. The Chestnut Street Theatre was still called the “New Theatre.” Morris’s famous house was still visible; you got into the country a few hundred yards westward of the old prison; the Dock draw-bridge was in its glory; and many rows of houses in Front street were chequered with glazed brick and adorned with porch-benches. There was a soothing, umbrageous quietude in those broad, well paved stretches of Third street, where tall old fashioned mansions seemed to retire a little under spreading elms, in dignified coolness. I am afraid I should not know the places again. The calm and stillness of Penn’s spirit was yet hovering over the town, with a shade and a natural grace which have long since been scared away by steam-wagons and engine-campaigns. But what was all this to a bewildered creature, who had gained glimpses of the old world before he had studied the new; who had gone over sea dreaming that he was rich, and had come back assured that he was poor; who had been ill-taught and was nevertheless to redeem his patrimony by labors beginning in a log school-house.

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