Here we are at the William Penn Inn at dawn of a September morning waiting to tramp our way, at least to the outskirts of the closely built part of the city. And before we are away from the tavern which has kept us through the lonely chill of the night, give it a single parting glance. It has been standing there at the cross-roads of two of the busy pikes of Montgomery county for a full century and a half. In all those years it has not closed its door against man or beast, seeking shelter or refreshment. There is a record of one hundred and fifty years of hospitality for which it does not have to make apologies.
Sometimes you will discover small inns of this sort along the roadsides of New England, but we do not know where else you will find them without crossing the Atlantic and seeking them out in the Surrey and the Sussex of the older England. Yet around Philadelphia they are plentiful—with their yellow plastered walls, tight green shutters hung against them, their low-ceilinged rooms, their broad fire-places, their stout stone out-buildings, and their shady piazzas, giving to the highway. Some of them have quite wonderful signs and all of them have a wonderful hospitality—heritage from the Quaker manner of living.
So from the William Penn Inn one may start after breakfast as one might have started a century ago—to walk his way into the busy town. The four corners where the pikes cross stand upon a high ridge—a smooth white house of stone, a meeting-house of the Friends, and the tavern occupying three of them. The fourth gives to a view of distant fields—and such a view! Montgomery is a county of fat farms. You can see the rich lands down in the valleys, the shrewder genius required to make the more sterile ridge acres yield. And, as you trudge down the pike, the view stays with you for a long while.
At the bottom of the hill a little stream and the inevitable toll-gate that seem to hedge in Philadelphia from every side. But your payment to the toll-keeper upon the Bethlehem pike this morning is voluntary. His smile is genial, his gate open. A cigar is to his liking and if you would tarry for a little time within the living-room of the toll-house he would tell you stories of the pike—stories that would make it worth the waiting. But—Philadelphia is miles away, the road to it long and dusty. You pick up your way and off you go.
Little towns and big. Sleepy towns most of them; but occasionally one into which the railroad has thrust itself and Industry flaunts a smoky chimney up to the blue sky. Quaker meeting-houses a plenty, with the tiny grave-stones hardly showing themselves through the long grass roundabout them. But those same neat stones show that the Friends are a long-lived folk, and if you lift yourself up to peer through the windows of one of these meeting-houses you may see the exquisite simplicity of its arrangement. The meeting-house is modern—it only dates back to 1823—and yet it is typical. Two masses of benches on a slightly inclined floor, the one side for the men, the other for the women. Facing them two rows of benches, for the elders. No altar, not even a pulpit or reading-desk; there is an utter absence of decoration. You do not wonder that the young folk in this mad, gay day fail to incline to the old faith of "thee" and "thou," and that no more than forty or fifty folk, almost all of them close to the evenings of their life gather here on the morning of First Day.
Between the villages and the meeting-houses the solid, substantial farmhouses. And what farmhouses! Farmhouses, immaculate as to whitewash and to lawn, with cool porches, shaded by brightly striped awnings and holding windsor chairs and big swinging Gloucester hammocks. This is farming. And the prosperous look of the staunch barns belies even thought that this is dilettante agriculture. It is merely evidence that farmers along the great pikes of Montgomery and Bucks and Berks have not lost their old-time cunning. And if the farmer no longer drives his great Conestoga wagons into market at Philadelphia, it is because he prefers to run in with his own motor car and let other and more modern transportation methods bring his products to the consumer.
Lunch at another roadside tavern. Bless your heart, this one, like the meeting-house of the Friends back the pike a way, is cursed with modernity. It can only claim sixty years of hospitable existence. Mine host can tell no fascinating yarn of General Washington having slept beneath his roof, even though his tavern is named after no less a personage. Instead he relates mournfully how a tavern over on the Bristol pike has a tablet in its tap-room telling of the memorable night that the members of the Continental Congress moving from New York to Philadelphia tarried under that roof. Two good anecdotes and a corking name almost make a wayside inn. But the anecdotes are not always easy to find.
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.