I went with father to Philadelphia three years ago; we staid near Washington Square; it is beautiful there. The trees are just splendid. Father told me it used to be a great burying-ground. I could not make it seem possible. A great many unknown soldiers, father said, were buried there; it was in Revolutionary times. How sad it must have been to live then! I like the little parks in Philadelphia that they call “squares.” I saw the place where they held the Sanitary Fair, when they roofed over the entire square, and let the trees stand as pillars.
Laura Creedmore.
One of the most interesting places I visited in Philadelphia was Mr. Wanamaker’s store. I did not know a store could be so large. It takes a hundred miles of steam pipes to heat it.
FRANKLIN STATUE.
My uncle has a fruit farm of ten acres, and I used to think when I walked around it that ten acres was pretty big; but there are over fourteen acres of floor to walk around in Mr. Wanamaker’s store! The different departments are fixed up beautifully. They have lovely parlors and dining-rooms and bedrooms all rigged up with beautiful furniture, to show people how to furnish their rooms, and every few days they change and give you another style. But the most interesting part of the store, to me, was the way the money is sent to the cashiers. There are eighty-one pay-stations in the store; then there is a central cash desk where twenty-five cashiers are busy all day long receiving the money that is brought to them through the tubes. The clerk at a pay-station takes the money you give him, and starts it in one of the pneumatic tubes, and away it shoots to the central desk on the second floor; a cashier there looks at it, sees what change is needed, and shoots it back. I don’t understand it very well, but I mean to. I am going to study the principles of pneumatic tubing, and Chris and I are going to have one to reach from my window to his. We are only about fifty feet apart. In Wanamaker’s they have seven miles of tubing to carry their money around. We took dinner at the Wanamaker Dairy, right in the store; it was jam full, and it will seat eight hundred people at once. Chris and I are going into partnership when we get to be men, and are going to have a store just exactly like it.
Henry W. Gilmore.
I went to Philadelphia last winter and attended Mr. Conwell’s church on Broad Street. It is very big—the biggest in the world, I guess—or maybe I mean in this country. It will hold thousands of people. Mother says she thinks Dr. Talmage’s church is bigger, but I don’t see how it could be. The people can’t all get in; they have to have tickets and be let in by a door-keeper. The singing sounds just grand. There is a very large choir, and the organ rolls and rolls. I liked Mr. Conwell almost better than any minister I ever heard, except my own, of course. Then I went to Sunday-school; hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of children! I never saw so many together before. Of course I saw other things in Philadelphia, but what I liked the best was that church. It seemed so funny to see folks crowding into church on Sunday morning, and to have a big overflow meeting for those who couldn’t get in. Where I live they have to coax the people to come to church, and there’s lots of room always.