CHAPTER XIV.

The letter that Philip Sterling wrote to Ruth Bolton, on the evening of

setting out to seek his fortune in the west, found that young lady in her

own father's house in Philadelphia. It was one of the pleasantest of the

many charming suburban houses in that hospitable city, which is

territorially one of the largest cities in the world, and only prevented

from becoming the convenient metropolis of the country by the intrusive

strip of Camden and Amboy sand which shuts it off from the Atlantic

ocean. It is a city of steady thrift, the arms of which might well be

the deliberate but delicious terrapin that imparts such a royal flavor to

its feasts.

It was a spring morning, and perhaps it was the influence of it that made

Ruth a little restless, satisfied neither with the out-doors nor the

in-doors. Her sisters had gone to the city to show some country visitors

Independence Hall, Girard College and Fairmount Water Works and Park,

four objects which Americans cannot die peacefully, even in Naples,

without having seen. But Ruth confessed that she was tired of them, and

also of the Mint. She was tired of other things. She tried this morning

an air or two upon the piano, sang a simple song in a sweet but slightly

metallic voice, and then seating herself by the open window, read

Philip's letter. Was she thinking about Philip, as she gazed across the

fresh lawn over the tree tops to the Chelton Hills, or of that world

which his entrance, into her tradition-bound life had been one of the

means of opening to her? Whatever she thought, she was not idly musing,

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The Gilded Age