I  
A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that one should have some excuse for being away from the office on a working afternoon. September sunshine and trembling blue air are not sufficient reasons, it seems. Therefore, if any one should brutally ask what I was doing the other day dangling down Chestnut Street toward the river, I should have to reply, "Looking for the Wenonah." The Wenonah, you will immediately conclude, is a moving picture theater. But be patient a moment.
 
Lower Chestnut Street is a delightful place for one who does not get down there very often. The face of wholesale trade, dingier than the glitter of uptown shops, is far more exciting and romantic. Pavements are cumbered with vast packing cases; whiffs of tea and spice well up from cool cellars. Below Second Street I found a row of enormous sacks across the curb, with bright red and green wool pushing through holes in the burlap. Such signs as WOOL, NOILS AND WASTE are frequent. I wonder what noils are? A big sign on Front Street proclaims TEA CADDIES, which has a pleasant grandmotherly flavor. A little brass plate, gleamingly polished, says HONORARY CONSULATE OF JAPAN. Beside immense motor trucks stood a shabby little horse and buggy, restored to service, perhaps, by the war-time shortage of gasoline. It was a typical one-horse shay of thirty years ago.
 
I crossed over to Camden on the ferryboat Wildwood, observing in the course of the voyage her sisters, Bridgeton, Camden, Salem and Hammonton. It is curious that no matter where one goes, one will always meet people who are traveling there for the first time. A small boy next to me was gazing in awe at the stalwart tower of the Victor Company, and snuffing with pleasure the fragrance of cooking tomatoes that makes Camden savory at this time of year. Wagonloads of ripe Jersey tomatoes making their way to the soup factory are a jocund sight across the river just now.
 
Every ferry passenger is familiar with the rapid tinkling of the ratchet wheel that warps the landing stage up to the level of the boat's deck. I asked the man who was running the wheel where I would find the Wenonah. "She lays over in the old Market Street slip," he replied, and cheerfully showed me just where to find her. "Is she still used?" I asked. "Mostly on Saturday nights and holidays," he said, "when there's a big crowd going across."
 
The Wenonah, as all Camden seafarers know, is a ferryboat, one of the old-timers, and I was interested in her because she and her sister, the Beverly, were Walt Whitman's favorite ferries. He crossed back and forth on them hundreds of times and has celebrated them in several paragraphs in Specimen Days. Perhaps this is the place to quote his memorandum dated January 12, 1882, which ought to interest all lovers of the Camden ferry:
 
"Such a show as the Delaware presented an hour before sundown yesterday evening, all along between Philadelphia and Camden, is worth weaving into an item. It was full tide, a fair breeze from the southwest, the water of a pale tawny color, and just enough motion to make things frolicsome and lively. Add to these an approaching sunset of unusual splendor, a broad tumble of clouds, with much golden haze and profusion of beaming shaft and dazzle. In the midst of all, in the clear drab of the afternoon light, there steamed up the river the large new boat, the Wenonah, as pretty an object as you could wish to see, lightly and swiftly skimming along, all trim and white, covered with flags, transparent red and blue streaming out in the breeze. Only a new ferryboat, and yet in its fitness comparable with the prettiest product of Nature's cunning, and rivaling it. High up in the transparent ether gracefully balanced and circled four or five great sea hawks, while here below, mid the pomp and picturesqueness of sky and river, swam this creature of artificial beauty and motion and power, in its way no less perfect."
 
You will notice that Walt Whitman describes the Wenonah as being white. The Pennsylvania ferryboats, as we know them, are all the brick-red color that is familiar to the present generation. Perhaps older navigators of the Camden crossing can tell us whether the boats were all painted white in a less smoky era?
 
The Wenonah and the Beverly were lying in the now unused ferry slip at the foot of Market Street, alongside the great Victor Talking Machine works. Picking my way through an empty yard where some carpentering was going on, I found a deserted pier that overlooked the two old vessels and gave a fair prospect on to the river and the profile of Philadelphia. Sitting there on a pile of pebbles, I lit a pipe and watched the busy panorama of the river. I made no effort to disturb the normal and congenial lassitude that is the highest function of the human being: no Hindoo philosopher could have been more pleasantly at ease. (O. Henry, one remembers, used to insist that what some of his friends called laziness was really "dignified repose.") Two elderly colored men were loading gravel onto a cart not far away. I was a little worried as to what I could say if they asked what I was doing. In these days casual loungers along docksides may be suspected of depth bombs and high treason. The only truthful reply to any question would have been that I was thinking about Walt Whitman. Such a remark, if uttered in Philadelphia, would undoubtedly have been answered by a direction to the chocolate factory on Race Street. But in Camden every one knows about Walt. Still, the colored men said nothing beyond returning my greeting. Their race, wise in simplicity, knows that loafing needs no explanation and is its own excuse.
 
If Walt could revisit the ferries he loved so well, in New York and Philadelphia, he would find the former strangely altered in aspect. The New York skyline wears a very different silhouette against the sky, with its marvelous peaks and summits drawing the eye aloft. But Philadelphia's profile is (I imagine) not much changed. I do not know just when the City Hall tower was finished: Walt speaks of it as "three-fifths built" in 1879. That, of course, is the dominant unit in the view from Camden. Otherwise there are few outstanding elements. The gradual rise in height of the buildings, from Front Street gently ascending up to Broad, gives no startling contrast of elevation to catch the gaze. The spires of the older churches stand up like soft blue pencils, and the massive cornices of the Curtis and Drexel buildings catch the sunlight. Otherwise the outline is even and well-massed in a smooth ascending curve.
 
It is curious how a man can stamp his personality upon earthly things. There will always be pilgrims to whom Camden and the Delaware ferries are full of excitement and meaning because of Walt Whitman. Just as Stratford is Shakespeare, so is Camden Whitman. Some supercilious observers, flashing through on the way to Atlantic City, may only see a town in which there is no delirious and seizing beauty. Let us remind them of Walt's own words:
 
A great city is that which has the greatest men and women. If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world.
And as I came back across the river, and an airplane hovered over us at a great height, I thought how much we need a Whitman to-day, a poet who can catch the heart and meaning of these grievous bitter years, who can make plain the surging hopes that throb in the breasts of men. The world has not flung itself into agony without some unexpressed vision that lights the sacrifice. If Walt Whitman were here he would look on this new world of moving pictures and gasoline engines and U-boats and tell us what it means. His great heart, which with all its garrulous fumbling had caught the deep music of human service and fellowship, would have had true and fine words for us. And yet he would have found it a hard world for one of his strolling meditative observancy. A speeding motor truck would have run him down long ago!
 
As I left the ferry at Market Street I saw that the Norwegian steamer Taunton was unloading bananas at the Ericsson pier. Less than a month ago she picked up the survivors of the schooner Madrugada, torpedoed by a U-boat off Winter Bottom Shoal. On the Madrugada was a young friend of mine, a Dutch sailor, who told me of the disaster after he was landed in New York. To come unexpectedly on the ship that had rescued him seemed a great adventure. What a poem Walt Whitman could have made of it!
 
 
II
 
It is a weakness of mine—not a sinful one, I hope—that whenever I see any one reading a book in public I am agog to find out what it is. Crossing over to Camden this morning a young woman on the ferry was absorbed in a volume, and I couldn't resist peeping over her shoulder. It was "Hans Brinker." On the same boat were several schoolboys carrying copies of Myers' "History of Greece." Quaint, isn't it, how our schools keep up the same old bunk! What earthly use will a smattering of Greek history be to those boys? Surely to our citizens of the coming generation the battles of the Marne will be more important than the scuffle at Salamis.
 
My errand in Camden was to visit the house on Mickle Street where Walt Whitman lived his last years. It is now occupied by Mrs. Thomas Skymer, a friendly Italian woman, and her family. Mrs. Skymer graciously allowed me to go through the downstairs rooms.
 
I don't suppose any literary shrine on earth is of more humble and disregarded aspect than Mickle Street. It is a little cobbled byway, grimed with drifting smoke from the railway yards, littered with wind-blown papers and lined with small wooden and brick houses sooted almost to blackness. It is curious to think, as one walks along that bumpy brick pavement, that many pilgrims from afar have looked forward to visiting Mickle Street as one of the world's most significant altars. As Chesterton wrote once, "We have not yet begun to get to the beginning of Whitman." But the wayfarer of to-day will find Mickle Street far from impressive.
 
The little house, a two-story frame cottage, painted dark brown, is numbered 330. (In Whitman's day it was 328.) On the pavement in front stands a white marble stepping-block with the carved initials W.W.—given to the poet, I dare say, by the same friends who bought him a horse and carriage. A small sign, in English and Italian, says: Thomas A. Skymer, Automobiles to Hire on Occasions. It was with something of a thrill that I entered the little front parlor where Walt used to sit, surrounded by his litter of papers and holding forth to faithful listeners. One may safely say that his was a happy old age, for there were those who never jibbed at protracted audience.
 
A description of that room as it was in the last days of Whitman's life may not be uninteresting. I quote from the article published by the Philadelphia Press of March 27, 1892, the day after the poet's death:
 
Below the windowsill a four-inch pine shelf is swung, on which rests a bottle of ink, two or three pens and a much-rubbed spectacle case.
(The shelf, I am sorry to say, is no longer there.)
 
The table—between which and the wall is the poet's rocker covered with a worsted afghan, presented to him one Christmas by a bevy of college girls who admired his work—is so thickly piled with booksand magazines, letters and the raffle of a literary desk that thereis scarcely an inch of room upon which he may rest his paper as he writes. A volume of Shakespeare lies on top of a heaping full waste basket that was once used to bring peaches to market, and an ancient copy of Worcester's Dictionary shares places in an adjacent chair with the poet's old and familiar soft gray hat, a newly darned blue woolen sock and a shoe-blacking brush. There is a paste bottle and brush on the table and a pair of scissors, muc............