f pretty wild woodland, watered by numerous small
water-courses, and divided by the main highroad, once the chief
channel of communication between New York and Philadelphia.

Six miles from the latter city, at a village called Branchtown, and
only a few yards from the road, stood my home; and it would be
difficult for those who do not remember "the old York road," as it
was called, and the country between that and Germantown, in the days
when these letters were written, to imagine the change which nearly
fifty years have produced in the whole region.

No one who now sees the pretty populous villadom which has grown up
in every direction round the home of my early married years--the
neat cottages and cheerful country houses, the trim lawns and bright
flower-gardens, the whole well laid out, tastefully cultivated, and
carefully tended suburban district, with its attractive dwellings,
could easily conceive the sort of abomination of desolation which
its aspect formerly presented to eyes accustomed to the finish and
perfection of rural English landscape.

Between five and six miles of hideous and execrable turnpike road,
without shade, and aridly detestable in the glare, heat, and dust of
summer, and almost dangerously impassable in winter, made driving
into Philadelphia an undertaking that neither love, friendship, nor
pleasure--nothing but inexorable business or duty--reconciled one
to. The cross roads in every direction were a mere succession of
heavy, dusty, sandy pitfalls, or muddy quagmires, where, on foot or
on horseback, rapid progress was equally impossible. The whole
region, from the very outskirts of the city to the beautiful crest
of Chestnut Hill, overlooking its wide expanse of smiling foreground
and purple distant horizon, was then, with its mean-looking
scattered farm-houses and huge ungainly barns (whatever may have
been its agricultural merits), uninteresting and uninviting in all
the human elements of the landscape, dreary in summer and dismal in
winter, and absolutely void of the civilized cheerful charm that now
characterizes it.

_Per contra_, it then was _country_, and now is suburb: there were
woods and lanes where now there are stations and railroads, and the
solitude of rural walks and rides instead of the "continuation of
the city" which has now cut up