The foregoing letter ends with a long description of a trip made on the Fairmount stage. The pillars in front were all finished but one. These pillars were beautiful, ornamental fluted columns, considerably larger than a hogshead at the base, and about as high as Clapinger's second-story front windows . . . . To see some of them finished and standing, and then the huge blocks lying about, looks so massy, and carries one, in imagination, to the ruined piles of ancient Babylon. I despise the infernal bogus brick columns plastered over with mortar.
Marble is the cheapest building-stone about Philadelphia.
Lippard, in his Legends of Washington and his Generals, has rendered the Wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and I shall make that trip, as well as one to Germantown, soon . . . . There is one fine custom observed in Phila. A gentleman is always expected to hand up a lady's money for her. She handed me her money, which was right. In St. Louis a man will sit in the front end of the stage, and see a lady stagger from the far end to pay her fare.