GRUMBLETHORPE, 5261 GERMANTOWN ROAD... 222 222 226 238 238 242 UPSALA, GERMANTOWN ROAD AND UPSAL STREET 255 256 ANDALUSIA, ON THE DELAWARE, BENSALEM TOWNSHIP, BUCKS. 343 PEN RHYN, ON THE DELAWARE, BENSALEM TOWNSHIP, BUCKS. 345 CALIFORNIA OUSES, like men, have personality. They have it, especially old houses, to a marked degree, reflected to be sure from human association, but running the gamut of variety as fully as their human makers who inwove so much of their own individuality into the fabrics they builded of stone and brick and wood. So closely identified with man and his doings are they, that it is no exaggeration to say that the history of the houses of a neighbourhood will give more clearly than any other medium an insight into the history of the men who lived there. As houses are the visible records and crystallised history of a nation's social life, as they reflect somewhat of the state and substance of their owners, so may we gain more intimate knowledge of epochs and men from a closer acquaintance with their abodes, just as a naturalist can reconstruct the tenant of a shell from a study of its form and structure. The story of a single house is ofttimes the history in small of all the country roundabout. It is only by studying history in small that we shall ever know its full meaning. It is only by marking well the homely things bound up with the daily life of the men aforetime that we shall ever see the great facts of history in their true light and realise the full extent of their significance for us. The day is now happily past when tales of battles and sieges, the trumpet-and-drum episodes of the drama of 10 VINU AIMBORLIAD COLONIAL HOMES OF PHILADELPHIA existence, are alone held of sovereign worth in writing history. From every side comes the demand to know what manner of men they were that wrought the deeds they did, their common relations to one another, how they tilled the soil, how they traded, how they ate and dressed, how they worked and how they played, how they gave and received hospitality, in short, how they lived; and unless these questions can be answered, history has done less than half its duty. Any material is to be welcomed that will help us to understand more fully the social life of a given period, for after all, that is what counts most. All other phases of a nation's history-political, economic, industrial, or constitutional—are in a great measure the outcome, the particular manifestations of it. Albeit the glamour shed by picturesque distance invests the brocades and laces and towering, plumed turbans of the ladies and the powdered queues and gold-bedizened waistcoats of the men with a romantic charm, we must, nevertheless, realise that there was, too, a fustian and ozenbrig side to the life of former times. With all this homely side of life the story of Colonial homes is so inseparably joined that it is the fittest point of contact we can choose for cultivating a more sympathetic and intimate acquaintance with the men and women of bygone generations, an acquaintance surely not to our damage and mayhap to the great profit of our manners and morals. Without giving ourselves over too much to retrospection, we may well enquire whether or not the plan and governance of our lives nowadays are wholly as |