Excerpt from The Runaway Browns It seems quite natural that the houses in Philadelphia should grow backward; yet a real Philadelphia house is. always a surprise to the stranger. From the sidewalk you see what looks like a compressed mausoleum. You enter, wondering if there is going to be room for you and the one tier of defunct. Behold! that house spreads out into the silent hollow of the square; back-extension after back-extension, in holy privacy, in a dim and chastened respectability, you see a Philadelphia Home expand itself. For many, many years there came forth daily from the door of such a house as this, a gentleman who was at first Oldish, then Old, then Very Old, indeed. He was thin and tall; he wore his old-fashioned beaver hat on one side of his gaunt, old-fashioned head; his clothes had been dandified once, when dandies wore stocks and tied their collars behind. He wore them still so jauntily as to make you think you were wrong in your reckoning - if the disloyal clothes had n't gone threadbare and shiny. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.