Class _J:_i_^_I_ Book- c A" COPYRIGHT DEPOSm t tn 'iiii; .sjcMM, ii.Aci; 1)1 iHi; dkci.akation ok inoephndknce THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA By ROBERT SHACKLETON Jtiikor of "The Book of Boston," "The Book of New York," "Unvisited Places of Old Europe," etc. Illustrated with Photographs and with drawings hy R. L. BOYER and Herbert Pullinger THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY PHILADELPHIA 1918 COPYRIGHT 19 18 BY THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY JAN !q;q The Book of Philadelphia ©Ci.Ar)089'rv TO HAMPTON L. CARSON A PHILADELPHIAN CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I Insideks and Outsiders 1 II The Hidden Churches 14 III Within a Nooked Courtyard 32 IV The City of Franklin 40 V The State House 62 VI The Hall of an Ancient Guild .... 81 VII Quakers and Meeting-Houses 93 VIII Old Sections op the City Ill IX Streets and Ways 128 X Romantic Business 150 XI Art and Artists 163 XII Some Actors and Authors 179 XIII The Place of Clubs 201 XIV A City of the Classic 218 XV From City Hall to IMemorial Hall . . . 230 XVI The Fair Mansions of Fairmount . . . 246 XVII A College Town Within the City . . . 260 XVIII Some Distinguishing Traits 272 XIX The Battle Street of a Village .... 288 XX Out the Old York Road 305 XXI The Wayne Line 321 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XXII The Three B 's op the Riverside .... 332 XXIII EoMANCE IN Towns to the Southward . . 344 XXIV Valley Forge 354 XXV As Far as York and Lancaster . . . .366 XXVI Some Benefactions, Old and New . . . 376 XXVII South of Market Street 386 XXVIII Feudal City 397 ILLUSTEATIONS PAGE The Hall of the Declaration Frontispiece At Broad and Chestnut Streets . . . (heading) 1 Franklin's Statue (initial) 1 The Broad Street Vista (facing) 12 Three Arches in Supreme Court Room . (tailpiece) 13 A Bit of St. Peter's (initial) 14 Aristocratic St. Peter's (facing 22 Christ Church (tailpiece) 31 St. Joseph's Tower (initial) 32 William Penn's Chair (tailpiece) . 40 Franklin's Electrical Apparatus . . . (initial) 41 Franklin's Grave (tailpiece) 61 The Syng Silver (initial) 62 The Old State House (facing) 64 The Court Room in the Old State House . (facing) 72 The Finest Stairs in America .... (tailpiece) 80 Carpenters' Hall (initial) 81 The Custom House (tailpiece) 92 The Penn Treaty Monument .... (initial) 93 The Old Meeting House on Arch Street . (facing) 96 A Peaceful Quaker Courtyard . . . (tailpiece) 110 An Iron Railing (initial) 111 One of the Ancient Alleys (tailpiece) 127 The Palladian Window: State House . (initial) 128 Residential Rittenhouse Square . . . (facing) 140 Old Mansions on Rittenhouse Square . . (tailpiece) 149 Doorway: Philadelphia Contributionship (initial) 150 The Old Stock Exchange (facing) 156 ILLUSTRATIONS The Ancient Black Horse Inn .... Fire Signs Academy of The Fine Arts .... School of Industrial Arts Franklin's Sword The Academy of Music Gateway of The Acorn Club .... The Street of Little Clubs The Franklin Inn The Philadelphia Club The Franklin Institute Andalusia The Classic Portico of the Old Girard Bank Girard College Memorial Hall The Classic Temples of the Old Water Works On the Parkway The Letitia House The Home of Benedict Arnold .... Arch over the Wissahickon Archway into Quadrangle The Memorial Tower Fountain in Rittenhouse Square . The United States Mint Washington's Garden Stenton: An Honored Mansion . The Chew House: Germantown . Washington's Germantown Home . An 0]d Doorway Paneling at Graeme Park The John Bartram House ..... St. David's: The Burial Place of An- thony Wayne (facing) I'AGE 160 (tailpiece) 162 (initial) 163 (tailpiece) 178 (initial) 179 (tailpiece) 200 (initial) 201 (facing) 208 (facing) 214 (tailpiece) 217 (initial) 218 (facing) 220 (facing) 228 (tailpiece) 229 (initial) 230 (facing) 240 (tailpiece) 245 (initial) 246 (facing) 254 (tailpiece) 259 (initial) 260 (tailpiece) 271 (initial) 272 (tailpiece) 287 (initial) 288 (facing) 292 (facing) 302 (tailpiece) 304 (initial) 305 (tailpiece) 320 (initial) 321 (facing) 328 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE On the Schuylkill (tailpiece) 331 Garden House, Bonaparte Park: Bor- dentown (initial) 332 Gateway to Bonaparte Park .... (tailpiece) 343 Naaman's-on-the-Delaware (initial) 344 Doorway of Newcastle Church .... (tailpiece) 353 Washington Memorial: Valley Forge . (initial) 354 Washington's Headquarters .... (tailpiece) 365 A Bethlehem Belfry (initial) 366 Mennonite Street Market: Lancaster . (tailpiece) 375 Drexel Institute (initial) 376 The Stately Old Pennsylvania Hospital . (facing) 378 The Ridgway Library (tailpiece) 385 An Old Foot-scraper (initial) 386 The Quiet Living of Philadelphia . . . (facing) 390 Steps of the Nicholas Biddle House . . (tailpiece) 396 Barye's Bronze Lion (initial) 397 Interior Doorway in State House . . . (tailpiece) 403 ■^^t,**' THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA CHAPTER I INSIDEES AND OUTSIDERS HILADELPHIA is the City of Brotherly Love; but if you hope to receive a share of the brotherly affection it makes a great deal of difference whose brother you hap- pen to be. And, more than that, it is looked upon as of prime importance to know not only whose brother you are, but whose son or daughter, whose grandson or granddaughter you are, who were your great-grandparents, even who were THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA your great-great-grandparents. No other American city so coldly cuts its social cleavages; no other has raised and upheld such unbrotherly barriers. There are not only brothers — but others ! If one is outside of certain lines and circles of consanguinity, Phila- delphia is not the City of Brotherly Love but the City of Unbrotherly Indifference. All this would liave immensely surprised William Penn himself, who hoped so ardently for the growth of an actual Philadelphia as the capital of his Syl- vania. The city whose name meant fraternal affec- tion was to be in the midst of a smiling sylvan colony. But the English King gave the first touch of exclu- siveness to the new colony by his merry prefixing of Penn's own name to Sylvania, and neither the entreaties of Penn, which were laughed away, nor his offer of a bribe of twenty guineas to the under- secretary who engrossed the charter; a bribe which was refused by the wary clerk, who, though he loved money much, feared the Merry Monarch more ; could suffice to take away what Penn deemed the un- Quakerlike use of his own name; he deplored the un-Quakerlike appearance of personal vanity. In Philadelphia, family is a fetich. And yet, it is far more than a city of families. It is markedly a city of individuality, of individualities, a city of character and of characters; it is a city of a character which comes more from individuals than from families, intense though family worship is. In this frank doj3endence on individuals for its fame and progress, the city presents an odd contrast in 2 INSIDEES AND OUTSIDERS the deference which it at the same time so frankly yields to local lineage. And, strangest of all, for this City of Unbrotherly Indifference to outsiders and love for insiders, is the fact that its accepted leaders, its greatest men, have been frankly outsiders ! Penn himself was the first example. Being the founder, he could not well avoid being an outsider; but instead of making himself an insider, by taking up his permanent home here, or even by living here for many years or making frequent visits, his personal stay in the city and province of his founding was brief. William Penn had excellent grounds for that family vanity which is so marked a trait of the city he founded. His ancestors were not such as sat upon the remote edges and outskirts of history. One Penn was even so distinguished as to have much to do with that long-established English institution, the Saturday night bath, for, as barber to Henry the Eighth, from whose reign until well into that of Victoria the week-end bath was a fashion firmly fastened, he was expected always to be present and, as the old phrasing has come down, ''always use- ful." And he had his reward, for in a painting by Holbein representing a group of barber-surgeons re- ceiving a charter from King Henry, he is gravely prominent, as befits the barber of a king. William Penn's own father, who was very much the opposite of a Quaker, found a road to fame by becoming an admiral, gallant and capable, thus quite 3 THE BOOK OF PHILADEL ^HIA eclipsing, in the opinion of most of the English, his non-fighting son, who merely founded a great com- monwealth and a great city. In the beautiful Church of St. Mary Eedcliffe, in old Bristol, which Queen Elizabeth declared to be the fairest and goodliest parish church in England, I saw the monument of Admiral Penn, with his coat of arms and his armor set in impressive prominence on the wall, and with a lengthy laudatory inscription, naming title after title that he had won, and quaintly ending, that he had *'in much Peace arived and Ancord In his Last and Best Port.'' Very different is this proud monument in the beautiful old church from the monument to William Penn himself; yet the sweet austerity of William Penn's last resting place outdoes that ( " his father in impressiveness. For the founder of ' hiladelphia rests in an out of the way nook in rural England, a lonely spot called Jordans, where stands a tiny Quaker meeting-house, and his grave is marked only by a low-set stone, and all is peace and restfulness, and the honeysuckle, the fragrant stock, the white roses, grow close about the stone, and in the charm- ing austerity there is immense impressiveness. The family and the descendants of William Penn followed his example in not staying in Philadelphia, either living or dead, admirable city though from the first it has been. Of the thirteen children of Penn, seven by his first wife, she of the unexpectedly romantic name of Gulielma, often affectionately shortened by him to '*Guli," and six by his second, 4 INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS Hannah Callowhill, a name retained in Philadelphia by unromantic Callowhill Street, only one was even born in America, his son John, and none was buried here. A later John, a grandson of William, and also governor, died here in 1795 and was buried in the cemetery of Christ Church ; but the body was shortly taken up and carried to England. By accepting perforce the prefix of "Penn" to the name of the colony, and by the effect of his own personality, Penn himself gave the note of individ- uality which has throughout the passing years marked the city. Over "■ ^r again one notices similitudes be- tween . lia and Boston, and curiously the two old e indeed alike, with the likeness de- pendent i oat degree upon the loyalty to family descent, j-jit in comparing the two cities, one may constantly -notice the contrast that it was families that made Boston, but individuals who made Phila- delphia. And again and again, once the fact is realized, one comes back to that curious fact that the greatest individuals of Philadelphia were not really of the city. Cold as Philadelphia is and has always been to outsiders, difficult as it is and has always been for outsiders to become affiliated — aphiladelphiated, so to speak — it is to outsiders, and not to insiders, that Philadelphia mainly owes her achievements and her prestige. Franklin, more than any other individual, repre- sents and characterizes Philadelphia; and Franklin 5 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA dropped in quite casually from Boston, and quite without the backing of proud New England family connection. That his father was a pious and prudent man and his mother a discreet and virtuous woman, as he himself expressed it on the epitaph which he wrote for their monument, covered all that could be said on that score; and this was nothing at all from the viewpoint of family. Yet Philadelphia, like Boston, stands in extraor- dinary degree for the sense of respectability which lies in family permanence. Next to Franklin, no name is so closely associated with Philadelphia as that of Stephen Girard; and Girard was a native of France, whose Philadelphia advent was even more casual than that of Franklin; for with his ship he slipped into Philadelphia in a successful effort to escape English privateers, and, rather than go out to certain capture, stayed on, and became a great Philadelphia merchant. Robert Morris, the financier of the Eevolution, the great Philadelphian who financially saved the country, was English born, and Jay Cooke, the financier of the nation during the Rebellion, was an Ohio man. It is a curious similarity, in regard to these two outsiders who became so important, that each of them, after saving the nation financially, failed in his own finances and lost everything. And an unhappy dissimilarity is that although Jay Cooke happily rehabilitated himself financially, Morris, the greater man of the two, unhappily did not. Philadelphia has a university of work. Temple 6 INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS University, whose students, coming from all parts of the country, have passed beyond one hundred thousand in number in the few decades of the uni- versity's existence; and the man who founded this university, Russell Conwell, founded also a great hospital, and a church which has greater seating capacity than any other Protestant church in the United States, and Sunday by Sunday he fills it ; and he has also made himself known as among the most popular of living lecturers, in thousands of lectures throughout the land; and this Philadelphian was born in a little hill town in Massachusetts! The two editors who have the distinction of win- ning, with their periodicals, probably the greatest and most widespread circulation, not only of Phila- delphia but of the world, Edward Bok and George Horace Lorimer, came to Philadelphia, the one from Holland by way of Brooklyn and the other from Kentucky by way of Chicago. Side by side with the fact that the greatest Phila- delphians, in accomplishment, were not born Phila- delphians, there has always gone a curious indiffer- ence to distinguished men, both that the city has had and that it might have had. It is curious that Philadelphia had the chance to have Phillips Brooks ; that in fact he was for a time a Philadelphian, being rector of Holy Trinity some half century ago; but his qualities were not sufficiently appreciated here, and New England got him back and made him a bishop. And there was another bishop that the Philadel- 7 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA phians rejected who became the head of a very con- siderable corner elsewhere, Bishop Potter: for although she kept two Bishop Potters, who by the way, were both of them born in New York State, she let the other and greater Potter, Henry C. Potter, leave here and go to New York City to become a very distinguished bishop indeed. The indifference has extended to the point of not even claiming greatness that actually belongs to the city, if the city has not sufficiently cared for the man who did the deeds of greatness. The city is so de- lightfully sufficient unto itself that it has always be- lieved that it could afford to accept or ignore, just as it chanced to decide. There was Tom Paine. He was a Philadelphian when he did his greatest service for the country. Yet he is never claimed as Philadelphian; and this was not because he was a free-thinker in religion, for Stephen Girard was an avowed free-thinker, and Franklin was known to be essentially one. And, as usual, Paine was not a born Philadelphian. The way in which Tom Paine won high achieve- ment is in itself a fascinating story. An Englishman, he came to America late in 1774, armed with a letter of introduction from Franklin, who was then abroad. Within a few months oc- curred the battles of Lexington and Concord, and all that this meant to Paine at that time was, as he ex- pressed it in a letter, that it was very hard on him to have the country set on fire about his ears just as he was getting settled! But before the end of 1775 8 INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS he was flaming with American enthusiasm. "I have always," writes this patriot of a few months' growth, **I have always considered the independ- ency of this continent an event which sooner or later must arrive." By the time he had been a year in America he was writing the brilliantly patriotic ** Common Sense," and it was published in January of 1776; not, however, to Paine 's financial advantage, for his publisher even managed to figure up a balance against him of 29 pounds, 12 shillings and one penny — and somehow that penny seems to stand for so much! Then Paine enlisted and took up his musket and marched and froze and fought and retreated and suffered with the other soldiers and in the intervals of his duty, at night around the scanty camp-fires, wrote the first part of the ''Crisis," and it was printed and sent out on the very eve of Washing- ton's attack at Trenton, and had great influence in heartening the handful of soldiers for the desperate attempt. "These are the times that try men's souls!" Such were the ringing opening words. Paine 's own account of the ** Crisis" is still pre- served. '*0n the eighth of December, 1776, I came to Philadelphia and, seeing the deplorable and mel- ancholy condition the people were in, afraid to speak and almost to think, the public presses stopped, and nothing in circulation but fears and falsehoods, I sat down, and in what may be called a passion of patriot- ism wrote the first number." 9 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA What a city of glorified indifference, to be indiffer- ent to such Philadelphia achievements as these of Tom Paine ! And it is so typical. One finds it hard to believe, for Philadelphians have forgotten it or never write or speak of it, that General McClellan was born here, and the city is just as silent in regard to the fact that here was the birthplace of General Pemberton. Indeed, I think it likely that few Phila- delphians know that either of these famous generals was Philadelphia born. And the case of Pemberton was so positively bizarre. Born in this city, of old- time Quaker stock, educated at West Point and serv- ing in the Mexican War, a Northerner of Northern- ers, he nevertheless joined the Confederate army and was so trusted as to be given the command at Vicks- burg, which place, with his army, he surrendered to Grant. Exchanged, Pemberton once more threw himself into the fighting and was in command of Confederate artillery at Petersburg and Kichmond, again facing Grant up to the end. Then, after a while, this curious Philadelphia Quaker so felt the drawing charm of his city, that he yielded to it and crept unobtrusively back, and died at nearby Penllyn. The similarities, so often insisted upon, between Boston and Philadelphia, are not so noticeable as their differences. In Boston, not only is every Bostonian who won even a medium fame proudly remembered, but the house where he lived is remembered, and street ad- dresses and descriptions are scattered freely through 10 INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS every book which treats of that city. But in Phila- delphia all this is different. The city takes a pride in forgetting its own people, except the outsiders who became insiders ! — and a perverse pride in for- getting where they lived. No Philadelphia book gives the names, or, if by some rare chance a few names are given, no mention whatever of the home is made. Did you ever hear of Kate Smith? *'Fate sought to conceal her by calling her Smith," as the poet sang. But nothing could long conceal this particular Kate Smith. She wrote the story of "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm." Yes; that story, with the most charming of young girl heroines, was written by Kate Smith of Philadelphia, though few knew she had been a Philadelphian. After a while she had left Philadelphia, and lived in California and Maine and New York, and incidentally developed a partiality for marrying into names holding within them the odd combination of "igg," such as Wiggin and Riggs. She was born in Philadelphia on September 28, in the year — but, well, never mind about the year! That is quite immaterial. Some people always stay young. Where was Henry George born? For, although the fact is forgotten, the great Single Taxer was born at 413 South Tenth Street. Where did Robert Mor- ris live? His unfinished *' Folly" is tauntingly re- membered, but his home is forgotten. Nay, you would ask in vain where lived the most famous Philadelphian of all, Benjamin Franklin, 11 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA A few, a very few, could tell where was located the home that he built for himself after he had been for many years a Philadelphian, the home that was his when he died, but no one could tell you, with cer- tainty, where he lived and worked during the most important years of his life, the formative years, when he and his printing press were establishing their permanent place in the history of not only Philadelphia but of the world. Boston honors his birth-site, London his lodging place, Twyford his visiting place, Paris knows where he lived while at the French court, but Philadelphia has forgotten his working-place. And yet, it is not that Franklin has been neglected. Never was a man more profoundly honored, more deeply and ineradicably kept in mind, by any city. It is only that in this respect, as almost all other re- spects, Philadelphia is a city apart, a city of individ- uality, a city that is different, a city that must needs even forget or remember her distinguished ones, or forget or remember facts in regard to her dis- tinguished ones, according to a code and a practice of her own. Or, take Girard. It would be hard to find his home or the site of his home. But none the less he is honored and remembered. A beautiful old bank building, far down town, the first of the classic pil- lared fronts and worthy of its leadership, bears his name, and a superb new building planned by that great lover of architectural beauty, Stanford White, and put up within a few years at the busiest corner 12 INSIDERS AND OUTSIDEES of Philadelphia, bears his name, not through a con- nection with his estate, but to do honor to his memory. 13 CHAPTER II THE HIDDEN CHURCHES '''''^''''Si^>)SjEm''i'a^iMiia^!is:si!i^i^^ 'NLIKE other old cities, Philadelphia hides her old churches. Boston sets her old churches out to be seen of all, in the heart of her ^^. w^ir^v'"^^^!?'^ busiest section, where busi- ipjT&=?iS4i,:r,s5^*,ti^im; jjggg foii^ r^nd citizens of every kind, and all visitors to the city, see them per- force. New York sets her fine old Trinity and the still more ancient St. Paul's so prominently in the fore- front that all must needs see. Thus to the throngs of Broadway, of Tremont Street, of Washington Street, are displayed the fine preciousness of the fine old churches of the fine old time. But in this, as in other matters, Philadelphia is the city that is different ! Those who go down old-time Chestnut Street or Market Street or Walnut Street look in vain for any indication of long-past churchliness. And these are the three old streets along whicli goes the traffic of the present day. And this in a city which so prides herself on her churches and her churchliness! 14 THE HIDDEN CHURCHES And even when one learns where the old-time churches are to be found, it is a matter of difficulty for most Philadelphians and for all visitors to find them. They are in out of the way corners, with no far-seen upstanding spires that dominate or guide. Christ Church has a low spire that is hidden, and St. Peter's has a tall spire that is hidden, and Old Swedes has no spire at all and is even more hidden. And when it comes to St. Joseph's— but that is still another story! It is not that there has been any effort to hide the churches. There has never been persecution. The hiding has been unintentional. From the earliest days, Philadelphia has made welcome every kind of belief, and almost every kind of disbelief. Quakers, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Eoman Catholics, Free Thinkers like Girard or Franklin but not quite the Free Thinker of the heedless outspokenness of Tom Paine, have been made free of the city. Far down town as it is, hidden in a part of the city where there is no longer either business or liv- ing; except, broadly speaking, for tenement dwellers who have seized upon old houses for their tenements ; in a part of the city that is now as distinct from social life as it is from business, although geographi- cally on the very borders of both, is old St. Peter's, and I mention this church first, because Philadel- phia is a city that is still governed, in essentials, by society, and St. Peter's is the society church. To be received as one of themselves by the members of St. Peter's is all that is necessary to show that one's 15 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA standing is established; those who permittedly pass St. Peter's portal here, feel no qualms as to being permitted entrance through St. Peter's hereafter. There is no obvious reason why this should be a more aristocratic church than the still older Christ Church or the church on Eittenhouse Square which represents, more than any other of the modern churches, social leadership; but ''facts is facts and not to be drove," as I think it was Sairy Gamp who observed. The church is especially notable because it stands in its own graveyard; and this is seriously or half seriously given as one cause of its exclusive- ness. For it is not the habit of Philadelphia churches to stand in their own graveyards. Taking the general aspect of the city, the churches are grave- yardless almost to the extent of new cities of the West. Here and there is a church with a patch of graves about it, as, so unexpectedly, the Catholic church on 13th Street between Market and Chestnut. But, broadly considered, it is a city without visible grave- yard evidences, except in the formal cemeteries. St. Peter's churchyard and that of old Swedes, where the graves are in open evidence, are almost hidden successfully away from the knowledge of all but those locally born. The Philadelphian must always have shared the Louis XIV dislike of seeing the place where he was to be buried. The graveyards and cemeteries, old and new, are mostly in remote places. The largest. Laurel Hill East, West, North and South, are so cleverly perched above park paths 16 THE HIDDEN CHURCHES and drives that they hold to their Schuylkill side without being in the city scene. Broad Street has no Trinity churchyard to point a moral to the busy Philadelphian ; no Granary graveyard looks out on happy Chestnut Street. Old Arch Street graveyard would be hidden were it not that the wall is cut for Franklin's grave to show. Is this perhaps an in- fluence of the Friends, whose graveyards are peace- ful spots and not for show? Even Woodlands is on a quiet road leading to Darby and is not a daily re- minder to many passers by. It does certainly add to the dignity of a church to be surrounded by rows of gravestones, for the general effect on the general eye and consciousness as well as on the personal pride of people who can walk into church past the gravestones of their an- cestors. Much more effective as St. Peter's Church is on account of its graveyard, that is not the only reason for its exclusiveness. After all, Swedes' Church is surrounded by its own graveyard. Old Christ Church found at an early day that it must secure burying space away from the immediate vicinity of the church, which was becoming hedged about by buildings, and thereupon established its graveyard in the large space at the corner of Arch and Fifth streets. The possession of a graveyard gives opportunity to add an interest to a church by the interest of the graves; and most interesting in the graveyard of St. Peter's is that of Decatur. When Stephen 17 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA Decatur offered the toast, *'My country! May she be always right! But, right or wrong, my country!" he did not know that the words were to become one of the proud possessions of our country. For they express the sentiment of a right good fight- ing man; his not to reason why, his but to do and die. And it is odd that, after winning fame in the Tripoli fighting and in the War of 1812, and winning, in general belief, like that other hero of the 1812 war, Oliver Hazard Perry, the title of ''Commodore," although neither of those gallant men was rewarded by a thankful government with so high a title, De- catur should have died, not in battle but in a duel. Decatur attacked in words the conduct of another navy officer, James Barron, and, although Barron probably deserved to be attacked, he was the better shot, and so the career of the famous toast-maker ended in 1820, when he was but forty-one years of age. His grave is marked by a tall grooved column and on it is the declaration that his ''exploits in arms reflected the daring fictions of romance and chivalry." Beside this column is the low flat stone marking the grave of that other Stephen Decatur, likewise a right good fighting man of the navy, his father. And poor Parson Duche is buried here. He had rapidly arisen to high prominence as rector of Christ Church and St. Peter's, and had uttered such a prayer, before the Continental Congress, at the beginning of the Eevolution, as set him high in public love. But when there came the days of 18 THE HIDDEN CHUECHES Valley Forge and it seemed that only a miracle could save America, he gave up the cause for lost, and wrote Washington, advising him to make the best possible terms with Britain, while he was still able to negotiate at the head of an army. The people turned against him. He fled. And when, the war over, he crept back, his former assist- ant held the double pastorate and there was no place for Duche. His previous popularity, his prominent connections, his former friends — ^nothing availed him, and he lingered on till near the close of the century, and died, unhappy and unforgiven. St. Peter's Church is lengthwise on Pine Street, facing out across a great area of graves, many of them with the old table-top, toward Fourth Street, and backing close up to Third Street. It was built in 1761, and was an offshoot of Christ Church, and for years they were under the same rectorship. Wash- ington, when his home was in Philadelphia, attended sometimes one, sometimes the other, and Pew 41 is here pointed out as his. It is a brick church, the brick being almost black with age; the building is of narrowish effect, with slim belfry tower, six stories in height, also of brick, surmounted by a narrowish wooden steeple which runs narrowly to a peak. Vines clamber freely up the front of the belfry tower to its very top, and the great graveyard is green with grass and sheltered by the greenery of trees. Inside, one notices at once how small it is. It is even smaller than Christ Church, which itself is 19 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA small compared with the old churches of New York or Boston, but it is somewhat larger than the toy- like Old Swedes. The pews are square box-pews, said to be of cedar, and painted white; and the plainness of it all, the simplicity, the simple dignity, give a pleasant im- pression. It is notable through having its organ and altar at the eastern end and its pulpit, a lofty, narrow, sounding-boarded pulpit of white-painted cedar at the opposite end, thus compelling the rector to con- duct one portion of the service from one end of the church and the other portion from the other end, and consequently compelling the occupants of the square pews to sit facing in one direction during part of the service and to change to the other seat, to face the other way, for the other part, of the service. And Philadelphians love to tell that a young man who ia time became one of the most prominent busi- ness men, was so attentive to a young woman of the St. Peter's set, whom he afterwards married, that he even dared to go to her church to see her. It was his first visit to the church, and hoping to slip in quietly and unobserved, he tiptoed to the door. He stepped hesitatingly in — only to retreat ia panic be- cause every eye was fixed directly upon him, the congregation all facing his way; whereupon he quietly slipped to the other end, and this time entered boldly, when what was his consternation to find that, the rector, preceded by the verger, having duly 20 THE HIDDEN CHUECHES paced the church's length, the congregation had all turned and again all faced him! To St. Peter's are ascribed two stories which have spread from Philadelphia and have been applied to exclusive churches here or there throughout the country. But it is a pity to take such tales from their original habitat. One is of the society leader who, having it pointed out to her by the rector, that she really ought to call upon and thus recognize a newcomer, still de- murred. *'But you will have to meet her in Heaven!" he exclaimed. To which came the swift retort, *' Heaven will be quite soon enough!" And the other tale is of the woman who, dying, was leav- ing a life throughout every day of which every social duty had been punctiliously performed. *' Don't ask my friends to my funeral," she whispered, to her grief-stricken husband, ** because I could not re- turn their calls!" And such stories are illustra- tive. Between Market and Arch streets, in the heart of a region of three-storied business in buildings of reddish or grayish or brownish brick and where, in a permeative odor of coffee and spice, there is still a good deal of business carried on, is old Christ Church, facing toward Second Street its niched and entablatured front. It is a church which shows exquisitely what triumphs may be attained in brick work; and the sober red, dulled and darkened by the years, is dotted with black headers. There are many 21 THE BOOK OP PHILADELPHIA windows, all curve-topped. The roof is heavily balustered with white-painted pine, dulled by age to gray, with urns holding torches of carved flame. And fine architectural effects have been obtained around the windows and the doors and in the heavy projective line dividing the two rows of windows. A brick belfry, topped by a spire of white, rises square and sturdy above the level of the roof, and then continues its charming rise in diminishing gradations of wood; rising at first four-sided, then eight-sided, then in a spire narrowing to a point and to a weathervane. But if you fancy that perhaps there is somewhat of overdone detail, it is possibly not altogether fancy. Not many years ago there was a fire; and the insurance company, under its policy, chose to re- construct many parts and did it admirably, follow- ing original designs. But there were some changes ; the urns on the roof, for example, being of concrete- filled metal instead of the perilous-for-fire white pine of the original structure. In the brick pavement close about the church one notices a few gravestones ; and in particular, here is the grave of James Wilson, a Signer of the Declara- tion, a signer of the Constitution, the first chief jus- tice of the State, a man of great consideration in his day. And there are a number of flat tombstones in the aisles of the church, indoors, reminding one of the French marquis who at gi'eat expense bought the right to be buried upright within one of the pillars 22 ARISTOCRATIC ST. PETER S THE HIDDEN CHURCHES of the cathedral of his town, so that, as he expressed it, people would not be walking over his stomach for centuries. Since the time of the Eevolution the pews have been torn out and replaced; they are now low, in- stead of high; therefore there is not such interest as there might have been in knowing that President Washington sat in Pew 58 and Betsey Ross in 12, that Franklin's pew was 70 and that of the author of ''Hail Columbia!" was 65; and yet you may at least see in what part of the church these celebrities sat; where George and Martha sat and after them John and Abigail Adams. Dr. John Kearsley, a vestryman, was the archi- tect, and Philadelphians like to point out, that this church and Independence Hall, the two most dis- tinguished old-time buildings of the city, are to be credited to law and medicine, John Kearsley design- ing one and a lawyer, Judge Hamilton, also of the same vestry, the other: assuredly a most curious fact. The general aspect of the interior is simple and admirable; a smallish interior, too; with panel- fronted galleries, with three white fluted pillars on either side, with bow-front organ-loft with square- edged pillars at the corners in front, with brass chandelier pendent in the center — a chandelier for candles, which has hung here since 1749, — a wine- glass pulpit, set so far forward as to give a sense of intimacy between preacher and people, a Palladian window behind the altar (Philadelphia 23 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA loved Palladian windows!); and there is much of new stained glass that in time will take on the precious softening which comes with age. The chime of eight bells — ''Distant and soft on her ear fell the chimes from the belfry of Christ Church" — dates from the middle of the 1700 's. These bells echoed the sound when the Liberty Bell rang forth its peal, and when the Liberty Bell was carried from the city to avoid falling into the hands of the British, these bells also were taken, and all remained in AUentown until after the British went away. The custom has now come in of ringing these church bells at noontime; ringing national anthems; a patriotic sounding forth! — and, with our entry into the great war, a beautifully expressed invita- tion was set, at the door, to enter and pray for our country, our soldiers, our allies, our churches, the wounded and the dying and those who mourn, and for *'a just and lasting peace." Ancient records of the church are still preserved; with such fascinating items as one which directed a ringing of the bells on the occasion of the passing of Washington through the city. And there are items of expense, of over two centuries ago, still to be picked out of the ancient books, such as, *'A poor man's grave, 6 s."; ''Mending the minister's fence, 8 s."; "A lock for the church door, 12 s."; "A cord of wood, 10 s." To bury a poor man, one notices, cost only half as much as to put a lock on the church door. 24 THE HIDDEN CHUECHES Among its ancient treasures Christ Cliurch preciously preserves its old silver, flagons and patens, chalices and plates, thin and delicate and light, in accord with the traditions of old-time artisanship; several of them given by Queen Anne, who so interested herself in sending silver to the early churches of these early English colonies, and thus materially tending to give fine remembrance to her name and fame here in America. Set within a slender stone paved patch on either side, shut in by iron fencing, with shrubs and small- ish trees standing close, within the open spaces, there is a pleasantly leafy aspect, in leaf-time, with pleasant tilleul-like surroundings. Washington used to come out, after service, be- tween the brick pillars, topped by stone balls, under- neath the beautiful arching wrought-iron which sur- mounts the iron gates; the only wrought-iron gate and arch that I remember, in America, of anything like equal beauty, except the gate and arch of ancient Westover, on the James. Washington's coach was generally drawn by two horses, fine Virginia bays with long ** switch" tails; but not infrequently there were four horses, and on rare occasions there were six, with postillions and outriders. His coach at Christ Church entrance gate always drew an expect- ant group. And it is not to be forgotten that he frequently wore, to church, a rich blue Spanish cloak, faced with red silk velvet. At this gateway I noticed, the other day, a large- lettered invitation which to the literal minded would 25 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA seem to be a request to proselytize among the Quakers, for with a delightfully unconscious humor it read, ''Come in and Bring a Friend." Here, beside the church, lies the body of that un- quiet spirit, General Charles Lee, who, passionate and violent as he was, was for once in his impetuous life awed by a passion greater than his own, that of Washington when he met him retreating at Mon- mouth. Lee died suddenly in Philadelphia just be- fore the war came to its end. He had strongly ex- pressed the wish that his bones should not be placed in any church or churchyard, or within a mile of any Presbyterian or Anabaptist meeting house. The Episcopalians were willing to assume charge of his body, and in disregard of his wish, it was buried at the outside edge of the churchyard. It is still told in Scotland, as a pleasant winter evening's tale, that when a husband buried his wife in a graveyard where, so she had solemnly told him, she would not be able to rest, he none the less placed her there, explaining to the neighbors that if she could not rest he would take her away. Such reasoning seems to have influenced those who buried Lee in a church- yard against his will, and for three quarters of a century he quietly rested there. Then the alley be- side the church was widened, the coffin of Lee was found and was buried near the south wall of the church. It was two hundred years ago that Christ Church bought its large plot of ground for burials at the corner of Arch and Fifth streets. The area is 26 THE HIDDEN CHURCHES thick-crowded with gravestones and monuments. Numerous trees and much of grass give restfulness. The graveyard is enclosed within an old brick wall, eight feet in height ; and at the northwest corner of the graveyard, close to the junction of the two streets, the wall has been taken down for a little space, and iron pickets set there; and, looking in, there may be seen the grave of Benjamin Franklin, market by a flat stone. In his will he gave explicit directions as to this. He was to be buried beside his wife, under a marble stone, six feet by four, plain except for a small molding around the upper edge, and with the inscription, *' Benjamin and Deborah Franklin, 178- ": all of which was followed, except that unexpected longevity necessitated the change to *'1790." This graveyard is notable, too, for the famous men of the navy who are buried here. Here lies that Commodore Truxtun, who so gallantly captured the swiftest and the biggest ship of the French in the course of our misunderstanding of 1799 and 1800; here lies Bainbridge, whose services were mostly in connection with the Mediterranean pirates and who lost his ship to them; here lies the distinguished Commodore Dale, who as a young man served under Paul Jones on the Bon Homme Richard, and was the first of the gallant Americans to get aboard the SerapisI The present Christ Church building was com- pleted about 1750 ; but the land had been purchased, and the congregation founded, and the earliest 27 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA church begun under its present name, as far back as 1695, thus making it, in foundation, almost as old as the first organization of the Quakers themselves. But it is not so old as the church of the Swedes nor is it so well hidden as the Swedes. Indeed, even after you have been directed to the Swedes, and have reached the general neighborhood where you know it must be, you look in vain for it, you probably pass beyond it, and helplessly ask again. It is only skilled street pilots who can find the hidden old church at all! The Old Swedes Church goes back in inception to the time of the Thirty Years' War. How long ago that seems! And the Swedes themselves always loved to point out that the inception came from the great hero of that war, Gustavus Adolphus. And that king not only busied himself with plans for Delaware River colonization while the great Thirty Years' struggle was in progress, but only a few days before his death, at the great battle of Liitzen, he warmly urged the scheme anew. The Swedes were in Philadelphia before the com- ing of William Penn; even before the granting of a charter to Penn. And this old church, Gloria Dei, was built in 1700, on the site of a block-house in which services had for years been held. In the 1630 's some Swedes actually came to the Delaware River region to settle, and in the fifties and sixties they carried on contests and disputes with the Dutch and with the English. There exists a pleasant homely tradition of their having trained beaver who 28 THE HIDDEN CHUECHES fished for them and laid the fish on their cottage doorsteps, and another tradition of a wonderful pear tree which bore little sweet pears many years after the Swede who planted it was gone and which was the family tree of all the delicious Seckel pears of to-day. When Penn arrived in Philadelphia, he found three brothers Swanson settled not far from his landing place, and, rather than insist on his rights under his English charter he bought their claims, and their name is still kept in the memory by Swan- son Street, on which street, near Christian, stands this ancient church. It is by the waterside, and is approached, from the center of the city, through a region of square after square of misery, of squalor, of wrecked and dilapidated little houses, of streets and little alleys and courts of decay and decadence, of dirt and dearth. It is a heartbreaking district; one of the numerous districts quite unknown to prosperous Philadelphians themselves, and lived in by a pov- erty-stricken class of foreigners, who have turned the homes of sea captains and clean-living mechanics into the poorest of tenements. Towards the river are railway tracks and wharves. The church sits in the midst of a little graveyard, with a little grass and a few trees, and among the stones is one to the memory of Wilson, the beloved ornithologist of a century or so ago, who begged that his body be laid here, so that he should forever lie in a silent, shadowed place, where birds should 29 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA always sing above his grave; and in spite of the spreading hither of the city's close-built homes, the church is in a little oasis in a sad desert of barren living; and trees and birds are still there! But it is all as if it were a toy church, it is so little a building, so odd a building, so quaint and fascinat- ing and unexpected and curiosity-provoking a build- ing. And the two cherubim with collar-like wings, examples of early Swedish wood-carving, which look out at you, big-eyed, are themselves like toys, in the toylike environment. The church is of brick that is almost black with age and shimmery w^ith headers, and the heavy cornice and the windows and the belfry are of a grayish white. The building has decided Norse sug- gestion, with its peaked gable over the entrance, sur- mounted by a tiny square wooden belfry, topped by a tiny narrow spire. The little interior has a bar- rel ceiling, with the lines of the beams showing through the plaster. Within barely half a mile from Old Swedes I came upon a busy sidewalk market, extending for square after square with unimaginable variety of goods and produce, wearable and eatable, in close juxtaposition ; with sour pickles next to cloth, pickled fish close to shoes, barrels of fish adjoining rolls of cotton, barrels and boxes of apples next to gaudy shirts, all piled on shelves or counters close against the front walls of the houses or little stores. It was a busy scene, for potential customers thronged by hundreds, even though for much of the distance the walking space 30 THE HIDDEN CHUECHES was so narrowed by the displays and by the buyers, that on what was left of the sidewalks it was often impossible to walk or to wade. 31 CHAPTER III WITHIN A NOOKED COUBTYAED "^^jk^ "^OT long ago I came -upon tlie ^L trail of an interesting Ben- ^L jamin West painting ; or, at ^L least, a painting by West IpJL. ^ with an interesting history — and, after all, any paint- ing by West must needs be interesting, especially in this, his own city. The painting was of the Holy Family ; rather, it was supposed to be, because it represented a woman, in Biblical dress, giving a child a drink from a little bowl, while an old man stood behind and an angel hovered near in general watch- fulness. The painting had been given, so the story ran, to the Jesuits of Conshohocken, now a part of Philadelphia, but then a little town apart; and was turned over by the Jesuits to the Church of St. Joseph in Philadelphia, where for many years it hung behind the high altar, like so many Holy Families or Virgins in churches abroad. But one day it was discovered, or surmised, that the painting was not of the Holy Family, but of 32 WITHIN A NOOKED COURTYAED Hagar and Ishmael in the desert, and, as being in too conspicuous a place for such a subject, it was removed from above the altar and carried into the adjoining church-house. To the church-house I went, and asked to be shown the painting by Benjamin West; and somewhat of interest was awakened. But all trace or memory of the painting had vanished! New priests had come in ; no one had left any record of it ; the sexton was called into the consultation, as having had a service of more years than any of the present priesthood there, and somehow the legend or fact or memory was dimly evolved that, long ago, there was a superior who, finding that a number of paintings hung on the church-house walls, ordered them into some forgotten limbo, on the ground that they gave a darkened effect to the rooms! And there, at least for the present, the story ends. There is some possibility that the West painting may be found, tucked away with rubbish in garret or cellar. *'It would sell for a good deal of money, would it notl" I was asked, with a touch of wistful- ness; and, so continued the priestly querying, "This Benjamin West was a man of considerable standing in his day, was he not?" The Catholics, although tolerated in this city in early days, were looked upon even here with some- what of suspicious dislike, and although they did not try to hide their place of worship, they put it in an inconspicuous locality, thus trimming their sails to possible storms of persecution; and, following this 33 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA unobtrusiveness, the church, through the close-build- ing-up of the city round about, has become positively obscure in its seclusion. Its location is like a dream from some story book. There could not be, in a crowded city, a more complete hiding away of a large buildmg. The church was built nearly two centuries ago and was rebuilt and enlarged a century ago. It stood here when the Acadians came, unhappy folk, four hundred and fifty-four of them — odd, that the precise number should be kept in remembrance! — unhappy banished folk, parents who did not know where their children had been taken, children who had been torn from their parents, husbands separated heartlessly from wives and wives who had been thrust away from their husbands, never more to see them. The Evangeline and Gabriel of the poet had very real prototypes. It is strange that the Acadian horror of 1755 should thus still echo here; and the fact has been remembered that the enforced Acadian pil- grims, cynically turned ashore here, were looked upon with dread by many a Philadelphian, through the idea that they might take the part of the French against the English ; though there need not have been much dread, as two-thirds of the four hundred and fifty-four heartbroken folk were women and children. One Philadelphian wrote that they were ''no better than so many scorpions in the bowels of the country ''; but the poor scorpions did not sting: — and later, when the Eevolution was impending, it was found that the Roman Catholics were, as a rule, on 34 WITHIN A NOOKED COURTYARD the side of the Colonies. They were given recogni- tion by the patriotic leaders, and on an October day of 1774 both Washington and John Adams risked criticism by attending service in this old church still standing here. Washington quietly enters in his diary "Went to St. Joseph's in the afternoon"; not expressing comment ; which, by the way, was in great degree his cautious custom; but John Adams, fresh from the outlook of Puritanism, was frankly shocked, and poured out his feelings in a letter to his wife. To him, "the poor wretches, fingering their beads, chanting Latin not a word of which they understood, crossing themselves, bowing and kneeling and genu- flecting," were, as he put it, "awful and affecting." That Lafayette also attended services here and Eochambeau and De Grasse and others of the French, was but part of the natural order of things. A build- ing that so many people discovered in the long ago, we should be able to find to-day, in spite of the hem- ming in by office buildings and warehouses; and so this is how the church is to be found. Begin by go- ing south on Third Street, past Walnut Street, to Willing 's Alley — one of the few alleys, if not the only one, still retaining the original designation of alley; for there was many an "alley" in early days, but a finical-minded generation has changed them into "streets." Turn down Willing 's Alley, to the west- ward, between tall warehouses, and you come to an iron-gated archway, on your right, which leads you through a building and into a nooked courtyard — and here, in this nooked and unsuspected corner, is 35 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA the church! It is of brick, of dull yellow, further dulled by the passage of many years; and in one corner is the square campanile, almost Italian in ap- pearance, and of the dull yellow hue of the main body of the church. You are reminded of some Italian church on the Swiss side of the Italian border, rather than precisely of a church of Italy. It is far from beautiful. But it is of foreign aspect, and would provoke instant interest if happened upon by some strange chance instead of being sought for. The interior of the church is large and plain; the courtyard — enclosed by warehouses, the church, and the church-house — ^is paved with dull gray stone, where once was the graveyard of the church. Here, according to tradition, the body of Evangeline's Gabriel, the Gabriel of Longfellow's poem, was laid; for it was fittingly here in Philadelphia that the tale came to its end. For Evangeline, after years of wandering and with hope forever departed, came to this city, joined a sisterhood who cared for the sick, and in the yellow fever epidemic of the 1790 's found her Gabriel, in the moment of his death, in the alms- house. But not in the Quaker almshouse, as you will be told, with such an earnestness as would seem to befit Evangeline's being a real and not a fictitious woman! — not in the Quaker almshouse, which stood on the south side of Walnut Street above Third, but at the City Poorhouse, which was in the square en- closed by Third and Fourth and Spruce and Pine streets; this poorhouse being also a hospital. And although both almshouses have disappeared, the real 36 WITHIN A NOOKED COURTYAED Philadelphian, though he may be forgetful of much^ is anxious that you have correctly the details of the connection of Evangeline with his city. The imaginary Evangeline impressed herself locally far more deeply than have most of the actual distinguished folk of Philadelphia. She is more real than as if she were really real ! In fact, the story of Evangeline is taken with an amazing reality. Phila- delphia has out-Longfellowed Longfellow! For, al- though the poet, the creator of the imaginary hero- ine of the heartbreaking tale, distinctly and musically says that ''Side by side, in their nameless graves, the lovers are sleeping, under the humble walls of the little Catholic churchyard," Philadelphia still insists that Evangeline was not buried by the side of Gabriel, in the courtyard of this old St. Joseph's Church, but that her body was placed in a vault, given over to the sisterhood of which she was a mem- ber, of the Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity, at Sixth and Spruce streets, which, by the way, is not to be confounded with the Holy Trinity of Rittenhouse Square, which is Episcopalian. The Catholic Holy Trinity is itself of old-time foundation, though not so old as St. Joseph's, and it holds tombstones bearing even Spanish and French names, reminders of the long-ago frightened influx from the massacres of San Domingo. Holy Trinity was, so it is said, the last building to be erected in Philadelphia in the Philadelphia style of red and black bricks; and in a corner of the churchyard is the slab-covered vault wherein lies the supposititious 37 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA Evangeline, with the actual Sisters. And the police- man on post is often approached by people who ask him to point out to them where Evangeline is buried ! Among the founders of the hidden-away St. Joseph ^s Church was an ancestor of one to whom we may refer as the wellknown Spanish general, George G-. Meade. For Meade, of our Army of the Potomac, was born in Cadiz ! But he was a very real Philadel- phian, none the less, and his parents merely hap- pened to be in Spain on account of the business in- terests of the father. Of an old Philadelphia family that was connected with St. Joseph's, educated in Philadelphia, married in Philadelphia, a general whose principal service was directing the great battle which turned back an invading army from Pennsylvania, he was throughout of Philadelphia spirit. He was a little more ostentatious, however, than the typical Philadelphian, and I think that his riding about, on a white horse, as many a Philadelphian still describes him, savored of the ostentatious. Born in the year of Waterloo, he may have associated the idea of Napoleon and Napoleon's white battle-horse with himself. And I recently noticed a war-time photo- graph which showed so many soldiers, with General Meade in the center, that it seemed of course that it must represent him at the head of his army; but a glance at the descriptive line beneath showed that it was merely a picture of the general and his staff. In what can only be termed a certain Philadelphian feeling, however, he was all Philadelphian; a feeling 38 WITHIN A NOOKED COURTYAED which holds within it a touch of envy toward the State and the City of New York and at the same time a profound sense of superiority; for I noticed, in his ' ' Memoirs, ' ' a letter of 1863, in which he said : *'I do not like General Hooker's entourage. Such gentlemen as Dan Sickles and Dan Butterworth are not the persons I should select as my intimates, how- ever worthy and superior they may be." One feels as if those words ought certainly to be italicized ; he doesn't like the New York officers ''however worthy and superior they may be!" 39 CHAPTEE IV THE CITY OF FRANKLIN HE idea that Franklin had of I gomg about Europe with George Wasliington, with the two traveling and sightseeing together, was one of the most fascinating suggestions ever made. That the two great Americans were personal friends is itself a pleasant thing to remember. And in 1780 peace seemed to be in sight. Whereupon Franklin wrote Wash- ington, from Europe, saying that when peace should come how happy he would be to meet Washington in Europe and accompany him, as he quaintly expressed it, *'in visiting some of its ancient and famous king- doms." I like to picture the two friends, wandering about together in the Paris of before the French Eevolu- tion, or floating together in a gondola in Venice, or together standing in Westminster Hall — for England honored both Washington and Franklin, in spite of their leadership in revolt. In Europe, so continues 40 THE CITY OF FEANKLIN Franklin's letter, '*You would know, and enjoy, what posterity will say of Washington. For a thousand leagues have nearly the same effect with a thousand years." But Washington could not arrange to go, and what would have been the most fascinating travel tour of history was not made. For one reason, such a tour, of two men together, would not have met Washington's ideas. A tour, to him, meant a tour with his wife also. Even during the Eevolution Martha was for much or most of the time in camp with him, and even at Valley Forge, her presence adding not only to the happiness of Washington and herself but adding much, also, to the good spirits of the officers and soldiers. But to Ben- jamin Franklin, the normal rule for travel was to leave his Deborah at home; and Deborah seems not to have objected to the years and years of loneliness that came from Benjamin's travels and his long periods of residence abroad. Franklin was a widower at the time he wrote his delightful sugges- tion to Washington, but even if his Deborah had still been alive it would not have occurred to him as either necessary or advisable to have her with him as a traveling companion. Deborah, his ''dear Debby," died in 1774, while he was on one of his European absences, and it seems that her end was saddened and even somewhat hast- ened by his absence. And thus ended the romance which began when Franklin, a poor lad, a stranger from Boston, walked for the first time on the streets of Philadelphia, and, eating one big roll and carrying 41 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA another under his arm, found that a pretty girl was shyly laughing at him from the doorway of her home : the pretty girl to become in later years his wife Deborah. Her death at the beginning of the Revolution ex- plains why she figures in none of the diaries or ac- counts of Revolutionary days, when Philadelpliia was filled with important folk from the various Colonies. And, poor thing, she seems not to have risen with him, as he mounted; she seems always to have been a little awed by having a husband who had developed into one of the world's greatest men, and he always treated her with a sort of gentle toler- ance, and always with trustfulness. He left her in charge of the building and furnishing of the fine house that was to be their home in the evening of their days; and she attended to many things, and others she rather pathetically wrote him about, and others she left for his decision when he should re- turn. *'It was lucky for me that I had a wife as much disposed to industry and frugality as myself," he wrote. One finds her in sore tribulation over the adorn- ment of walls, the placing of furniture and the hang- ing of the pictures, fearing to displease her Ben- jamin, or to spoil the walls with nail holes in the wrong spots. And then she died. Nothing is more indicative of the confident energy of Franklin than the spirit in w^hich, the war at length over, he set himself to the completion of liis house plans, although he was at an age when most 42 THE CITY OF FRANKLIN men are thinking not at all of building on this earth. He writes in 1786, then 80 years old, of **a good many hands employed" and of making a long room for his library and instruments. The next year he writes, regarding his own dwelling and two other new houses beside it, that he has been busy with — what a list! — ** bricklayers, carpenters, stone-cutters, copper-smiths, painters, glaziers, lime-burners, tim- ber-merchants, carters and laborers." This house, representing the ambitions and ideas of his mature life, stood on Market Street (then known as High Street), between Third and Fourth. It did not, however, face toward Market Street but toward Chestnut ; it was built with the idea of being a Chestnut Street house ; but the deed given him for the land between his house and Chestnut Street was defective : — and it is odd to find one of the wisest men that ever lived, cheated in a real estate deal, and in his own city! Access to Chestnut Street being im- possible, the approach to the house was by a drive- way from Market. The house was torn down in 1812, but the driveway was retained, and was long known as Franklin Court. Now Franklin Court has gone, and a narrow alley extends quite through, with the name of Orianna Street. Where the house stood, in the center of the block, is but a dismal-looking sort of place, with old warehouses and a few ancient little, shabby, dormer-windowed, oncewhile homes, •and with nothing to suggest the fine living of the past, or the home of a great man. At almost the close of his life, Franklin put up, 43 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA on what is now Orianna Street, a rude building in which he housed a printing press; not for himself, except as a pastime, but for his grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache. In the course of years the Aurora newspaper was regularly jorinted here, and when one Duane was in possession, Bache having turned the press over to him, there arrived one day, looking for work, a young man from Ireland, named James Wil- son; not James Wilson, the Signer, who is buried at .Christ Church, but one who through a descendant won far greater fame. And at the press that Frank- lin had left, in the little printing shop he had built, there went to work this young Irishman, who shortly afterward married a Scotch-Irish girl who had crossed the ocean on the same ship with him; and a grandson of these two is Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States. To add smaller things to great it may be men- tioned that it was in this now so dingy Oriaima Street that the elder James Gordon Bennett began his printing career. Franklin had what we should even now consider advanced ideas as to fireproofing his home. ''None of the wooden work of one room communicates with the wooden work of any other room ; and all the floors, and even the steps of the stairs, are plastered close to the boards, besides the plastering on the laths under the joints." And he thinks that as in Paris, it w^ould be still better if the staircases were of stone and the floors tiled, with the roofs either tiled or slated. The house must have been really a mansion. As 44 THE CITY OF FKANKLIN a matter of fact, Franklin had gradually become rich as well as influential; and a delightful touch as to this is in the story told by himself, of how he and his wife had begun their first gathering of china and silver, which was in their first home, and not in the mansion of which I am now writing. Franklin says that for a long time their domestic habits were so simple that his breakfast was only bread and milk, eaten out of a two-penny earthen porringer, with a pewter spoon; but that at length, one morning, he fomid a china bowl and a spoon of silver, and a wife who defiantly explained that she had paid three-and- twenty shillings for the articles, thinking that her husband deserved a silver spoon and a china bowl as well as any of his neighbors ! That was the first appearance of silver or china in the Franklin house- hold, but their possessions in these two branches ** augmented gradually to several hundred pounds in value. ' ' It was a house of individuality. It was thirty-four feet square and three stories high, with three rooms on a floor. The east room was wainscoted below, with "frett cornish"; I quote from the description in an insurance policy for five hundred pounds, on the building, issued to Franklin in 1766, a document yellow with age; and the long-ago insurance man's spelling was not always what Franklin himself would have used. There was *'a rich chimney-piece," there were "fluted cullims and half pilasters, with in- tablatures," and in the description of the other rooms one finds wainscotes, pedestals and dentals, 45 .THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA a **cliimney-peice with tabernacle frame," with ramps and brackets and wainscoting along the stairs, and, outside, such things as *'two large painhouses with trusses" — supposedly meaning penthouses — and, delightful suggestion, **modilion eaves"! modilions, as all lovers of old-time architecture know, being something quite different from medallions. There were pictures in the house, as well as china and silver, and Mrs. Bache, Franklin's daughter, wrote him that, during the British occupancy of the city. Major Andre was among those billeted there and that, on leaving, he took away with him a por- trait of Franklin himself! Major-General Grey, of whose staff Andre was for a time a member, was likewise billeted at the Franklin home, and it is said that he, too, went off with a portrait, which long afterwards was sent back to the Franklin family by one of the general's descendants. Mrs. Bache, Franklin's extremely capable daughter, would nowadays be a leader of the Eed Cross. The Marquis de Chastellux extols her merits and tells of her as being at the head of a body of women who sewed and knitted for the soldiers ; she led him into a room and showed him twenty-two hun- dred shirts, just completed, each with the name upon it of the married or unmarried woman who had made it ; this being in the fiercely cold winter of 1780, and the shirts turning out to be of important practical value, keeping the soldiers in condition in the cam- paign that resulted in the capture of Cornwallis. Born in the reign of Queen Anne; the subject, in 46 THE CITY OF FRANKLIN turn, of four consecutive British sovereigns; Frank- lin exercised for many years of his eighty-four a far greater influence than did any of those sovereigns. And no man was ever so associated in so many im- portant ways with any city as was Franklin with Philadelphia. His power began with his printing press. Throughout his life he relied immensely upon the printed word to gain his ends. At the same time, no man was ever more successful than he in personal talk and persuasion, whether he was in discussion with a committee of the House of Commons in regard to America, or with a group of Philadelphians re- garding some matter of police or fire protection. But his printing press was his chief strength. It was a mighty power wielded by a mighty man. And where he and the press were located, in those early years when he was reaching toward higher and higher influence, was a fascinating question to me: a question which I supposed would be readily an- swered; and I was amazed to find no answer to it. Philadelphia had not cared to remember the location of so great a power. His home and his printing press, in the early years of his career, were in the same building, in accord- ance with the simple Philadelphia custom of the times. It has frequently been stated that the original and important printing-shop was on Second Street, close beside Christ Church, and a picture of a sort of rural English cottage with a business front is offered as a veritable pictorial presentation of the house j 47 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA although as a matter of fact the picture was made, by the late Otto Bachcr, frankly as an ideal picture of an unknown building, for a book published a quarter of a century ago. In his ''Autobiography," Franklin intends to be explicit. He ''found a house to hire, near the market, and took it." This seems to have been in 1728. Previously, he had worked for Keimer, a printer, on Second Street, and also had some deal- ings with William Bradford, a printer, on Second Street. But his venture into independence seems to have meant a venture into High Street (now Market). Books and pamphlets followed each other, from his press, with the address given "At the New Printing Office near the Market," but without nam- ing the street. A pamphlet on paper currency, the Psalms of David, the Pennsylvania Gazette, the world-famous Poor Richard's Almanac — all bear the tantalizing address, meant to describe and not to hide, but which only hides. When his wife's mother removed to his home after she became the Widow Eead, she continued her busi- ness under his roof, as is shown by the advertise- ment of her specialt}^, which was an ointment which had cured many, as she declared, and in fact never fails; it being an ointment for the itch; a "gally- pot" (delightful word!) cost two shillings, and there could be "not the least apprehension of danger, even to a sucking infant." But the value of this advertisement of Franklin's mother-in-law lies in its statement that she had "re- 48 THE CITY OF FRANKLIN moved from the upper end of Highstreet to the New Printing Office near the Market/' This, in the absence of definite evidence to the contrary, may be taken as sufficient proof that Franklin had located on High Street. For, had the Widow Eead moved from High Street to one of the cross streets she would have said so; she would not harve advertised as if she had removed from one location on High Street to another. One day, in the library that Franklin founded, I thought for a moment that I had discovered the de- sired knowledge; for in a manuscript headed, '* Franklin's Printing Office, No. (now) Market Street — ," with the number left blank, written by a Philadelphian in 1863, based, as he noted, upon in- formation from another Philadelphian of an older time, I found the deliberate statement that ''Frank- lin's old printing office was on the north side of Market Street, a few doors east of Second Street, now numbered ." There it was tantalizingly ended. Of course, it adds to the practical certainty of Market Street but omits the precise spot, which was to have been described in the manuscript when the street number should be learned. So that the man who was sure, more than half a century ago, that it was on Market Street, near Second, and not, as so many have supposed, on Second Street, felt a worried necessity to go and look it up — ^with un- satisfying results. With the idea that some old insurance policy might illuminate the subject I went on a policy quest, and 49 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA safes containing ancient documents were courteously opened for me, but still I found nothing that could apply to that early printing-house. No fire insurance company was in existence in the early days of his business life, but he founded such a company years before he left these early quarters ; he organized the first fire-insurance company of America. Never was such an organizer, never such a man to be the first to think of a thing, to see its ad- vantages, to start it going. One wonders what Phila- delphia and America would have been without him! I found that, after this company was organized, Franklin took out policies on several houses which he had acquired on Market (High) Street, but that there was none on his printing office! In one house, in- sured for two hundred pounds, dwelt Daniel Swan, another, insured for one hundred and fifty pounds, was "where E. Hadock dwells," another was *' where Mary Jacob dwells." The explanation seems to be obvious. To begin with, Franklin rented premises for his work. That is in his own account. And as business and prosper- ity increased he remained at the same place, still a renter; buying now and then a house and lot as in- vestment but continuing himself to rent the combined house and shop where he worked and lived. Had he owned his place, he would certainly have insured it with his other properties, when insurance com- panies began, through his initiative, to be organized. And the rented building seems almost surely to have been on the north side of Market Street, just 50 THE CITY OF FRANKLIN east of Second. Nothing could more have surprised him than the fact that the location could so soon and so completely be forgotten. Why, it was some- thing that everybody knew! When the marvelous preacher Whitefield, who spent much of his time in America and in sailing back and forth thirteen times, between England and this continent, in an age when one crossing was no light task, was about to make one of his visits to Philadelphia, he wrote his friend Doctor Franklin as to where he could stay, as he had learned that Benezet, at whose house he had usually stayed, had moved out to Germantown. Whereupon Franklin responded: "You know my house. If you can make shift with its scanty accom- modations, you will be most heartily welcome." To which came Whitefield 's reply, expressing the hope that Franklin made the offer for Christ's sake; to which the forthright Benjamin answered, ''Don't let me be mistaken; it was not for Christ's sake, but for your sake." And Whitefield, no doubt with a chuckle of appreciation, accepted the invitation. Not far from Franklin's house, in the open air, at the junction of Market and Second streets. White- field delivered one of his famous outdoor sermons, and Franklin, who knew that it had been asserted that at some of his gatherings in England he had been heard by twenty-five thousand listeners, found to how great a distance he could move away and still hear the preacher, and then, by estimating the number of square feet mthin the space, allowing two square feet for each individual, he found that it 51 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA would be possible for thirty thousand outdoor hear- ers to hear that marvelous voice. None knew better than Franklin that, broad though Philadelphia was in religious tolerance, she was not broad in irreligious tolerance; a distinction seldom made. Franklin was more irreligious than religious, but deemed it best not to insist on the unbelieving features. He took the religious test necessary to hold office, and he was associated with Christ Church; and he could genially say, in friendly talk or letters, that he did not believe in every particle of the Bible as inspired; for example, he could believe that Jael drove a tent peg into the head of Sisera, but not that such an act received the warm approval of the Angel of the Lord. When Whitefield came back from the South with a scheme of raising a great sum for Georgia orphans, Franklin doubted the good policy of the scheme. Then he went to listen to Whitefield 's public address urging contributions ; and with rueful amusement he tells that he had three kinds of money in his pocket, copper and silver and gold, but was determined not to give even a copper, but that Whitefield 's eloquence so moved him that he found himself handing over all the copper, and after a while all the silver, and before the address was concluded even the pieces of gold. In Europe, he made friends with the greatest. Even the first William Pitt came driving to his door. And always he was ready with the right word, to harmonize and control, or to resent in cleverness some attack on his country. At a dinner in Paris 52 THE CITY OF FEANKLIN shortly after the close of our Revolution the English ambassador, responding to the toast of "Great Britain," likened his nation to the sun, shedding beneficent rays upon all the world. Franklin, fol- lowing him, was to respond to the "United States"; but, he said, his own nation was still young, her career was to come; so, instead, he would give as a toast, "George Washington, — the Joshua who suc- cessfully commanded the sun to stand still." While the Revolution was in progress he wrote to his friend Priestley — the same Priestley, dis- tinguished as philosopher and scientist, who later, in the 1790 's, disappointed in England, came to America and made his home far up in the Susquehanna valley, in a region still distant and lonely even after all these decades; — he wrote to Priestley: "Tell our dear good friend, Mr. Price, who some- times has his doubts and despondencies about our firmness, that America is determined and unani- mous ; a very few Tories and placemen excepted, who will probably soon export themselves. Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees this campaign, which is twenty thousand pounds a head; and at Bunker's Hill she gained a mile of ground, half of which she lost again by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During the same time sixty thousand children have been born in America. From this data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole country. ' ' Yet always and everywhere, he was the same 53 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA simple, kindly unpretentious man. Manasseh Cutler, of Connecticut, and shortly to be of Ohio, went to see Franklin, armed with letters of introduction. He felt the same, as he afterwards wrote, as if about to be presented to some European monarch, and was prepared to let the conversation consist of merely answering such questions as the great Franklin should choose to ask. Imagine then, his surprise, at finding a man of unaffected simplicity, friendly and cordial, seated in his garden, on a grass plat, under a very large mulberry tree, a low-voiced man in plain Quaker dress, white-haired and partly bald. Tea was served beneath the mulberry tree, by Mrs. Bache, to Franklin and Cutler and several friends, and as it grew dark they all went into the house and the intel- ligent Cutler was pleased with the chance of thus see- ing the largest and finest private library in America. Cutler's reference to Franklin's Quaker dress brings to mind an advertisement which was inserted in a Philadelphia paper, half a century before this ; precisely forty-nine years before if one desires exact- ness. For Franklin's clothes had been stolen, and he advertised for them, describing the garments as ** Broadcloth breeches lined with leather, sagathee coat lined with silk, and fine homespun linen shirts." Nothing ever daunted Franklin, no work was ever too hard for him. He takes over, when far on in years, near the end of his life, the Presidency of the State of Pennsylvania, such being the title in those days, and is elected and then reelected. He writes to the Duke de la Eochefoucauld in 1787 that he 54 THE CITY OF FEANKLIN has been elected, and says, with pardonable pride: '*0f seventy-four members in Council and Assembly, who voted by ballot, there was in my first election but one negative, beside my own ; and in the second, after a year's service, only my own.'* His energy, his spirit, were unconquerable. One cold day in a village in Normandy I saw a happy father walking beside a smiling nurse, carrying his first-born child to church to be baptized; and I was told that the child was Kut three or four hours old; and I thought I could understand how it was that the Normans had made themselves world rulers; and it also came to me that here likewise lay an explanation of the tireless endurance of that world conqueror of thought, Benjamin Franklin, for on a January day in bleak Boston he had been carried to the Old South Church to be baptized only four hours after his birth. Franklin founded the still-existent American Philosophical Society, he invented the Franklin stove, he founded the still-existent Pennsylvania Hospital, he was the first to utilize electricity, he was the leader in matters of street paving, fire protec- tion, matters many and important. Into everything that he created he breathed the breath of life. And it would astonish organizers of to-day to know that Franklin did not look for personal exploitation. He did not wish his name to be given. He did not even, as a rule, take part as the prinicipal director or the president. He made it part of his system to remain modestly in the background; he managed and controlled, but deemed it wise not to put him- 55 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA self in the forefront as manager and controller. Yet everybody knew that he was. One of his foundations was that of the noble Library Company of Philadelphia. It came about through Franklin and his friends lending each other their books, and his seeing what would be the im- portance and benefit of an organized system. And so, in 1731, he organized a formal library. Its first books came in 1732 from England. Between 1731 and 1742 eighty-five men signed the articles of in- corporation, and those of present-day Philadelphia who can possess ownership of one of the early shares by descent are proud indeed. The library began its existence on Pewter Platter Alley, a name long since *' improved" to Church Street. Franklin's enthusiasm was contagious. Books came freely in. James Logan willed his own large library, a valuable and precious collection, to the organization. Over in England, one day, while Benjamin West was painting a portrait of one Samuel Preston, who owned many bookish treasures, the painter looked around and said, "What do you intend to do with all your books I ' ' Preston did not know ; he had no children. ' ' Then send the books to the Philadelphia Library," said West; and Preston did! The library, after some movings, is now housed at Locust and Juniper streets, and a statue of Frank- lin in a toga, making him look very uncomfortable, is up in the gable. But within the library there is an atmosphere of scholarly quiet such as Franklin him- self would have loved. 56 THE CITY OF FEANKLIN Franklin was not only a creator of organizations and corporations that still live; he was also a seer and a prophet, a man of vision. Before even a single cabin was erected where the great city of Cleveland now stands, when there was no road but an Indian trail, and while the mouth of the Cuyahoga was but a sandbar, Franklin, from his study of conditions, pointed out the site of the future Cleveland as the place at which an important city was to arise. The crumpled face of Franklin, a face like a finely crumpled mask, was one that could literally mask his thoughts when he did not care to have them known. And one matter on which he was absolutely reticent was that of the identity of the mother of his son, William Franklin. His "Autobiography," one of the few great auto- biographies of the world, written largely in ''the sweet retreat of Twyf ord, ' ' in England, where he was the guest of the beloved Bishop Shipley of St. Asaph, in the bishop 's home — which I remember as a mellow building of Georgian brick, with its front charmingly covered with ivy and roses, at the edge of a prettily sedate village — does not give any intimation in re- gard to this mystery of his life. Even had the ''Autobiography" been published in full, as written, it is not likely that any hint would have been found. But any possibility of this sort was done away with by the grandson, "William Temple Franklin, to whose care Benjamin Franklin, by will, had committed the MS. for publication. William Franklin, Benjamin's son, died before his 57 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA father. William Temple Franklin was William's son, and he postponed publication of the ''Auto- biography" for years, and is understood to have eliminated large sections, on account of pressure from certain people who did not wish revelations made, and he was certainly in receipt of large sums of unexplainable money from English sources. The thought is hopelessly tantalizing, of what precious chapters were destroyed, of how much of fascinating interest was thus lost to the world. The romance which early began between the youth- ful Benjamin Franklin and Deborah Eead was broken by temporary estrangement and by Ben- jamin's absence on a tentative trip to England. On his return, he seems then or shortly afterwards to have been the possessor of the unexplained William; and Deborah herself had meanwhile been having an unhappy matrimonial experiment; and the two, de- ciding to let bygones be bygones, married, and con- tinued their comfortable union into old age ; Deborah accepting the mysterious William as a member of the household. I have long thought, from various indications, that the mother of William was of a prominent English family. The youthful Benjamin had been on his first visit to England and he always had a taking way with him, with women as well as men. Modest as was his worldly position in his years of earliest man- hood, he had such looks and manners that he at- tracted the personal attention of Governor Keith of Pennsylvania and Governor Burnet of New York, 58 THE CITY OF FRANKLIN shortly before Ms first journey abroad, so there was nothing surprising in his having made friends and attracted special attention in England. In various ways one sees indications of some strong but hidden English influence. His son Wil- liam was entered at the English Inns of Court before leaving this country. When William received his appointment as Governor of New Jersey, it was not looked upon so much as an effort to win Franklin to the English as an appointment made on the per- sonal account of the son. And although Franklin himself was content to marry a young woman of low degree, from a society standpoint, he aimed high for William, and looked for an alliance for him with a relative of Governor Keith, and was angry with Keith for not accepting the suggestion : which doubt- less explains, at least in part, the bitterness which Franklin felt toward Keith, as expressed in his story of their relations in the ' ' Autobiography. ' ' And Wil- liam Franklin took tlie English side in the Revolution in spite of his father 's urgent appeals ; he knew some- thing, at least, of his birth, and deemed himself an Englishman. But if there was a love affair between the re- markable Benjamin and some one of high standing, William at least did not live up to romantic ideals, but married prosaically (his wife's monument is in old St. Paul's, on Broadway, in New York), and was prosaically imprisoned in Connecticut in the course of the Revolution, and then went into prosaic banish- ment, and prosaically died, after an interview with 59 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA his father, in England, which failed to heal the gap between the two which had come with war. One is justified in wondering in regard to such a mystery concerning such a man as Benjamin Franklin. Chaucer, in his ''Franklin's Tale," has described a Franklin: a friend-maker, a sturdy, clearsighted man, a prosperous man and so hospitable a man that ''it snowed in his house of meat and drink"; or to quote good old Chaucer more literally, his Franklin was "so gret a househaldere" that "it snewed in his hous of mete and drjTik." In spite of Franklin's remarkable association with Philadelphia, and the importance of his ideas and the impetus behind them, one always associates him also with England and France. He was the first American Citizen of the World. Even now no Phila- delphia home is properly set up if it does not possess a copy of the picture of "Franklin at the French Court"; a rather stilted matter, painted perhaps a half century after both Franklin and the French Court had vanished. Benjamin Franklin, gave much to France. Among other things he gave it both the motto and the name for a terrible Revolutionary hymn ; he gave it the in- spiration for ' ' Ca Ira. ' * For he frequently had used the two words, meaning "It will go, it will succeed," in reference to our own Revolution, and when the French so shortly afterwards came to a revolution of their own, they took his words and put them to ter- rible music. "Ca Ira!" they sang exultantly; and with the idea of revolution they associated the dread- 60 THE CITY OF FRANKLIN ful cry of the aristocrats and tlie lantern — ^the lan- tern, literally the lantern, in front of many a house, to which the aristocrats were dragged for death; '*Ah, ea ira, ca ira, ga ira! Les aristocrates a la lanterne!" When Franklin died, the National Assembly of France, on the motion of Mirabeau, seconded by Eochefoucanld and Lafayette, went into mourning for three days. When Jefferson went to represent the United States at Paris, Vergennes said to him, cordially: *'So you replace Dr. Franklin?" To which came the instant reply: *'No; no one could replace him; I only succeed him." CHAPTER V THE STATE HOUSE BUILDING of serenity and symmetry, of fine am- plitude, a gracious, al- luring building, rich in noble memories, yet touched also with a living sweetness; such is the beautiful old State House in Philadelphia, often referred to as In- dependence Hall. And it stood here, and was even then a building of age and dignity, when Sir Walter Scott said to Washington Irving, with a tolerant con- descension which he meant to be flattering, "The vast aboriginal trees that have sheltered the Indians be- fore the intrusion of the white man, are the monu- ments and antiquities of your country ! ' ' Scott was quite ignorant of the fact that America had archi- tecture; to him, our country had merely trees, although this building, and some other American buildings, were richer in beauty and in noble associ- ation than quite a number of those in his o^vn land of which he wrote with such enthusiasm. Scott was deeply impressed by the thought of our illimitable forests. He longed to see one, as Dickens 62 THE STATE HOUSE longed to see an American prairie. And had Scott come over here, and had he seen not only a forest but this State House, his imagination would have been fired, and he might have written a great novel about America, rich in details of the Revolutionary leaders, with the picturesque John Hancock, in scarlet coat and cocked hat with black cockade, enter- ing this building to preside at the Signing of the Declaration. The painting of the Signing, by Trumbull, is the formal artistic offering, by America, in regard to it ; the general effect is excellent, and the portraits are likenesses. It stands well up among historical paint- ings in general, including those of Europe, for a cer- tain stiffness of pose seems almost inseparable from historical paintings which show a large number of characters. And if one notices, in engravings of the painting, discrepancies as to various details and postures, this is not to be blamed upon the engravers, but is to be explained by the fact that Trumbull, finding that he had hit upon a good subject, made several replicas, with minor divergencies. The Trumbull Gallery at Yale has one of his Declarations ; there is one at the Hartford Athenaeum; there is one in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington. Trumbull does not in any of the pictures show every one of the Signers, though he shows almost all of them in all; and he seems to have had some eliminative ill-will toward Caesar Rodney. Trumbull's "Declaration," with its rows of legs, 63 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA was irreverently given the appellation of ''the shin- piece," supposedly by the sharp-witted Eandolph. And it is known that some peculiarly vicious flies from a neighboring livery stable caused great an- noyance to thin-hosed patriotic shins on the day of the final vote, and indeed that this hastened the mem- bers in voting in order that they might escape. Yet it should not be thought that on that famous July the Fourth the members, in formal dignity, one after another signed, making the signing a natural sequence to brave voting. In the first place, the fact that there was not a single adverse vote does not show that the vote was unanimously affirmative; for part of the Pennsyl vania delegation and the entire New York delegation refrained from voting at all. Not until July 15 did the delegates from New York decide to stand, for the Declaration, and not until after July 20, when other delegates were named in place of those who had re- fused to vote, was the Pennsylvania number com- plete. Nor was the Signing all done on one day, either July the Fourth or another! On July the Fourth, the supposed day of the signing, the Declaration was actually signed only by John Hancock, President of the Congress, and Charles Thompson, Secretary. And it was a brave thing for the somewhat dandified Hancock to do. He had fled in the middle of the night from the rough and ready fighting of Lexing- ton and Concord, but was ready to be the first to sign the document under which the leaders hazarded 64 THE STATE HOUSE THE STATE HOUSE their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor; he had fled from muskets but was valiantly willing to risk the losing of life and fortune if a formal arrest should be followed by a formal trial and by formal and public punishment. It was no mere jest when Benjamin Franklin remarked, "Well, gentle- men, if we do not, now, all hang together, we shall all hang separately!" Hancock was proud of his big signature. He was proud of his personal appearance as he sat in the chair of the President of the Congress. The chair is still here, in place in the hall where he presided. It is an armchair of mahogany, a Chippendale, the very king of Chippendales, rising to double height, as a presiding officer's chair ought to rise, with inter- laced and open-work back, and with a rayed sun, touched with gold, in the center of its bow-shaped top. Gorgeous dresser that Hancock was, he doubt- less had more than flitting thoughts as to which of his many suits would best become him should he be placed on his formal trial — should there ever be a trial ! For almost a month Hancock's name and that of the secretary were all that the Declaration bore and even these were signed over again, on the supposed July the Fourth document, when it was fittingly en- grossed on parchment. The name of George Wash- ington never appeared, for he had resigned his place as a member before the Declaration was presented, to assume, at the request of Congress, his place with the army as its commander ; a place of more personal 65 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA danger than that of Hancock, for Washington was not only just as sure of the extremity of punishment if he were captured, but he was also in the physical danger that came from the operations of war. Most of the members formally signed this supposed Fourth of July document on August the second, but a few did not put down their names until still later. And how oddly some of the members signed! There was one ''William," but five who reduced it to "Wm." Huntington was "Samel." Hopkins was "Step." Lewis was "Frans." Stockton was "Richd." Rush signed "Benjamin," but two other Benjamins, Harrison and Franklin, signed "Benja." There was only one who spelled out "George," and four who signed it "Geo." "Charles Carroll of Carrollton," who signed thus lengthily so that, as he expressed it, King George should know which Charles Carroll it was, was one who, like part of the Pennsylvania delega- tion, was a member on August 2 but not on the momentous July 4. It meant something, too, Car- roll's saying this, for it is said that he added "of Carrollton" because of the fleer of some member that there were so many Carrolls that he might be safe! He was believed to be the wealthiest man in the Colonies. His property at the beginning of the Revolution was estimated at two million dollars. All this he risked ; yet he lived until 1832, to the age of 95, the last to survive of all the Signers. The hero of Delaware is Caesar Rodney, and an active earnest man he seems to have been. I am 66 THE STATE HOUSE glad to think that I possess a great fireside chair, fortunately chanced upon in Wilmington, years ago, which seems in almost certainty to have belonged to him ; a strong and dependable chair, like the depend- able Rodney himself. The people of Delaware honor him because of his having been a good citizen and a gallant of^cer, but more particularly because of a ride ; and two to\vns quarrel over the honor of its beginning! And the ride was a tremendously rapid and eager ride, made that he might get to Philadelphia to vote for the Declaration. The voting was by States, not in- dividuals. There were three members from Dela- ware. One favored the Declaration, one opposed it, Caesar Rodney, the third, was absent. It was vital that the vote of Delaware be recorded, so a messenger was hurried after Rodney, who was found some miles beyond Dover. He at once swung into his saddle and galloped eighty miles, reaching the State House and striding into the meeting hall at just the needed moment. It was a dramatic ride, and a tremendously dramatic scene. Yet, as with so much of picturesque Americanism, it has been wellnigh forgotten, except locally, because no novelist or poet ever gave it thrilling life. There were no impetuous Paul Revere verses, and no Browning put such fire into this ride from Dover to Philadelphia as has been given to the gallop from Ghent to Aix. Alas! the best that was done for Caesar Rodney, versically, were such lines as: 67 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA * * Ho, saddle the black ! I 've but half a day, And the Congress sits eighty miles away"; and **The Congress is met; the debate is begun, And Liberty lags for the vote of one — When into the hall, not a moment too late. Walks Caesar Eodney, the delegate." I have read in somebody's long-ago memoirs, but not of a date quite so far back as the time of Jeffer- son, that somebody one day asked him how he reconciled the *'A11 men are created equaP' clause, that he had written, with the existence of slavery. For a moment he was dumb with astonishment, then : **By God! I never thought of that before!" "Where is Jefferson?" wrote Washington, from Valley Forge. The long slim statesman is very prominent in Trumbull's picture, and was so in reality ; but during the terrible days of Valley Forge, although then only about thirty-five years old, he was not with the army! His words had got other men in! Nor was he even with Congress. He had recently resigned, when strong men were desperately needed there, and had given his private concerns as excuse! He was rich, with a huge estate. He en- tered the State legislature, and before the war was over became Governor of Virginia. After all, North and South were alike; Hancock and Samuel Adams galloping in mad fear away from the coming fight at Lexington, and Jefferson shrink- ing from Valley Forge. If one chose to be cynical, he might remark that a successful statesman is a man who gets others to fight and then keeps away 68 THE STATE HOUSE from the fighting. But one need not be cynical about exceptions. Franklin would readily have fought, but he was almost seventy, and the country needed him to be in France. Washington fought. Most of the men of the time fought or were quite ready to fight. Quite a number of years after the Eevolution, Philadelphia awoke to the realization that it did not know in which building Jefferson actually wrote the Declaration; and, as the matter began to be talked about, some one remembered — it was now 1825 — that Jefferson was still living, and thereupon wrote and asked him, and Jefferson's response was that he was lodging, at the time of writing the Declaration, in a new brick house, three stories high, on Market Street, between Seventh and Eighth, of which he rented the second floor, and that it was there that he wrote it. He added that he had ''some idea it was a corner house." And it was. A man named Gratz was his landlord, and it was a new house at Market and Seventh streets. The building was not many years ago torn down, and the building of the Penn National Bank stands in its place, bearing a tablet setting forth the important fact regarding the Dec- laration. How very near the Revolution is! To any one who studies history and knows human nature, it was but yesterday. But to hear a Philadelphian casually say, "When my great-grandmother received General So-and-so at her home here in 1776," or, "My great- grandfather gave more money to the Revolutionary 69 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA cause than any other man except his fellow-towns- man, Robert Morris," or, **My family have always told that on the day of the Signing," and so on, brings it very close and very real. The State House, "Independence Hall," was planned in 1729 and completed, except as to wings and tower, five years later: — quite old enough, one sees, to satisfy even a Walter Scott! But it must not be thought that it is beautiful or interesting prin- cipally on account of age. Age adds to a beautiful building the salt and savor of time, the romantic patina, literal or metaphorical, that com.es with the decades. But this State House is beautiful in itself; it was beautiful when it was young and new; it will remain beautiful as long as it stands, with its tradi- tions growing more interesting with time. After all, Philadelphia was the largest and richest Colonial city of Great Britain, and so it was natural that a fine administrative structure should be built here. And it was put up in the same period which saw the construction of two other admirable State Houses, that of Boston (not the stately pillared building of the present time, but the delightful ancient State House), and the charming State House of Annapolis. All three are lessons in good taste, in positive beauty. And the Philadelphia structure is the finest of the three. But what chances of leadership Philadelphia quietly relinquished! Those other cities of early and beautiful State Houses have retained their literal capital importance. But Philadelphia let 70 THE STATE HOUSE her headship of the nation pass. She even let pass the headship of the State. The State House has witnessed many important scenes, besides those connected with the Declara- tion. Here assembled thousands of cheering citizens when the news came of Concord and Lexington. Here Washington was chosen commander-in-chief. Here, in 1781, the captured standards of the army of Cornwallis were brought by a cavalry escort and formally carried into the building and laid before Congress. Here Lincoln raised a flag on Washing- ton's Birthday, 1861, and four years later his body was carried here to lie in state, his troubles forever at an end. The Constitution was debated, agreed to, and signed, in this building; and Franldin, who had watched and taken part in the proceedings with in- tense anxiety, breathed a deep sigh of relief and said, gravely, that in the vicissitudes and anxieties of day after day he had looked at the representation of the sun on the back of the chair used by Washington, the presiding officer (the same chair that had been used by Hancock) ; and he had wondered, day by day, whether it was a rising or a setting sun, but now he knew that it was a rising sun. The State House is a beautiful building, alike in its mass effects and in its smallest details, in the views of it from the exterior or in rooms within. Its fagade is exactly centered, and similarly winged and arcaded at right and left. It is beautiful and it is balanced. Seen from Independence Square, which is a large 71 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA open space, stone paved, with intervening surfaces of grass and fair-sized trees, it is a towered building of time-mellowed brick, with white window stones, with smallish pillared doorway beneath a tower built outside the lines of the main buildiDg, and, over this doorway, a splendid Palladian window. Above are cornicings, and a fetching, bulging, bow-fronted window, and above this is a clock-tower, square at the bottom and rising in eight-sided diminutions to a six-sided narrow pinnacle which is topped by a trident-like weathervane of gilt. Enter beneath the triple Palladian window, with its heavy muntins, and, passing by the foot of the finest stairs in America, you enter a broad and brick- paved central hall; and there comes the sense of a glory of white, with touches of mahogany and dark- ish green. The rooms are serenely beautiful; they are digni- fied, large and light; there are pillars and pilasters, there are charming cornices, there are panels; in every direction one sees beautiful corners or vistas or entrance-ways. The view through the arches of the room of the Supreme Court, into and across the Hall of the Signing, defined by those three pilastered arches, is astonishingly effective. At the foot of the wonderful stairs now stands the Liberty Bell, upon which may still be read the Bible verse which long before the Eevolution was cast upon it by its makers: ''Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof." The stair mounts, ramp by ramp, within the great 72 THE STATE HOUSE tower; a broad stair with broad treads and low risers ; and on the second floor, as on the first, there are everywhere long and lovely vistas of distinction. And on the second floor is a great banqueting hall, entered through a delicately bell-flowered doorway topped by a beautiful fanlight, occupying the entire length of the building; and at each end of the great room is a broad fireplace, with the intent that the two shall flicker at each other with fineness of effect. The Hall of the Signing is a noble room which it- self might weU inspire to noble deeds. It is a beauti- fully pilastered room with three great broad-silled windows on each side and with two of its corners rounding. Here is not only the chair of Hancock, but here, too, is the desk which he used, here is the silver inkstand into which he dipped his pen, with quill-pen holder and sanding-box, looking, in all, some- thing like a cruet of the period, and standing upon a little four-legged silver salver. It is an admirable bit of workmanship, one of the best by that Syng who, a friend of Franklin and a man of standing, was among the most interesting of early Philadel- phia silversmiths, of whom there were so many, in early days, that fifty-six walked in one parade in the 1780 's. Others were scattered throughout the country, in little towns and big, working toward high standards of craftsmanship. This inkstand, as a reminder of early American art, is of interest ap- proaching that of the work of the contemporaneous silver-worker of Boston, Paul Revere, he of the Eide. The chairs, except that of the presiding officer, 73 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA that for many years have been shown as those used by the Signers, do not seem to be the actual chairs, as they are of the style of a later period. They were doubtless secured for legislative meetings here, after the Revolution, the original chairs having been mis- used, broken and burned, in the period of British occupancy, when the State House and much of its contents were rather roughly treated. The Hall of the Signing — about such a room such details ought to be known — is thirty-nine feet and six inches wide, by forty feet and two inches long, with a height of nineteen feet and eight inches; the intent having apparently been to have it precisely forty by forty by twenty. Sully's portrait of Lafayette displays the French- man as he appeared on his visit in 1824 ; he wears a coat with a lining of old-rose silk, and his pleasantly humorous look accents the length of his long nose; and his face does naturally lend itself to likable humor I And here, too, facing Lafayette at the foot of the grand staircase, is a painting of Washing- ton. It is somewhat unfortunate that the high value of many other portraits that have been preserved iii the State House has been lowered by the intrusion of copies, hung on the same walls as the original por- traits, and of pictures of doubtful pedigree. Tliis grew to be such a glaring matter that to enter the State House and look around at the portraits used to give one somewhat the feeling of the tourist who, entering Holyrood, is sho^vn long lines of mythical 74 THE STATE HOUSE portraits said to be those of Scottish kings. Yet the fault, in the State House, is to be remedied, and in fact the matter has for a long time been under exami- nation. Such portraits as those, of veritable authenticity, by Charles W. Peale, of a number of the Signers, would alone make the building a treasure house, and there are also the little pastels, veritable gems, of fascinating interest, made by James Sharpies, including one of exceptional in- terest, made of Washington, from life, in 1796. Englishman though he was. Sharpies did a distinct service to America in making these pastels; and at the prices he received, fifteen dollars each for pro- files and twenty for full face, he could not have be- come precisely wealthy. The city purchased the Sharpies collection, of forty-five pastels, in 1876. A vigorous statue, placed with peculiar promi- nence opposite the Independence Square face of the State House is of Barry, a naval officer of the Revo- lution, a Philadelphian. He is buried in the Catholic St. Mary's, on Fourth Street, adding thus to the striking number of naval officers of note who are buried in Philadelphia. On the broad sidewalk, in front of the Chestnut face of the building, is an in- effective statue of Washington. A tang of especial distinction is given to the ad- mirable Chestnut Street face of the State House by the unusually high keystones, of marble, which center the brick above each of the ample windows and rise into a band of dark gray marble that ex- tends across the entire one hundred and seven feet 75 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA of the building's front; and by a line, above this band, of nine panels of marble, beneath the windows of the second floor. The quoins on the corners, and the fine wooden cornice and balustrade, add still further distinction; and in all it is a noble and dis- tinguished building, rich in noble and distinguished memories. The Fourth of July and the Declaration of In- dependence have become so associated in the public mind that it is odd to realize that at the time of that first ''Fourth," of 1776, it was not so particularly held to be a day of importance. On June 7, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia (a Philadelphian, writing of this, would be sure to put in the fact that a sister of Lee married into the powerful Shippen family of this city) moved, ''That these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.'* Congress directed the secretary not to mention in the journal the name of Lee, or that of the seconder of the motion, John Adams, for fear of British punishment, and so the record reads, "Certain resolutions regarding independency being moved and seconded. ' ' A committee to prepare a statement or declara- tion was appointed on June 11. A sub-committee was then appointed, consisting of Jefferson and John Adams. Jefferson wrote the Declaration. He himself said that he wrote it, and Adams also said that Jefferson wrote it, so no attention need be paid to those who from time to time have attempted 76 THE STATE HOUSE to claim that it was some one else than Thomas Jefferson. On July 2 Congress voted formally for independ- ence. On the third and fourth the precise form of statement was debated. And on the ''Fourth" the form written out by Jefferson, with some merely minor alterations, was accepted. Thus did the ''Fourth" begin. But nobody except Congress then knew it ! The public could know little as to precisely what was going on, for the meetings were secret. After all, it was at that early period still to be deemed treason, and the delegates could not afford to be heedless of that fact. On the eighth of July the Declaration was read formally to the people, from a platform beside the State House, and the Liberty Bell rang out its peal, and all the bells of the city echoed it. For some days the passage of the Declaration had in a general way been known, the news having seeped out; but as America had been actually at war for over a year, the voting of the Declaration did not, at the time, seem so vital as it seems to-day. And it was noted and noticed that, on the day of the formal reading, the rich and dis- tinguished folk of the city were not here, to en- courage the movement; no large crowd gathered; and the few who stood and listened were of the poorer class. There were "not half a dozen good coats" in the crowd, as a Philadelphian wrote, and it was a thoroughly Philadelphian observation. But the Fourth of July gradually took hold of the minds and hearts of the people, throughout our en- 77 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA tire country; and with most excellent reason, for it was on that day that the Declaration of Independ- ence was actually adopted, and was signed by the President of Congress, and became formally our nation's act. Within a year the ''Fourth" had won its position, and I like to think of the very first of the annual celebrations, on July 4, 1777, in this city of the Signing. Congress was still in session here, and there were parades and reviews, of both the land and the sea forces, there being several ships in the river at the time. There was music by a Hessian band that had been captured at Trenton on the Christmas previous — ^what an amazingly good touch ! — and at night nearly every housefront was charm- ingly aglow with candles lighted and set in the windows. Just a trifle away from the east wing of the State House, at the corner of Chestnut and Fifth streets, is a smallish building which was put up in 1791 for the use of the Supreme Court of the LTnited States, and the little building at the corner of Chestnut and Sixth is still more interesting; it would, in fact, be of far more interest than it is were it not that its fame is overshadowed by that of the more notable State House beside it; for this smallish building is Congress Hall, and in it Congress met while Phila- delphia was the national capital, and here Washing- ton was inaugurated for his second term. Here, too, in this little building, Washington pronounced that Farewell Address which, delivered toward the close 78 THE STATE HOUSE of Ms second administration, stands so superbly as a model of dignity and far-sightedness. One seems still to see Mm, to hear Mm, so solemnly offering to the new nation that he loved Ms profoundly earnest advice. It was also in tMs demure little building, standing so almost unnoticed beside the imposing State House, that Washington, a few months after the delivery of this Farewell Address, turned over the Presidency to his successor, John Adams. And in regard to tMs there is a remarkable account. It seems that the people who packed the building and thronged round about it thought but little of the new President, and of Jefferson, the new Vice-Presi- dent, compared with the man they so loved, who was leaving them. When Adams and Jefferson went away they went practically alone. Washington stood, to watch them go. And the throng stayed, in silence, to look to the last moment upon Washing- ton. And it was noted and written down, that he wore on that day a suit of black velvet, that his hair was powdered and in a bag, that he wore diamond knee-buckles and a gray-scabbarded light sword. Adams went to his room at the Indian Queen, at High Street and South Fourth, and the punctilious Washington started gravely to walk there, ''to pay my respects to the new President." In total silence the great crowd followed him. The door opened; but before entering, he turned and looked silently at the people. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and from the crowd there arose a kind of groan. He 79 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA said nothmg; he bowed, slowly and profoundly, in recognition of the tribute, and then slowly entered the inn. 80 CHAPTER VI THE HALL OF AN ANCIENT GUILD T is a fascinating feature of Philadelphia that she still re- tains the hall of an ancient guild. Not a guildhall in the sense of town-hall, but the literal hall of a literal guild of the olden time; and it arouses romantic thoughts of the past, pictures of the artisans of the ancient cities of Lombardy gathering together and making their guilds and their cities powerful, pictures of the ancient guilds of England, with their power and ex- clusiveness and picturesqueness, pictures of the richly-built guildhalls on the market squares of old Dutch cities. For the past was not only a time of wars. The picturesqueness of the past lies not only in fighting, in armor and castles and battlefields; it lies also in the homely, friendly life of the people, their organizations, the strength which came to them from banding together. The Guild of the Carpenters of Philadelphia was organized in 1724 ; the date pointing out, what should never be forgotten, that it is an error to think of our country as a new country, or to take it that all 81 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA of our cities are new cities. This Philadelphia guild was definitely patterned after the ''Worshipful Company of Carpenters of London," which had been founded some two hundred and fifty years earlier; in 1477, to be precise; this date pointing out that, although Philadelphia is old, it is not so old as London ; but such things are from necessity compara- tive, and one might go back to the earliest of the London guilds, founded in the eleven hundreds, and from that to the still more ancient guilds of Italy. So, this old guild of Philadelphia is a very old guild indeed, even though other guilds are older. And I think it is not a mere fancy, but a very real fact, that the excellent ideals of probity and fair dealing which I have met with in the course of years of knowledge of the city, are owing, not alone to the sober honesty of the early Quakers, and to the economical honesty of the early "Pennsylvania Dutch," but to the influence of this Carpenters* Company and its openly expressed standards ; for its early articles, formally set down, declared that prices should be based upon equitable principles, so that "the workmen should have a fair recompense for their labor, and the owner receive the worth of his money;" which principle, after all, expresses the very root and essence of fair dealing. This hall of the organization was not its earliest meeting place, but was built in 1770, and around it then was an open space, which extended from Chest- nut to Walnut streets, between Third and Fourth. Carpenters' Hall still stands in the center of that block, 82 THE HALL OF AN ANCIENT GUILD but it is tucked in and quite put out of ordinary sight among the tall buildings that have arisen all around it. And it has become an almost forgotten building, in consequence of thus being put out of general sight, of thus being so surrounded that it is not seen except by such as are definitely in search of it. For although it looks down a narrow court toward Chest- nut Street, it is a very narrow court indeed, with nothing to attract the attention of the casual passer- by. And so it has become a building overlooked, dis- regarded, a building almost mythical, even though it actually stands here in fascinating actuality. I should think it probable that three quarters, or even more, of the inhabitants of Philadelphia do not know that such a building is honorably preserved ; and the number of those who would be able to walk directly to the spot is quite negligible. In Carpenters' Hall the work of independence was begun in 1774, by the representatives of the people. In ** Independence Hall," as the old State House is often called, the work was completed, in 1776. The history of the beginning is so merged in the overshadowing history of the conclusion that to many a Philadelphian the very identity of one build- ing is literally lost in the greater fame of the other ; and to such people this extremely interesting ancient Hall of the Carpenters has never had an existence! Before me is a book containing an account of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence, pub- lished in the year 1876, the year of the Centennial, when every detail and incident and locality bearing 83 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA upon Philadelphia and the Eevolution was discussed and rediscussed, and was supposedly in the minds of all Philadelphians and visitors and a great mass of the population of the United States. For 1876 was a year that drew marvelous attention to Philadel- phia and aroused and awakened the keenest interest of Philadelphians themselves. The book bears the name of one R. M. Devens, described on the title page as ''Member of the Historical Society of Penn- sylvania." And in the last paragraph of the de- scription of the Signing are the words : "Carpenters' Hall — or Independence Hall — ^in Philadelphia, where the tremendous scenes tran- spired, is still one of the places which every Ameri- can looks upon with patriotic pride"; as if the two buildings were one and the same! It was in 1774 that Carpenters' Hall won its fame. The members of the First Continental Congress had gathered, from the various colonies, in Philadelphia, and had tentatively met in the morning of Septem- ber the 5th, at the City Tavern, on Second Street, near "Walnut. It was the newest and most fashion- able of the taverns of that time ; it was a coffee house as well as a tavern ; and it had quite taken the leader- ship from others. And there were quite a number of others from which choice might have been made. The members might have been called together at the Crooked Billet Inn, or at Pewter Platter Inn or Pegg Mullen's Beefsteak House, or the Indian King (what Philadelphia has lost in picturesque names!), or the Black Bear, or the Three Crowns ; but the City 84 THE HALL OF AN ANCIENT GUILD Tavern, a new building, with prices that were men- tioned with criticism in some of the letters home, was preferred. It was the Bellevue-Stratford or Ritz- Carlton of that Philadelphia day. And it long re- tained high standing; for, years afterward, when Washington first entered Philadelphia as President of the United States, it was to the City Tavern, for his temporary quarters, that the Light Infantry proudly escorted him. And Washington must have been properly impressed by thoughts of all that had happened since the days of 1774, when he was at the tavern as one of the delegates from Virginia. Of course, the formal meeting was not to be held at the tavern. And just where it was to be held was something of a question, as Philadelphia was then, as it still is, a city without a recognized place for gatherings of protest. It neither had then nor has now a Faneuil Hall or a Cooper Union, for critical folk, or would-be reformers, or organizers of new movements, naturally to come together ; and this has had the effect of rendering the city's own feeling of protest practically voiceless. But this Continental Congress was another matter. It was a gathering of the most notable men of America. The question of a meeting-place was discussed, and one of the delegates reported that the Guild of the Carpenters offered their building, with its hall; and the dele- gates, after a few questions concerning the Car- penters, accepted the offered courtesy. Then they all walked, by twos and threes, in gen- eral friendly companionship, along the narrow brick 85 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA sidewalks, the short distance from the tavern to Carpenters' Hall. I have always thought that I should like to know just who walked with each other ; who walked by the side of the always stately Wash- ington, who measured steps with the short John Adams and the tall Jefferson, who chose Franklin for companion, or whom did Franklin choose. It was but a few minutes' walk; it was a walk of the briefest; but it was the most interesting walk in American history. The proceedings of the Congress were secret; the public were not admitted and the deliberations were not announced; but it was inevitable that much in regard to the arguments considered and the speakers who took part would seep out in private conversation. And the English, realizing that the fact of the Con- gress m^eant the possibility of war, had placed in the city a secret agent of delightful manner and in- gratiating ways, to inform himself of what went on and then inform the British Government. This was John Andre. Put into a clerkship in a counting-house, by his father, he had determined to escape from what he deemed business drudgery. His manner and ability secured him a commission in the army. He spent two years in France and Ger- many, keeping his eyes very wide open. He was ordered in 1774 to Quebec, and could have gone directly there in the same ship with Sir Guy Carleton, his new commander, and the staff; but, somehow, he sailed for Philadelphia instead, al- though when there he was as far from Quebec as 86 THE HALL OF AN ANCIENT GUILD when he was in London. He was an ideal secret service man, for he could make friends of men and of women alike, and made himself cognizant of the general trend of the Congress, of the character of its leaders, of the feelings of the people. Then he went to New York, and thence, leisurely to Boston; only after a considerable time turning seriously toward Quebec with his gathered information. There he was attached to the unfortunate Seventh Eegiment which, when war actually began, was the first to lose its colors to the Americans; and it is a pretty touch which, in a letter of John Adams, is shown us, of these first-captured colors being ''hung up in Madam Hancock's chamber with great splendor and elegance." Andre himself was captured too, and sent to Lan- caster, Pennsylvania, and, after being exchanged, went to New York and submitted such a report on his observations that General Howe advanced him to a captaincy and put him on the staff of General Grey. And then, after a while, by way of the fight at Paoli, Andre was to get back to Philadelphia. All of which has taken us for a little from Carpen- ters' Hall; but Andre's secret reports about it were important and Andre himself has always figured prominently in the minds and imagination of Ameri- cans : his scarlet coat still glows like a scarlet splotch on the Revolutionary pages. The building of the carpenters, this Carpenters' Hall, is far from large, and seems even smaller than it actually is on account of being so nooked in, so put 87 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA away in a corner, so placed out of sight, so over- topped by the buildings standing close about. But the actual meeting-room is of unexpectedly generous proportions, after the sense of smallness received from the f agade. And they were broad sub- jects discussed in that broad room by that first Con- tinental Congress; and that some two months were taken up in the discussions was partly because the subjects were new and crucial, as bearing upon at- tempted independence, and partly because, as some one of the members cleverly remarked, each man was a man of unusual ability, distinguished as an orator or critic or statesman, and therefore each man had to give proof that he was an orator, critic or states- man, and that, had some one made a motion that three and two make five, it would have been debated acutely, eloquently, profoundly, by all the members, from every angle, and in the end the decison would have been that three and two make five. The members were feeling their way across un- mapped political fields; they were wise and saga- cious men ; they would not be hurried ; and in the end, when they went to their homes, it was clear that the struggle for independence had in spirit begun. The first meeting for actual discussion, after two days of organization, here in this hall, was deeply impressive. Although the meetings were behind closed doors, certain details came to be well known. On the second day it was decided to open subsequent meetings with prayer, and so, on the third day, Duche, the brilliant rector of Christ Church, thus 88 THE HALL OF AN ANCIENT GUILD officiated, on formal request of the members; an Episcopalian being chosen as the one most likely to be agreeable to all sects; and it was noticed that while others stood, Washington, Episcopalian that he was, knelt, according to Episcopalian form. On that day a report was received, which was be- lieved to be true although later found to be an en- tire mistake or invention, that the British were actually firing upon the people in Boston, and this caused profound feeling; and it was noted as a strik- ing coincidence that the Psalter for the day, read by Duche, seemed peculiarly fitting, with its glowing sentences regarding protection from enemies, about shield and buckler and spear, about the stopping of them that persecute; and the effect of this reading was immense, upon the delegates, following the sup- posed terrible news. Then Duche stepped aside from the Episcopalian path and, leaving his book of prepared forms, delivered an extemporaneous prayer, full of splendid enthusiasm, fuU of splendid patriotism, full of inspiration. This was the poor Duche who, later appointed chaplain to Congress, gave his salary to the families of men killed in the war, but lost his popularity, never to be regained, by favoring an accommodation with England at the black time of Valley Forge. He ought to be remembered, too, as the man who had first braved public derision by carrying an umbrella in the streets of Philadelphia — in itself a revolutionary act of bravery which should have worked much toward his forgiveness! 89 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA After the opening prayer there was a long silence, which all the members, profoundly impressed as they were by what seemed the vastly increased import- ance of their deliberations, hesitated to break. But at length a grave, plain-looking man, with un- powdered wig, and dressed in what was known as *' minister's gray," arose and began to speak; and the assistant of Duche, who was afterwards to be- come Bishop White, has recorded that he listened at first with regret to this plain-looking man, sorry (Philadelphia like!) that a country parson should so presume to lead in the speaking, in the presence of men of high standing. Others likewise listened at first with disapproval. For only a few knew who the speaker was. Scarcely any one knew that he and George Washington, the wealthy Southern sol- dier and planter, had come to the meeting together, traveling in company, on horseback, from Virginia. The supposed country parson continued, in such a surge of fiery eloquence, that in a few minutes he had won the astonished admiration of all. *'Who is he? Who is he?" And the word was swiftly passed around that his name was Patrick Henry. Carpenters' Hall is a model of taste, a fetching, felicitous, fascinating building, a building full of sug- gestions of the past, a building of brick, with the pleasant variegation that comes from headers of heavier hue, a balanced building, a building whose keynote is symmetrical proportion, with the curious structural feature of four faces of equal dimensions, and with the pediment above the front door matched 90 THE HALL OF AN ANCIENT GUILD as to shape and proportions by the larger pediment of the gable. The door is set at precisely the right height above the pavement, and the three beehive- topped windows of the second floor are notably at- tractive, with heavy white balusters immediately beneath them, and with a double band of white across the front. And the little tower, over all, is an addi- tional fetching touch. The face toward Walnut Street, now hidden by the surrounding structures, was apparently in the begin- ning meant to be the main entrance, and there is an unusually fine fanlight above its door, with a remark- able bull's-eye of dark green. The interior has suffered from bedizenment of intended restoration, with a revel of costly spoilings, yet the general effect is still there, for the general effect is dependent upon proportion and line; and the meeting-room, on the whole, still retains its look of the long ago. Outwardly, except that it is overshadowed by newer structures, the aspect is practically un- changed; it is now caught sight of, up its narrow court off Chestnut Street, instead of iu an open space, but it is practically the same in looks as it was in long-past 1774, before Concord and Bunker Hill carried its deliberations into action. It is delightfully archaic, this smallish building, looking so much smaller than it is, yet with its air of important age, this building of diversified brick, this building in the shape of a Greek cross, an odd fancy of those old time carpenters ! It has an aspect 91 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA as of a memento of a bygone and forgotten world, a relic of the past which looks as if it had been tossed by the waves of time into this recess among cliffs of modern brick and stone. To a traveler there is al- ways pleasure in visiting the unvisited, and at Car- penters' Hall that impression comes with curious strength. But, whereas in Europe one finds the un- visited to be the place unvisited by tourists but per- fectly well known to the natives of the region, here in Philadelphia one finds that Carpenters ' Hall is visited by the tourists but is almost unvisited by the citizens. But, to be sure, Philadelphia officially keeps it as a proad bit of the distinguished past; and some Philadelphians still go there, as one, the other day, who was asked by his little son what men had made the building famous. ''They were our forefathers, *' was the grave reply; ''this building was given its fame through such men as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson." "But that's only three," said the puzzled boy; "that's not four." CHAPTER Vn QUAKERS AND MEETING-HOUSES N the early days of our participa- tion in tlie great war, a party of young men of the navy, who had gathered at Philadelphia from distant parts of the country, were taken about by a friend from one place to another to see the city. There were busy hours of going about, and toward the close of the day the host of the party asked if there was anything else which they would like to see; something which he had not thought of but which they would not like to miss; whereupon, after a brief conferring together, the spokesman said, "Yes, thank you, there is something else, in which all of us are interested: we should like to see some Quakers." And, when one thinks of it, although this is the Quaker City, and although the influence of Quaker thought and principles continues to be profound, one does not often see men or women garbed as Quakers. In the first place, the proportion of Quakers in the population has been greatly decreasing. And, 93 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA secondly, of those who remain, few wear markedly any distinctive dress. But in financial strength they are powerful, and socially they are powerful, and through the marriages of decades their influence extends throughout the fiber of the city's best life, even though many of those directly allied or an- cestrally allied with Quakerism are not themselves Quakers. And yet, there are Quakers, garbed as Quakers, still to be seen. Now and then one sees the broad- brimmed hat, the sweet old-fashioned bonnet; but rarely except at a meeting at one of the old meeting- houses. Even if from a pictorial standpoint alone, nothing could be more effective and more interesting than the meeting-houses of the city and of towns round about. They are buildings of picturesque plainness, build- ings prim, precise and peaceful. They are buildings which represent the extreme of architectural auster- ity, yet at the same time with a profound sense of the charming. The early Quakers believed so strongly in the planting of trees along the city streets and sidewalks, that Philadelphia used to be lovingly spoken of as the "Green City.'* The trees made the city a colorful place, in the combination of the red brick of the build- ings, the white doorsteps and copings, the herring- bone brick pavements, and the shimmering greenery. Tree planting was also carried out along the Quaker farms outside the city, thus marking the Quaker dis- tricts by long avenues of trees along the highways. 94 QUAKERS AND MEETING-HOUSES Around the Quaker homes and the Quaker meeting- houses the trees were set with particular care, to the delectation of those who view the huge monarchs that many of the Quaker-set trees have become. All the famous old roads leading out of Philadelphia were tree bordered, for non-Quakers imitated the excellent tree-planting example. Buttonwoods and sycamores, maples and oaks, such were the principal varieties ; for this is not, as is New England, an elm- shaded countryside. John G. Whittier, the Quaker poet, wrote that he thought the old Quaker settlements of the districts around Philadelphia ''were nearer the perfection of human society than anything I have since seen or had heard of before.'* And you fully understand what he meant when you are at, say, such a Quaker settle- ment as that of Gwynedd. Whittier quitted New England for some three years, in the late 1830 's, to live in Philadelphia and edit an anti-slavery paper here; and he stood one night on Sixth Street, between Race and Cherry, hastily disguised in an overcoat and a wig (and curiosity is balked, as to how he happened so con- veniently to find, of all things, a wig!), watching the burning, by an infuriated mob of many thousands, of a beautiful building which the anti-slavery people had built as headquarters. He boarded at one place or another, while here, and Philadelphia made no particular effort to hold him. He usually attended service at the old meet- ing-house on Twelfth Street, which is still standing, 95 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA in the heart of what has become a busy and business section; and a charming and peaceful sight it is, this old meeting-house, even without the association with so distinguished a man as Whittier. The famous Lucretia Mott, too, loved this old meet- ing-house, and she loved also to worship in the beauti- ful old meeting-house in Jenkintown, just a little away from the York Road, one of the most peaceful spots imaginable. This fine old building, prim and full of dignity, known as the Abington Meeting- House, stands in the midst of noble trees, the "Oaks of Abington. ' ' And as to these there is a story alto- gether delightful. For it came to pass that the Quakers of that region, many years ago, became stressed for money, and there seemed no way of obtaining it except by selling their oaks, even then of mighty growth. A large sum was offered, and the meeting was on the very point of accepting it ; when a neighbor, named Fisher, paid them the sum that was needed and took the oaks in payment; only to present them to the meeting, to stand forever as their property. The latter years of Lucretia Mott were passed in an old house on the York Road somewhat south from Jenkintown. She had won fame even in Europe, as an anti-slavery leader and a leader in thought, and Charles Dickens was one of the many who carried letters of introduction to her. She had not expected to meet Dickens, he being **not quite of our sort," as she calmly wrote, but when he sent a letter from an old friend of hers, of London, introducing him- 96 QUAKERS AND MEETING-HOUSES self and his wife, she with much condescension de- cided to call. There is something of peculiar charm about the Quakers and Quakerism; the charm is compounded of the obvious prim sweetness, the picturesque plain- ness, and at the same time a sort of intangible es- sence of charm. And it need not be deemed out of the way or offensive to refer to them as '^ Quakers." Formally, they are *' Friends," but they also call themselves ** Quakers," and Penn himself frequently used the word, so that it is not in the least a term of derision. Standing within a great open space at Fourth and Arch streets is what is looked upon as the principal meeting-house of the original Quakers : for there are two sects, these quiet people, averse to quarreling as they are, having had bitter dissensions a century or so ago, in consequence of which they divided into Orthodox and Hicksite; and as the Hicksites outnumber the Orthodox here in Philadelphia they naturally deem themselves just as orthodox as the officially orthodox. But this meeting-house on Arch Street is one of the buildings of the officially ortho- dox. The big area about this meeting-house is shut in by a nine-foot wall of brick, with long brick panels and a topping of stone; and there is spaciousness of aspect, with trees and grass, and toward one side is the fine old meeting-house itself. It is of brick, with extraordinarily broad gable in the center and broad hipped wings, and dates from 1804. It is one hundred 97 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA and eighty feet in length, thus being the largest Quaker meeting-house in the world. Whether Hicksite or Orthodox, all are interesting, and to non-Quakers all seem alike. And their build- ings and setting seem all alike. I remember a nar- row gate in a high wall near Sixteenth and Eace streets ; something that is always felicitous, as Henry James somewhere says ; and I went inside, for there was a glimpse of an ancient burying-ground : and in- side of a long enclosing brick wall I found a great open space, with a Quaker schoolhouse at one side, and old trees scattered about, and children playing: and all this quiet spaciousness just a few blocks from City Hall, The Quakers here are Orthodox, and the other great grounds, with buildings, near at hand, be- long to the Hicksites ; but, as I said, their places all look charmingly alike. I was walking one day on Fifteenth Street, northward between Cherry and Eace, and I was tempted to turn into a narrow iron- gated, brick-paved passageway, and found it open- ing into a big and sunny brick-paved court, and there I found a peaceful green-and-white-shuttered meet- ing-house, sleeping beside a patch of green grass, in the shade of a few horse-chestnuts and a few maples. Here, as with the other Quaker spot just described, I was fortunate in entering by the most felicitous approach, instead of by approaches not quite so fascinating. And I felt as if entering into some- thing like the Temple Gardens of London; ancient places, with passages and gateways, and buildings dreaming peacefully in the heart of a busy city. 98 QUAKEES AND MEETING-HOUSES The typical Quaker is credited with much of commonsense, and also with the possibility of a gently acid touch to his words; and Philadelphians consider as typical the story of the man who went to his Quaker friend for advice as to the buying of a horse. "I want a horse," he said, *'that must not cost much, but which shall be nice and quiet for mother to drive out with and make calls in the after- noon, one broken to the saddle so that I may go horse- back-riding in the morning, one that is strong enough to draw the carriage when we go to church ; a horse that can be depended upon for drawing the la^vn mower, and also for cultivating the garden, one that would be equal to pulling in a load of hay, and that could be used to go back and forth on errands and- to the railway station. Now, can you tell me where to find such a horse f" *'No," said the Quaker quietly; **I know of no such horse. But as thee looks for one why does thee not get one that is also a good milker T' The sect takes pride in upholding the ideal announced in the city's name; and this ideal of brotherly love you will find not a vanished ideal among them, but one still justifying its tradition, in hospitality to accredited strangers, in a certain quiet gentleness; and its traditions are shown markedly by that group of idealists, the few orthodox Friends who still publish little leaflets of altruism, still watch the action of the legislature and school boards, still are prompt with delegation and protest when honor or public betterment demands or when the poor and 99 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA downtrodden are being unfairly pushed, still teach Indian children industry, through a reservation in an adjoining State, still love their fellowman; — ^but even their broad and gentle love does not seem quite to cover their schismatically separated brothers, the Hicksites. It was really by an odd chance that William Penn, the Quaker, became the founder of a commonwealth. A large money debt had been owed to his father, Admiral Penn, by the King; and in this claim against royalty consisted the main part of William's in- heritance; and the King, the Merry Monarch, Charles the Second, was merrily pleased to give cer- tain square miles of wilderness in cancellation of the debt. And Penn, with broad ideas that had come to him of doing good to mankind and setting an example of good government and humanity, gladly accepted. It was always a matter of pride on the part of Penn that he came unarmed to America, and that no Quaker was ever killed by an Indian; in this, mark- ing quite a contrast with the other Colonies, with their tragic records of Indian wars. Obviously this was a Penn that was mightier than the sword. But the Colony was openly taunted by the other Colonies of the period, because, as they declared, the Indians believed that the Quakers were not Christians, but men, like the Indians themselves I Penn desired freedom even for the slaves. He planned for education, and the WiUiam Penn Charter School, still existent, to which he actually 100 QUAKERS AND MEETING-HOUSES gave the charter — it being not only named for him but founded by him — is among the most distinguished schools of the city or State. Although it may be re- gretted that in putting up new buildings, some years ago, which were probably enough advisable according to modern demands of health and eyesight, the trus- tees lost sight of beauty and ignored the spirit of the past. William Penn was perhaps not always strictly consistent. No one ever was. And his secretary, James Logan, who immensely loved and honored him, loved to tell of an incident of either the first or second Atlantic crossing of Penn, when, a supposed privateer being sighted, the Commonwealth founder and several other Quakers consistently went below, as non-combatants, while Logan himself stayed and took his place at a gun; and that when it was dis- covered that it was not a hostile ship, and Penn came on deck again, he chided Logan for being so wicked as to be ready to fight, whereupon Logan sturdily reminded him that no objection had been expressed to his fighting so long as the other vessel was sup- posedly hostile, and that there was complete will- ingness to have him fight when Penn, as his superior, could have ordered him below. Shortly after founding Philadelphia, Penn made a treaty of amity with the Indians; the only treaty, as some great Frenchman remarked — (was it not Voltaire?) — which was not sworn to yet which was never broken. The spot where the conference with the Indians 101 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA was held has been remembered. It was in what is now called Kensington, at first a suburban village but long since incorporated with the city; it is reached from the center of the city through a region of long stretches of old-time markets in the middle of the street, and then an old-time village section is come upon, with oddly crooking streets twisting past flat- iron-pointed corners where right-angles cease to exist, streets with many an old-fashioned little dormered house of brick, and — uncommon sight in Philadelphia ! — little dormered houses of wood. A park has been preserved around the spot, still known as Shackamaxon, where long stood the Treaty Elm under which the treaty was made. The park is a tiny bit of greenery, dotted with little elms which are said to be descendants of the original Treaty Tree. Close-hemmed in by big modern manufacturing establishments and great piles of lumber, the little park faces out over a great glim- mering stretch of the Delaware. And a monument, a little pyramidal monolith, plain and simple, a modest memorial of a momentous act, stands there. "As long as water flows and the sun shines and grass grows ;'^ thus was the treaty to endure. And still, where the treaty was made, the grass grows green and fresh; still, in front of this little patch of greenery, the great stream moves on in quiet glory ; still, over all, the sun is shining and the cloud-flecked sky is fair and blue. It is well for Philadelphians to remember and honor this spot; it would be well for the world to honor this spot; this spot, where was 102 QUAKEKS AND MEETING-HOUSES signed an unbroken treaty; probably the only treaty of the world's history which was not broken when temptation and opportunity came hand in hand. Penn deserved a fine and happy life, so many were his fine and happy deeds ; but his latter years, which he had vainly hoped to spend in his own province and city, were checkered with disappointments, be- reavements, criticism and even an imprisonment for debt. '*And thou, Philadelphia,'' he wrote feelingly: **And thou, Philadelphia, the virgin settlement of this province, named before thou wert born, what love, what care, what service, and what travail has there been, to bring thee forth and preserve thee from such as would abuse and defile thee!" Macaulay, himself born of a Quaker mother, alone among historians has failed to appreciate what seem now to have been unquestionably the noble qualities of Penn; or rather, while appreciating the noble qualities, he at the same time believed that he saw serious faults; and the year after the death of Macaulay, Whittier wrote some fiery lines on him for having attacked this chief saint of the Quaker calendar in regard to some shortcomings in his con- duct in England. "For the sake of his great-hearted father before him; for the sake of the dear Quaker mother that bore him; for the sake of his gifts, and the works that outlive him, and his brave words for freedom, we freely forgive him. " Which would have mattered little to Macaulay even had he been living, for he asked no forgiveness, being at least sincere, 103 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA though mistaken. And Macaulay seems to have been mistaken, largely through a mistake in identity be- tween Penn and a hanger-on at the English court named Pen. The verses on Macaulay tempt Whittier to the use of the name of another historian in an interesting reference to the decreasing numbers of the sect ; and he writes: "There are those who take note that our number are small — New Gibbons who write our decline and our fall; But the Lord of the seed-field takes care of his own, And the world shall yet reap what our sowers have sown.'* In the case of any great man, nothing is gained and something may be lost, by refusing to consider critical sidelights from intelligent observers, no matter though we think the observer partly or even altogether mistaken; and it was with keen interest that I chanced upon a summing up of the character of Penn, by that "Colonel William Byrd of West- over in Virginia Esqr" as he delightfully and with- out punctuation cognomened himself. He was the builder of the noble mansion of Westover, possessor of the largest library, of his early day, in the Colonies; he laid out the city of Eichmond, thus rivaling Penn in the laying out of Philadelphia; he was a man of clear-sighted and humorous cynicism, and, to him, the fortunate freedom of Pennsylvania from Indian troubles was but due to politic caution on the part of the Quakers, who, opposed on prin- ciple to war, were wise enough to give no provoca- 104 QUAKERS AND MEETING-HOUSES tion. And again it is the cynical man of the world who, appreciating to the full the worldly success of the Quaker colonists, who, as he freely admits, had diligence and frugality, dryly writes, * ' and no vices but such as are private.'^ Cool criticism of tliis nature, intended to be fair, and showing how differ- ently men of different temperaments may view things, may at least contribute to check any tendency toward over-exaltaUon. Byrd was not a man of merely provincial outlook. He was educated for the law at the Middle Temple in London, was frankly well acquainted with the gay life of London and Paris that was open to young men of wealth, and was living in London as a student when Penn was a mature man of affairs there ; and, among his gay associates, he picked up the story that William Penn, when himself a young man in London, before becoming a Quaker, was so handsome and had such winning ways as to be a great favorite with the ladies; notably with a mistress of the Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles the Second; and that this connection resulted in a daughter who grew up wonderfully handsome and ''became a Dutchess and continued to be a Toast for 30 years." But it is not at all necessary to believe such a story, for one may see how readily it could gain circulation among people whose talks and acts were carelessly free, in an age that was notoriously careless and free. But the story of the tantalizingly un-named "Dutchess" is at least narrated by a great Colonial contemporary. 105 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA For a peaceful folk, the Quakers seem to have quite a taste for schisms. Long before the Hicksite controversy, there was a schism of Keichites, which took so violent a form, here in Philadelphia, as to develop into an actual physical contest between the two parties ! But the Hicksite controversy seems to have been conducted with seemliness of behavior. By the way, it is one of the odd things, that the Quaker who on horseback followed the body of Tom Paine, on its almost unattended journey to New Eochelle, was a Hicks, a near connection of him of the schism. In Philadelphia, and dotted about the countryside in the vicinity of Philadelphia, are meeting-houses about which no one questions whether Orthodox or Hicksite. Every meeting-house is a house of charm, of attractiveness, of peace ; every meeting-house is a place of beauty and of subtly simple appeal. Always the simple, the unornate, the plain. The largest of all, and the oldest existent of the city, at Fourth and Arch streets, is typically plain, typically effective, with its immense concave sounding board, its incredibly long and narrow-seated settles, with their mortised ends, its galleries supported by Doric pilasters and columns of the severest Greek sim- plicity. In all, there is an impression of permeative gray and brown and time- dulled white that is itself almost a gray; but there are a few Venetian blinds giving unexpectedly a note of green, and through the windows one sees the greenery of the trees. The wooden pegs for hats, the gray walls, the unusual 106 QUAKERS AND MEETING-HOUSES sills, broad and shoulder-high, the windows of many- panes, the unbroken serenity of it all, the sense of spaciousness which accompanies the prim simplicity, all are interesting. I remember a First Day morning meeting there. A majority of the small congregation went in their motor cars, and I set it down, not in the least as taking it to be indicative of any trait or any agree- ment, but merely as a fact which at once struck me, that every motor car (all of them being fairly expen- sive, of good make, and well cared for) was of the same dark rich green, a green of reserve and dignity. Inside, in the meeting room, I noticed that the faces were notably Anglo-Saxon, sturdy and fine. A few elders sat on the front raised benches, facing the little gathering, and on the other side sat a few elderly sisters also facing those assembled ; the elders being really elderly, grayish of hair and likewise grayish of whiskers ; and I noticed that a few of them wore oddly-cut coats, without lapels at the neck, and I wondered if this were the style known to long-ago Philadelphians and referred to as ''shad-breasted.'* (Some of the men, too, I noticed when the meeting broke up, wore hats of broader brims than is custom- ary with other folk, though not so broad as pictured in cuts of Quakers of olden time.) The deaconesses, or eldresses, if one may call them such, sat in a row of prim black, all dressed in gowns of black; and some — it was a winter's day — ^in shawls of black as well. And their faces were gently 107 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA crumpled into serenest peace, matching the gently wizened faces of the oldest of the men. It was a meeting of long and restful silences. Silent introspection, solemn self-contemplation, a speaking only when the spirit moves, are curiously impressive. By no means were all of the men and women old, yet few were young, and only a small number were below middle age; and there came to me, perhaps incongruously, the frequently uttered Philadelphia pleasantry, *'Who ever saw a Quaker babyr' For a long time the grave and reverend seniors sat in profound silence; the women sat in silence as profound; in all, of the men, only two spoke, and they spoke briefly, slowly, expressing thoughts of gentle beneficence toward all mankind. There was no vaunting priggishness, no pretentiousness, no claim of merit; it was merely that a group of intelli- gent people had gathered, well disposed toward all the world. The first speaker enriched his talk, unaf- fectedly, with fine Biblical phraseology; the second spoke somewhat of the past, and referred to Fox as if he were a friend of yesterday. A long pause between the brief talks of the two men ; a long pause after the words of the second ; a pause as of peaceful rumination ; and then one of the oldest of the women spoke, taking off her prim black bonnet and displaying the white cap beneath. She began with a sort of qualdng diffidence, but soon her voice grew more steady, more sure, though still it was very, very gentle. She spoke even more 108 QUAKERS AND MEETING-HOUSES briefly than the men, and her subject was charity, and ended with a quotation from ' ' The Vision of Sir Launfal," brought in with easy naturalness, as if she were accustomed to thinking in terms of the poets: " 'Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, — Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me. ' ' ' And it was almost startling; for I wondered if she knew that, not so many years before the time when she herself, sweet old lady that she was, was born, the poet who wrote those fine lines had lived just across the street from this old meeting-house; that James Eussell Lowell, New Englander of New Englanders, had for a time lived in the Quaker City as a writer, with his wife, and that the house in which they lived is still standing, at the northeast corner of Fourth and Arch streets, facing diagonally this Quaker building. At what is now the junction of Thirteenth Street and Ridge Avenue there used to be an open space, looked upon as a bit of town common. It was reaUy a space for pasturage and sheds, established by the Quakers for the free use of such of their number as should drive in from outlying points to the meetings. !With the coming of railroads, the original purpose could no longer be carried out, and so a court decree permitted the sale of the land and the putting of the money into a fund whose interest was to be expended in railway fares for not-rich Quakers who wished to attend Yearly Meetings or other formal gather- ings. 109 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA But while that bit of land was still open and free, it was put to a use of worldwide importance; for here, one day, went Benjamin Franklin, accompanied by his son William, to fly a kite when thunderclouds were piling up in the sky ; the most famous kiteflying of the world I mm . pn ..^^^ 110 CHAPTER VIII OLD SECTIONS OF THE CITY NLY gradually does one come to realize, even thongh familiar with the city for years, that Philadelphia retains much more of the old, in buildings, than does any other American city. Much of the old is shabby, but shabbi- ness is a frequent ad- junct of age, especially of a city's age. In Philadelphia there grad- ually comes the impression of square miles of buildings, shabby with time and desertion; and then one begins to pick out here and there, buildings of especial interest, and to visualize the days that are gone; and at the same time one realizes that much' of the city's present-day prosperity is directly de- pendent upon these shabby- seeming streets. One is apt for a time to have an impression of a wilderness of gray despair and disrepair. But although there is much of the shabby poor, there is also a great deal of shabby comfort, in the ancient quarters. And at 111 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA any moment one may come upon the fasoinating. There still stands the home of the Reverend Robert Blackwell, of the New York family who owned Black- well's Island, which long ago became a spot of as- sociations anything but churchly. This Blackwell who came to Philadelphia was the wealthiest of clergymen in America and one of the wealthiest men of this wealthy city. His home, at 224 Pine Street, was one of the splendid homes of the time. It is now sadly wrecked, it is dirty, dilapidated and dingy, and much of its splendid interior panelings and orna- mentation have been torn out and carried away. Its glory has departed. Yet even now, it can be seen that its outside cornice, facing the street, is of intricate and elaborate design and workmanship ; indeed, it was among the few most elaborate cornices of the city. And there is the Powel house, also among the finest of all, at 244 South Third Street, with unusual overmantel in the main bedroom, and unusual panel- ing ; but it is now dingy of aspect, shuttered close, not remindful of its glory when Washington was a guest here, and when John Adams, in one of those letters of his which are stiU a gustatory joy, wrote of a dinner here in phrases overflowing with joyful list- ing of the curds and creams and sweetmeats, the jellies, the tarts the syllabub, the floating island, the cheeses and the drinkables. Among mementoes of the past there are some which, although of unusual interest, are easily and generally and literally overlooked. I mean the old- time footscrapers, of which many are still to be 112 OLD SECTIONS OF THE CITY found, old ones, fine old ones, within the heart of the old portion of the city, built into the sidewalk at the foot of the house steps. A pair of winged grifSns, back to back, lion-pawed, very strong, particularly pictorial, are near Third and Buttonwood streets. In numerous places there are the old curled-ear, wrought-iron scrapers, of the blacksmith's handiwork. On South Third Street I remember a scraper with classic urn above a hooped- over top; and not far away, on the same street, is one of almost the same design, except that the hooped-over top is taller and more slender. The admirable designs and the variety, make these old Philadelphia foot-scrapers extremely worth while. An interesting scraper on Walnut Street, is another of the hooped-top kind, made by some un- known Peter Visscher of an iron worker, with eight wrought-iron curls upon it which must have de- lighted the artisan's heart and which are a delight to look at to-day. Another on Walnut Street is curiously made, with a wrought rosette on either side. A pair of very old ones form a pair of brac- ings for the bottom of the iron balusters of the steps in front of a house on Pine Street. These are but examples. The number of old scrapers still remaining is large and the proportion of interesting ones is great. And these lowly examples of early artisanship are worthy of search and examination. There is still a great deal of fine old wrought- iron work that is more prominent than the scrapers. 113 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA There are lovely old iron rails at front doorsteps, many of them with the classic palmette, one of the things which so often make architects refer to things of old-time Philadelphia, little or big, as ''pure Greek." Everywhere is the interesting. There are ador- able little curving marble steps, ironrailed, rising rather steeply to the doorways; and when they are in pairs, converging to a center, these are house-door approaches of great distinction. There are fan- lights, there are pent-eaves, there are pilasters at many a door, and here and there one still may see an old-time knocker. And it is sorrowful to see such a proportion of the old made squalid and sodden by ill-usage. And the squalid so frequently merges into the mere shabby, and alternates with it, that one is constantly liable to confound the two qualities. There are many decent and decorous people living on what at first glance seem altogether dirty and deplorable streets; and there is still much of ex- cellent and prosperous business carried on in shabby old buildings. It is curious, yet one sees how natural it was, that coming to a new country with infinite open space usable, Penn should have planned his new city with many of the streets as narrow as if they were in the close-cramped, walled-in cities of old Europe. He probably thought that he was giving the streets, on the average, great spaciousness. But his rectangu- lar plan, besides marking out most of the streets with what we deem narrowness, marked also a system of alleys behind all of the streets. They are 114 OLD SECTIONS OF THE CITY still alleys, although in this finical age they are called streets. And, ill-kept though most of them are, they still show, especially two or three running westward from the Delaware Eiver water-front, just north of Market Street, how pleasantly people of moderate means used to live, in these little old houses, still standing, of two-stories and an attic; houses with dormer windows, with projective pent-eaves between the first and second stories, and each with its little doorstep and its solid shutters. Originally, the idea frankly was that the less well to do should frankly accept these less desirable locations, and live in these small houses in the narrow alleys; and the intent also was to make these inferior homes really homelike ; and in those early days they were. Numbers of these old alleys — and the system of alleys extended with the extension of the city — are still without sewage connection, even behind some of the fashionable and wealthy streets, and behind prosperous streets of modern business; and until recently there were many more. Some of these old alleys are mediaeval in suggestion; both evil and mediaeval in unsanitariness, in narrowness, in their rough cobbled paving, in their sharp grading toward the gutter in the center of the roadway; a gutter which is in some alleys the only sewer. Such places as the worst of these, with the narrower alley en- trances and the loss of light and ventilation for the homes, are paralleled nowhere else in America, and nowhere in England except in dismal Sheffield or some other duke-owned city. The rent roll of great 115 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA estates that own the alley properties gives the ex- planation there, and presumably the same explana- tion holds to a great extent here; yet assuredly not in all cases. Numbers of these narrow alleys are still close- packed with human life, and in grim correlation, human death; and you may still pick out, here and there, a crowded alley, extremely dirty, with the ter- rible record of its deaths during the yellow fever scourge of 1793 still kept in mind. In one of these alleys, into which Doctor Eush and Stephen Girard and a few other brave men penetrated during those yellow fever days, freely risking their own lives, tirelessly tending the sick and carrying out the dead on their shoulders, in one of these alleys, now called Spring Street, leading westward from Front Street, a little north of Market, an alley of smells, of roadways uncommonly rough, of small houses, of doddering roof lines and ancient gables, the impression of being set far back into the past comes with curious force. The alley is really among the very oldest and tradition has it that some of the little houses here have been stand- ing for over two centuries, and that to one of them Benjamin Franklin came, as a youth, on his arrival from Boston, and in this house rented a room, and made his first home in Philadelphia. It is one of the unsanitary alleys. It does not run through the block from street to street, but makes a sudden turn to the right, and ends abruptly in this right-angled offshoot; and m this little offshoot is the old house. 116 OLD SECTIONS OF THE CITY And it is a pleasure to see that it is pridefully kept up. It has a brass knocker, and still retains what many a rich house would envy it, one of those ancient bull's-eyes which are year by year growing more rare. There is an undoubted charm about this. The houses themselves are surprisingly clean and attrac- tive, also, as you suddenly notice. In fact, it is a place of contradictions. And although you still see features which you would fain see bettered, there has been a marked holding up of standards along this entire right-angled cul-de-sac. And you find that the properties here are not owned by rich men or by estates, but are individually owned, and mostly by that vanishing race, the Americans, or by old- time Irish, who, in these days of Southern European inundation, seem markedly American. There does not seem to be much actual basis for the Franklin tradition, yet it seems reasonable. Much of tlie soundest history is necessarily based upon tradition. And in this case I am inclined to ac- cept the tradition because of a touch of verisimili- tude, a homely, human touch, which is,' that it is still traditionally held that Franklin used to go from here to the then much nearer riverside, and plunge in and take long swims. Franklin used to be a mighty swimmer, and he exulted in his physical prowess; and as life went on, and he acquired medal after medal of honor, from monarchs and societies and public assemblies, for this or that achievement in science or statecraft, a story told of another Philadelphian, also a writer, 117 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA might have been put upon him with a different appli- cation. For this modern Philadelphian writer, Eichard Harding Davis, in the desire to make an effect at some formal reception, pinned across his breast several medals received for achievements in war correspondence or other experiences, whereupon George Ade approached and, running his finger along the line of medals, touching each as if in awe, to the increasing pleasure of the wearer, said at length, with gentle questioning, *' Swimming?" Near this probable Franklin locality is one tliat is associated with Washington. For at the southeast corner of Front and Market streets — the buildings now standing thereabouts, although not new, are not of Eevolutionary era, and the general aspect has also considerably changed through the filling in and pushing out of the waterfront — ^to that corner, Washington made a daily habit of going, when he lived in Philadelphia as President of the United States; twelve o'clock was the usual hour, and he would stand, watch in hand, for a moment, compar- ing his watch with the clock in the window of the clockdealer who then occupied this corner. He was always immaculately dressed; for it was a deep- based belief with him that a man owes it to himself and to his position in life to dress with care, and he felt this the more deeply at a time when he knew that his appearance and personal bearing were of vital im- portance to a new and struggling nation, in giving it place in the eyes of the world. And it is also still remembered, for tradition has brought it down, that 118 OLD SECTIONS OF THE CITY the porters of the then immediate waterside always took off their hats when he came and stood uncov- ered till he walked away, and that he always lifted his own hat in recognition. Washington, in those Presidential days of Phila- delphia, lived in a fine house on the south side of Market Street between Fifth and Sixth streets. It was in that house, long since vanished before the march of business, that he received the terrible news of St. Clair's defeat; maintaining calm during the dinner party that was in progress when the message came, then giving way briefly to wild grief and in- dignation. It was in that house that Alexander Hamilton, on the day on which he resigned his post as Secretary of the Treasury, picked up a copy of the Constitution of the United States, and said: **So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instrument will bind us together in mutual in- terests, mutual welfare, and mutual happiness; but when we become old and corrupt it will bind us no longer." For the wise men of early days well knew that there were possibilities of disaster which the Constitution, unless backed by the devotion of the country, would be powerless to check. It was in that house that Gouverneur Morris tested his bet that he could be successful in treating Washington famil- iarly, which nobody had ever done; and so, here it was that, at dinner table, he patted the President on the shoulder and said, *'01d gentleman, do you be- lieve that?" — only to be crushed into abjection by Washington's silent look. (Once, at a gathering in 119 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA Virginia, where Wasliington was in the habit of meet- ing his neighbors as a fellow farmer, it was agreed be- forehand that the custom into which they had fallen, of rising at his entrance, be discontinued, and that all keep their seats ; but the very moment that he entered, and glanced about the room, every man arose.) The landlord and neighbor of Washington, on Market Street, was Eobert Morris; and Morris sold these holdings to put his money into what was to be the grandest of all Philadelphia mansions. He bought the entire block, between Chestnut and Walnut streets, and Seventh and Eighth, and there put such vast sums of money into his new house as utterly to ruin him. The house was never completed; before long it was destroyed for business advancement; and it had an extraordinary quantity of underground structure, with cellars and tunnels and walls and arches; and portions of these underground or semi- underground constructions are still existent and from time to time cause puzzled inquiry. Another Morris house, at 225 South Eighth Street, between Walnut and Spruce, built in 1786, may fairly be deemed the best example remaining of the old-time excellent town dwelling house of wealth and beauty. Though far from being so old as some, it is of pre- Revolutionary style, and is a broad-fronted building, admirably proportioned, with excellent door and dormers, with windows twenty-four paned and wooden-shuttered; and it contains, as do so many of the houses of this city, a great quantity of old furni- ture and old china. It is known as the Morris house, 120 OLD SECTIONS OF THE CITY and has for some generations been owned by a Morris family; but, as with the so-called Morris house of Germanto^vn, it was not built by a Morris nor was it owned by a Morris during the most interesting years of its existence. It stands — an unusual condition for that part of the city — with a garden space on either side of it. And this is remindful of that altogether charming old house, lovingly known as the ** Yellow Mansion," which until a few years ago stood, garden-surrounded and tree-shaded, in square-fronted serenity, at Broad and Walnut streets. The early builders were fortunate in their age, for it was an age when it was hard to build unattractively ; it was an age of largely unconscious devotion to beauty; these old-time Philadelphians builded better than they knew, their conscious stone to beauty grew — only the poets ''stone" must here be rendered *' brick." A universal sense of beauty was diffused, and that is why the Colonial houses of America, or those built near that time and following those ideals, are such models of taste. And it is most satisfactory to find so many of the most beautiful ones still preserved. To seek out the best examples in the old parts of the city, go if possible on Sunday. On weekdays the streets are jammed and cluttered, and there is a roar and thunder of traffic, and you see nothing but the heavy motor-trucks as you cross the streets and the crowded sidewalks as you walk, every moment bump- ing or bumped if your attention strays from your 121 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA stepping. But on Sunday the entire old-time district is open and deserted, with scarcely a vehicle, scarcely any people on the sidewalks. Every old house is recognizable. You see every worth-while gable and doorway and cornice. On weekdays, you think there is nothing there to see ; on Sundays you realize what a very great deal remains. On South Ninth Street, at No. 260, there are Kingly instead of Presidential memories; for in this house, gray-plastered outside, with its end to the street, with a little portico, with a bow-front of wrought-iron, with wistaria clambering about, there lived for a time a man who called himself Comte de Survilliers, but it was no secret that he was really Joseph Bonaparte, formerly King of Spain. The house still contains some fine old furniture of his time, including two fine Empire sofas, and there is a great room still papered with the scenic paper which was on the walls when he lived here, with lovely classic scenes in such soft color- ings as now to have become practically black and white. At the northeast corner of Fourth and Arch streets stands an old house, built about 1760, of much dignity and excellent lines; a house of three stories and a dormered attic, and with the line of the front cornice continuing on the side of the house along the base of the gable. And it has long been regarded as the home of the first provost of the University of Penn- sylvania, William Smith ; although recently some have claimed that his house was in reality the old house on the diagonally opposite corner. A distinguished man was Provost Smith, a peppery 122 OLD SECTIONS OF THE CITY irascible man, besides being a man of dignity and learning; and when lie was put into jail for some months through a dispute with the Colonial Assembly, charged with having assisted a Judge Moore in the preparation of an obnoxious pamphlet, he used his time to excellent advantage, addressing with perfect composure and even nonchalance his classes, who gathered outside of the jail window, and becoming weU acquainted with, and engaged to, the daughter of his fellow prisoner. Judge Moore, and marrying her shortly after his release. To clear his name, he then voyaged to England, and secured a royal order condenming in severe terms the unwarranted impris- onment; an order which was quite annoying in its effects, however, when the Eevolution came and made royal favoritism unpopular ! A son of his marriage with Judge Moore's daughter Rebecca (Rebecca was a favorite name with early Philadelphians) had a daughter who as a little girl was given a calf for a pet ; and when, like other calves, it grew to cowhood, the British, who had by that time attained the occupancy of Philadelphia and its im- mediate vicinity, captured it. This granddaughter of the Provost learned that the raiding troopers were of the division of Lord Comwallis and so to the British camp she made her way, and was led to the general's tent. She was only some thirteen years of age, but demanded earnestly that her pet cow be re- stored. The general looked at her genially, but asked if she had no father or brother who could have ap- pealed in her behalf, whereupon the little girl bravely 123 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA replied that her father was then in a military prison in Philadelphia and that her brothers were with the Continental army. And at this Cornwallis, with all military courtesy, ordered that her cow be driven back and, as the girl thanked him and turned to leave, he handed her a little trinket, expressing the hope that she would pleasantly keep in mind a British officer. Little Letitia Street used to be notable from its pos- session of what was known as the ''Letitia house"; some years ago removed to Fairmount Park and now known as the ''Penn house"; it being, supposedly, a house built by William Penn, and probably for his daughter Letitia. The house as it stands is not as old as the style of Penn's time, unless it has been somewhat altered ; and it cannot now be learned, with certainty, precisely whether or not this was the veritable house after all. When people forget, deeds are the only evidence, and deeds, after all, give only land boundaries ; and when a deed covers a tract con- taining several houses it is anybody's guess just which is some particularly sought-for house, or what is the age of a house, except so far as certain indications are usually evident as to this latter point. Letitia Street has an undoubted association of an- other 'kind, one which shows that human nature is always essentially the same. At a little inn, long ago established in Letitia Street, and long since gone, a young man one day appeared and announced that he had sold himself to the devil, who was to come on a near-at-hand day and seize him, unless he could raise redemption money. The people were so impressed by 124 OLD SECTIONS OF THE CITY his plausible plight that they actually raised the money, and on the fateful day came with it and placed it on a table in the middle of the room at the inn, and then prayed; the number of ministers present being three. But, ''The devil! The devil at the window!" suddenly cried the young man, interrupting the fer- vent prayers. At which everybody fled in wildest panic. And when, after a while, a few crept hesitatingly back, the young man, and of course the money, had gone. One of the prettiest stories of old Philadelphia is connected with one of the smallest of the ancient houses of the city, still standing on Arch Street, be- tween Second and Third. And the most delightful thing about the delightful story is the fact that Phila- delphians are ready to fight, instantly and fiercely, if you speak of the story as true ! — a story which a city of different idiosyncrasies would gladly grasp for it- self. But there is a reason for this. For years, the story was so sentimentalized, so intensely oversenti- mentalized, in pictures and descriptions, as to give a disagreeable flavor. And, too, there was at one time some financial exploitation which touched the city's pride. The actual story is sweet and homely. Elizabeth Ross, Betsey Ross, the widow of John Ross, a nephew of one of the Signers, supported herself for a time as a lace cleaner and by carrying on the business of her husband, who had been an upholsterer or "up- holder," as the word was in those days. She did not long remain the Widow Ross, for a soldier named Ashburn married her, and after he was captured and 125 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA died a prisoner in England, she was married again, this time to one Claypole, understood to be a descend- ant of Cromwell. Congress, in Jmie of 1777, voted for a flag of thir- teen stripes, alternate red and white, with thirteen stars, white in a blue field. Washington was in Philadelphia at the time, over from New York on military business, and the committee which was ap- pointed by Congress to carry out the idea consulted with him. He knew Mrs. Ross. She had cared for his lace cuffs, he knew her as a self-respecting, self- supporting woman, and he led the committee to her house. Under their eyes, Mrs. Ross cut and stitched, and soon the flag lay before them, the first of our Stars and Stripes ! There is no official record of her making that first flag. No importance was attached to the matter. To Betsey Ross it was merely, as we nowadays should say, ''all in the day's work'*; to the committee, and to Washington, it was just a matter of finding the best woman for the work. Philadelphians say that had it been Betsey Ross some claim would have been made earlier. But whoever it was that made that first flag made no claim earlier ! And those who doubt that Betsey did it, have no one else to suggest. Old records, although none have been found refer- ring to that first flag, show that Mrs. Ross was afterwards given considerable work by the Govern- ment as a maker of flags and colors, one single pay- ment for some ship's colors being fourteen pounds and twelve shillings. There are traces, for years, of 126 OLD SECTIONS OF THE CITY her having won her place as a maker of national flags ; and she was a woman of some substance, and of recognized position in business, in an age when women in business were rare. At the time of the Centennial, in 1876, when every- thing Revolutionary assumed, in Philadelphia, new and great prominence, a grandson of Betsey Ross told of the flag-making, saying that when he was a boy of eleven, his grandmother, then Mrs. Claypole, told in his hearing the story of the making of that first American flag, under the very eye of General Wash- ington. And at any rate, the very idea is picturesque, of the scene, that day, in the little low-ceilinged room of that tiny Arch Street house. CHAPTER IX STREETS AND WAYS HERE is a stationary- quality noticeable in Phila- delphia's population more than in other cities. In Boston, although many of the wealthy and prominent, the people of ''family," still live in the same district, the same streets, the same houses, of long ago, there is little of this per- manence with the other classes. In such newer great cities as Cleveland one will find conservative families established in four successive homes in one generation, caused by "changing neigh- borhoods." In Philadelphia, however, people of all classes continue year after year, generation after generation, to live in the same houses. And it is a distinctive feature of the city, that the people are proud of their own districts. The people of Dia- mond Street are as proud of Diamond Street as the people of Rittenhouse Square are proud of Ritten- house Square. There are no "blocks" in Philadelphia street nomenclature. The term 128 'block" is unknown. STEEETS AND WAYS There are ** squares," to express street spaces be- tween cross-streets. I one day heard a Philadel- phian naively wondering, having heard a New Yorker refer to a ''block," whether that word had come to New Yorkers from the fact that Adrian Block was an important figure in early New York life. One takes easily to the use of ''squares" in this city from the fact that the city was laid out by Penn in literal squares; the streets are primly precise, crossing one another at severe right angles ; this un- swerving checker-board severity, however, being re- lieved by the diagonal lines of a few avenues which cut across the city on the bias. One sees in the plan of the city, in its impression of gentle rigidity, an indication of the very spirit of Quakerism. There is a pleasing satisfactoriness in the way in which the city is laid out; and there comes the memory of the argument between the Philadelphian and the New Yorker as to the merits of their re- spective cities, and of how the Philadelphian, driven to anger by his opponent's continued impervious- ness, at length cried triumphantly, "But at least you must admit that Philadelphia is well laid out I" To which the New Yorker, "I knew that Philadelphia was dead but I did not know it was laid out I" Ah, well — those many, many jests on Philadelphia ! — And how calmly Philadelphia goes on her important way, ignoring them! And yet, when a certain line of stories continues to develop, with additional similar stories developing, for generations, there must be 129 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA some ground for them. And the ground seems to be a certain content that is inherent in the average Phil- adelphian'fe character or temperament. But content is a pleasant tiling to get along with, and is one of the qualities which go to the making up of the de- lightful Philadelphia type. The quality of content has made for the continued uniformity of streets and houses and looks and manners; very pleasing, all this, interesting and un- usual. For forty years, so Philadelphians will tell you, the quarrymen of Burlington, Vermont, sup- plied the white marble steps and copings for Phila- delphia buildings, large and small ; what a contented continuity of trade ! And they will add that no Bur- lington man ever lost a cent by a Philadelphia bad debt! Yet contentment may have its bad side. In speaking, with a newspaper editor, of the street car system which makes eight cents the fare for most of the people, with what those from other cities deem poor service, he laughed contentedly and said, "But I own street railway stock!" And a lawyer who had been made a member of a commission to investigate tuberculosis conditions told me that he found conditions so bad, in the district assigned to him, that his report was quietly suppressed. One of the street railway executives, at a dinner with a party of about a score, spoke of an intended car that was to be without possibility of ventila- tion. ''And if the public object we'll put the cars on anyhow!" he exclaimed. But this was not really 130 STEEETS AND WAYS so defiant as it seemed. He knew tliat Pliiladel- pliians, rich and poor, did not like ventilation, even though they may indulge, contradictorily, in open- air sleeping at home. For even the open-air sleeper, the moment he enters a trolley or railway car, in cold or even cool weather, desires every particle of fresh air shut out. Even business offices, and private homes, yes, even doctors' offices, are kept to the same general standard. When, as a war measure, it was proposed to have no heat in the street cars, but to let them be heated entirely by the animal heat of the passengers, it impressed the city as an obviously excellent thing to do. There is a sort of cynical frankness here, as to the power of the powerful, that I have not noticed else- where in such degree. And those Tvho suffer from the powerful feel but a sense of fatalism. "Allah is great!" — Allah being the man with money. In the matter of street cars, the company acts on the knowledge that the class who would naturally be the powerful objectors ride in their o^ai motors, or walk from railway station to office, or from their homes to their offices. Philadelphia, curiously, for ■so large a city, is so built as to permit of doing with- out trolley cars on the part of a host of people. With marvelous convenience, the railroads have placed their stations in the heart of the city, so that commuters may walk to their places of business. And the most active business area is so small as to cover only walkable distances. And a great number of fine homes and a still greater number of more 131 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA ordinary homes, are within walkable distance from offices, from the shopping district, and from the theaters. The sense of content, in the city, of satisfaction with things because they are Philadelphian, becomes naturally a sense of patience ; also a heritage of the Quakers. And never was there a city so patient. I have seen a packed trolley-load of people, a carload so tight-packed that there was not another inch of standing room, turned out on a windy corner, with the thermometer hovering around zero, for that car to be smtched off and returned, while the people waited under the command of ''Next car!" And there was not a word, not a symptom, of protest, or even of impatience or anger. The next car came, and it was itself so jammed that only a few of the people standing in the icy wind could board it. Still, not a word or an indication of resentment ! And I remember one recent cold morning last winter, at Germantown station, quite a group wait- ing for a train which was behind time. In the first place, no one thought of taking a street car. These were commuters who had day after day taken the train, and a custom must not be broken. Nor did any one telephone for a taxicab, although every man and woman had the appearance of being amply able to afford many taxicabs, and although it was presum- ably important for m.ost of these well-to-do folk to get to their destinations. Time was not made for Philadelphians. They would wait. I waited too ; in gathering impressions for this book it would never 132 STREETS AND WAYS have done to desert those patient people. They waited for over an hour, without a single effort on the part of a single individual to find some other method of getting away, and without the slightest sign or word of impatience. And this, not from self- control, for they did not feel either anger or worry; they did not feel impatience. There was every in- dication that they would patiently stay there till going-home time, if necessary, and that then they would, with a mild sense of duty done, just go home. When, after the wait of over an hour, the train was seen rounding a curve, there was not the faintest sign of relief or interest, and the people boarded it just as if it had come in on time. But one need not dwell on the overdevelopment of content, except so far as to point out how it lies at the root of the city's characteristics, and that it could be traced out curiously in various develop- ments. The typical Philadelphian is neat, well-groomed, precise, even immaculate. And the women are ad- mirably gowned, good looking, many of them pretty or even positively beautiful. The average is higher in the good looks of women than in any other city that I know, whether in Europe or America. Thackeray referred to them as the ** pretty Quaker- esses ' ' ; but Chestnut Street, on a sunny winter after- noon, does not nowadays precisely suggest Quaker- esses. One of the points that marks that this city has traits of the nearby South is that you will see 133 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA negroes, in bitter weather, wrap up their feet in huge bundles of burlap or old carpeting, and thus stumble about, with ragged coats pinned across their chests and turned up toward their ears. The real Philadelphian, however, and now I mean the typical white Philadelphian, has an almost in- superable aversion to giving way, in outward appear- ance, to cold, and even on bitter cold days does not even turn up the collar of his overcoat ; his aversion to doing this amounting almost to personal inhibi- tion. It simply isn't done, in Philadelphia; and if it isn't done, the Philadelphian, whether of north or south of Market Street, does not do it. But stoic as he is in the matter of his coat collar in a snow storm, it seems to be quite proper to put on a little pair of funny velvet ear-muffs ! In the shops or in advertisements, one never meets with ** Bargains." The very word gives the Phila- delphian a cold shock. There may be *' special sales," however, and there is the lure of ** reduc- tions," which the most exclusive shop can offer with- out loss of caste. Yet the word "bargains," so dis- liked by Penn's present-day successors, was used by Penn himself. On the same ship with him, in coming over, was a man named Duche, ancestor of the rector of that name, and Penn borrowed thirty pounds of him. On landing, and looking over the new city's site, Penn offered Duche a fine space in the very heart of expected development, in lieu of the money as actual money was scarce; it would have been a ** bargain," wrote Penn; and he also, in writing 134 STEEETS AND WAYS down that Duche refused the ''bargain" and wanted the money instead, called Duche the very un-Quaker- like name of ''blockhead"; which the over-cautious man was himself soon ready to admit that he was. Early Philadelphia showed its love for trees by giving tree names to the principal east and west streets of the city, as Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, Pine, Locust, Cedar, Filbert, Mulberry, Sassafras; and most of these names have been retained. It has ill-naturedly been said that Philadelphia is as narrow as her streets ; but in reality she is a city of imagination. Surely, none but a city of sweep- ing breadth of outlook could put up such a sign as is placed at one of the busiest corners, that of Broad and Walnut; it is a signpost, marking the points to the westward, and only two cities are named; Lancaster, practically a suburb — and San Francisco ! The city is good. It frankly admits this, and be- lieves it. To be sure, some Philadelphians, goaded by the complacent claims of their own city, have called it "corrupt and content"; which is, however, quite too severe. The contentment is basic, tempera- mental, inescapable, and apparently not very bad in results, with much that is resultantly pleasant; and as to being corrupt, it is merely that the city is about like other cities. She became accustomed, years ago, to a political control which (I say this in all seriousness and from considerable knowledge) out-Tammanyed Tammany; and her self-styled "re- formers" have been neither better nor worse than ' ' reformers * ' elsewhere. 135 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA In view of the present-day eagerness for public office it is curious to note that it was only some quarter of a century before the Eevolution that two men, in one year, elected in turn to the mayoralty, refused in turn to serve, and were each fined the sum of thirty pounds for such neglect of civic duty. And two or three years after this, although mean- while a salary of one hundred pounds was attached to the office, a man elected to the office disappeared and kept out of sight, his wife merely declaring that he was away from home, mitil another man was elected and installed. From the earliest days, Philadelphia has officially recognized offenses against the law, although the at- titude of the people has been that crime does not exist. There was a time when a man would be fined twelve pennies if he smoked in the public street; showing what a height of civic virtue was attained; and old records tell of a butcher who was punished as a ''common swearer" because of ''swearing three oaths in the market-place, and uttering two very bad curses." Could criminal record be more delight- fully naive! But even at that, curiosity is balked, for the "two very bad curses" are not given in the record. In the first year of Philadelphia's life, in 1682, it was ordered that a "cage" be built, "seven feet long by five feet broad," for lawbreakers: assuredly, nar- row quarters ! and the scenes around the stocks and pillories of the early years were not edifying. The laws of Pennsylvania have always had odd 136 STEEETS AND WAYS quirks, hence the colloquial references to a "Phila- delphia lawyer"; and landlord and tenant laws are unusual. For rent due, the landlord is given power to levy upon not only the personal property of the tenant but upon that of a tenant or even a guest I If the tenant takes away his own property, while owing rent, he is guilty of theft. At least, ''Phila- delphia lawyers" tell of these things, and they tell, too, strange stories of "ground rents" lying mys- teriously hidden under many a lease, ready to arise and remain an incubus forever. The police of to-day, on the whole, are a capable- seeming set of men, with somewhat more of lack of discipline or lack of appearance of discipline than is customary elsewhere. It is not unusual to see a policeman lounging against a w^all; in hot weather I have seen them sitting on the front steps of shuttered homes. Philadelphians have so much of both manner and manners, that the negroes who live here, and there are great numbers of them, imitatively have also a higher than usual average of manner and manners, and indeed of general conduct, for in no other city is the standard of the negroes so high, especially of those who are house servants, ofifice employees, ele- vator operators, and such classes. The newsboys of the city have terribly raucous voices, and this comes from their fighting against the noises of the streets, and in particular the noise of trolleys. For the trolleys crash through the nar- row business streets, high-walled by buildings on 137 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA either side, with terrific thundering, banging, clang- ing, grinding sounds, excruciatingly terrible. Slang, except now and then some selected word for a special occasion, is not necessary to the speech of the better-class Philadelphian. He has his own phrases, however, and it is typically Philadelphian to begin a sentence, **My thought is — ." He is rather particular as to his speech, yet his particular- ity does not smack of the schoolroom; but now and then you may even hear the Oxford pronunciation of physiognomy, *'fizzi-on-yu-mi." Once or so in a lifetime you will hear, what you will never hear in any other American city and rarely in England away from the tower of Magdalen, the pronunciation of ** Deuteronomy" with long **o's" and with the accent on the next to the last syllable. The Philadelphian dislike of the simple word **the" is among the curious manifestations of the city. There are two sets of city council; what may be termed the upper and the lower houses; but Philadelphia never refers to **the councils"; no Philadelphian could by possibility do so. It is always just one word, ''councils"; and ''councils" do not meet in the City Hall, huge building though it is. No. It is always "City Hall," without the *'the." I do not know why or how this can be. I put it down as among those unexplainable facts which travelers notice, in Europe or Asia or in Pennsylvania. And, as a rule, although not with absolute uniformity of usage, a man does not have his money in the bank; it is "in bank." 138 STREETS AND WAYS There is no *' Union League Club" here, as there is in New York, and other cities, for, with recogni- tion of correctness, it is just the ** Union League." It is a typical Philadelphia pronunciation to give "hospitable," a word much used in this extremely hospitable city, with the accent, oddly and markedly, on the ''spit." Great numbers of Philadelphians, although in this case not the most careful speakers, 'refer to the ' ' rad-iators " on the front of their motor- cars, and to the ''shock-abzorbers" (with a "z" sound!) on the rear axle. There is not the variety of odd street signs that one expects to see in an old city; but one is amused by such a baker's announcement as "The Cake that made Mother stop Baking." The oldest confec- tioner of the city still displays the good old-fashioned word, "Sweets." There are still such reminders of the past as, "goat, sheep and deer skins." I noticed on the front of a mansion that had been given over to the use of the Naval Auxiliary of the Red Cross, in the very heart and center of Philadelphia's exclu- siveness, on Rittenhouse Square, the sign, without saving punctuation, "Parcels and Packages received here for the Men of our Navy weighing less than 100 pounds." Though a city with a reputation for slowness, one notices an unusual number of places where clothes are pressed or shoes mended "while you wait." But, of course, this does not tell how long you may be expected to wait! Butchers are still known as "licensed victualers." 139 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA One gets the impression of an unusual number of bird-seed stores and of places where dogs and other small animals are sold. There are many more opticians, proportionately, than in other cities, and I have heard Philadelphians themselves explain this by the city's constant contrast of red brick and white marble. There is more than the usual number of shoe stores, because Philadelphians walk more than the people of most American cities, their homes and railway stations being so near the center. Perhaps Franklin unconsciously set the supposed Philadelphia standard, in the matter of sleep, by promptly falling asleep, the very first day he was in the city, in the first building that he entered, which happened to be a meeting-house. It is still a city that is delightfully dormered; there are dormer windows, in the older portions, in every direction; and one may readily fancy a connection between *' dormer" and sleep; although, for many people it would be amusingly sufficient, as a proof of sleepi- ness, to say that the city actually maintains a number of cricket clubs ! It is a city that goes to bed early and the "twelve o'clock visitor in a nine o'clock town" is frequent. In the older residence streets, those which still have solid shutters, you will hear the resonant bang of shutter after shutter, shortly after eight. The dog is either turned out or called in, according to the kind of owner, and then the houses are black. This is, however, to some degree deceptive, as the old- fashioned sitting-room is up one flight and at the 140 STREETS AND WAYS rear of the house; but even so, the hours are gen- erally early for a big city. Naturally, an idiosyncratic city develops some idiosyncratic people; and one of the Philadelphia judges is blessed with so careful a wife that she has all the family silver carried to her room, for safe- keeping, every night; and friends (it is always friends!) say that the distinguished judge often pounds furiously on the breakfast table, impatiently waiting for the so very carefully guarded silver to appear. Over and over, one comes back to the subtle satis- fied something that is written on the Philadelphia face. *'Smug," says one visitor. They ** never bristle," says Henry James. *'I can always tell what city a man comes from" — ^you remember the old story — working around to, *'Now, you are from Philadelphia," and the indignant, **No, I'm not! IVe been sick for a month and that's why I look that way!" I think the feeling comes, first, from the inherited spirit of non-resistance, and secondly from the sense of conscious regularity which comes from living among severely regular streets and regular number- ings. Streets at right angles, numbered in numerical succession, and precisely one hundred numbers to a block; the streets north of Market just the same as south of Market with the differentiating *' North" or ** South" in referring to them — this alone must have a tremendous effect on the mental makeup of the 141 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA people. Direct a man to, say, 2020 South Twentieth Street, and he knows that he must go twenty squares south on the twentieth street from the Delaware Kiver. I happened to read, in an English book, a few days ago, of an American, in London, who was under suspicion of giving a false name and address, because he gave it as **One thousand one hundred and ninety- one, Walnut Street, Philadelphia;'^ obviously an in- vention, to the British mind (though one really does not see why) ; till a traveled Englislmian remarked that there really was such a street in Philadelphia and that, as it was at least ten miles in length, it might possibly reach that numbering. As a matter of fact, it reaches the number within less than two miles. This regularity operates, too, to hold people close to the customary. They go precisely to the places where they have always gone, to see the things they have always seen. They rarely leave the beaten path; which is why, after all, most of them do not follow that of the primrose. I was told, one day, by the head of a prominent house, that numbers of his employees who live out Germantown way had never been in West Philadelphia and that numbers of his West Philadelphian employees had never seen Germantown. And a member of an active woman's club told me that her fellow members came from "the ends of the earth," at which I expressed in- terest, feeling that with allowance for unintentioned exaggeration, at least Bristol and Chester were 142 STREETS AND WAYS meant, only to find that it was deemed marvelous to have one or two from Camden and Manaynnk. No other city presents, in its sidewalks, so many pitfalls to the unwary, with stone steps projecting, and blocks of marble at the curb, and open basement stairs, and trees in the middle of the sidewalks even on Broad Street. The Glasgow admonition to its public, of ''Gang warily'^ ought to be printed, with the Glasgow addendum of the reference to the text, which is the 23d verse of the 3d chapter of Proverbs. The shops are attractive, especially the little shops for specialties: rare books, prints, old books, antiques. No other American city equals Phila- delphia in this except New York, and the New York specialty shops are so scattered as to require years to make their acquaintance. In walking in Philadelphia, more than in other cities, one is always meeting friends, and especially on Chestnut Street ; Chestnut being the most walked- upon street, and its walkable district being very small, say from Eleventh to Sixteenth. Constantly one notices the good looks, the good manners, the good clothes. And there comes the memory of that extremely active Philadelphian partisan, of Revolu- tionary days, Captain Allen McLane, for a bill to him, from a Philadelphian merchant, itemized a pair of boots, $600, 4 handkerchiefs, $100 each, a little calico and silk and chintz (curious purchases to go with his boots and handkerchiefs!), making in all a total of $3,144; with the saving clause, however, that if paid in specie eighteen pounds would settle it ! 143 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA As to walking on Chestnut Street — ^it is not likely that there will ever be anything more important, more impressive, then the march of the Continentals along this street, led by Washington, on their way to the battlefield of Brandywine; ragged, ill-shod, ill- clothed, ill-fed, they marched bravely on, with drum- ming and fifing, and each with a green twig in his hat. I have noticed, in Philadelphia, more than the number usual in American cities, of the miserable, the maimed, the blind, crouched on the stone steps or huddled against some wall, not precisely begging but silently offering pencils or matches. But I think this represents leniency of the authorities rather than unusual misery. Another class make the build- ings at the corner of Chestnut and Broad streets, the most noteworthy business corner of the city, greasy with their slouching shoulders; this repre- senting the survival of an old custom, arising long before the present modern structures stood there. In the old days, many a Philadelphian stood at this corner, especially if of the '* Bohemian" type; Walt Whitman and a few of his worshipers being often noticeable. Rebecca Harding Davis, herself a Phila- delphian, has described him as "fishy-eyed," and as "writing poems to every part of his own anatomy." In truth, he sorely shocked the fastidious ; but those who object to the fact that he was worshiped by a following ought to remember that at that time, in England, Tennyson was worshiped to such a degree that on leaving a dining-room after dinner, each lady 144 STREETS AND WAYS was expected to kiss his hand, and that even Ameri- can ladies did this! — and that as the English poet walked along the road he made such a pretense of being fearful of being seen that he covered his face from the gaze of the vulgar. It is pleasant to think that our "Walt did not do that, whether at Broad and Chestnut streets or elsewhere. Imbedded in the gummy, oily pavement around City Hall are innumerable little black metallic specks which, if one stops to look at them, wondering what such pavement construction means, will be found to be fragments dropped from motor cars, bolts, grease- cups, rods, nuts, all the various parts that can be shaken off when a car suddenly stops — and the sudden stops are frequent. The absurd story may have originated here, suggested by this medley of debris, of the escaping patient from a sanatorium who leaped into a doctor's waiting motor car and dashed off with it for liberty, stopping at a nearby corner to get two amazed Chinamen into the rear seat, and then continuing till a terrific crash ended the flight ; when a policeman, hurrying up, could find only "a nut and two washers" I I learned, one day, motoring around City Hall, what may presumably be looked upon as the average value of a woman's life, not in the judgTQent of life insurance folk but m that of the police; at least, on the day in mind, I remember that a policeman, after a necessary stoppage of cars, motioned to go on; and I went on; but at that very moment a woman was so careless as to step out from the sidewalk 145 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA directly in front of the car, which it was fortunately possible to stop while she was still a few inches away. At which, the policeman marched over to me. ** Didn't you see me motion you to come on?" he said. "If I had not stopped that woman would have been run over," I replied. ** Never you mind about the women," he said darkly. **You do as I tell you or it'll cost you eighteen dollars." When Philadelphia is mentioned, South of Market Street claims the name. North of Market is much like Brooklyn is to a New Yorker. North of Mar- ket is a great area, mile after mile of brick houses, three storied and some two storied, individual, shoulder to shoulder, houses of well-to-do mer- chants rising in clean, Holland-like shininess of door varnish, clean panes and exact curtains, white door- steps, sometimes with a glimpse of sideyard and a garden of greenery, with roses and wistaria in ex- treme orderliness. Then, without apparent reason, may come a change to squalor, with untidy pave- ments, shaky shutters, and desolateness sitting like a blight over all. Then one will pass a great area of endless two-story, company-built little houses in wearying repetition, monotonous in unchang- ing likeness, hundreds upon hundreds, street and corner and street, street and corner and street. The newer of these districts have unvaried houses topped by metal cornices with peeling paint. Then one will come upon areas of homes, one after another, alike as peas in a pod, of be-porched dwellings, and as the houses form a continuous line so the porches 146 STEEETS AND WAYS extend on both sides of tlie way like continuous boardwalks, with 'little jumpable hurdles to mark each bound. Each of these porches, all rather nar- row, is filled to capacity with large-sized rockers, all covered in summer, thousands of them, with strips of white linen towelling, neat, clean and frequently replaced. North of Market Street shows acres of the mediocre, of the conservative, mostly of the comfort- able. It shows an even array of primly starched lace curtains of the '80 's, evenly hung across the glass, a curtaining which has vanished from other cities but which is traditionally the outward and visible emblem of prosperity here. "Within the houses are treasured the what-nots and the Victorian black-walnut furniture, just as south of Market Street the mahogany of Chippendale's time is honored and preserved. Even these quiet folk sitting swaying in their tight-wedged, rocker-lined porches are saying to each other: *'Yes; she was of good family, a Klinker- foos from Schaefferstown, and her grandmother was born a — '^ and thus on and on. One wonders whether it is the climate of the city or the blood or the food. It is so marked, that it must be from all. Most of the streets in the central business portion of Philadelphia are necessarily one-way streets, through narrowness and the volume of traffic, and at the crossings there is an infallible way of picking out strangers from resident Philadelphians ; for the stranger, before crossing, looks both to the rigjit and 147 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA the left, for possible motor-cars, whereas the PMla- delphian looks in one direction only. Tradition has it that two spots were reserved, by William Penn, to remain forever vacant, ready for the use of visiting Indians; and tradition further holds that one was a spot in the rear of some build- ings on South Second Street, between Chestnut and Walnut, and the other on Walnut Street near Broad. Neither of these places is now available for the wandering Indian, nor have the spots been used as playgrounds or resting spots. The busybody is a unique feature of Philadelphia life ; it being, not an individual, but a set of smallish mirrors, one of them being on a concave curve. It is so adjusted, at a second-floor window, that a per- son within the room may see in reflection, without being seen in turn, every passer-by on the sidewalk or any caller who may be on the doorstep; all of which gives a stranger the idea of an entire city peeping at him unobserved. I never like to find myself thinking critical thoughts of Philadelphia. And one of my pleasant memories is of meeting, one day, in a little Connecti- cut town, an old man, a veteran of the Civil War, who told me of his journey home with a companion veteran after Appomattox. They stopped off at Philadelphia, and wandered aimlessly about, tired and dirty and miserable, and they paused at a gate in a high wooden fence in an alley; having become so heartsick and ashamed that they had left the main streets; and they saw an aged lady motion to them, 148 STREETS AND WAYS from her window, to come in, and they went in, and she and her sister, quiet Friends, welcomed them, and gave them hot water and fresh towels, under a grapevine in the neat little brick-paved yard— how those fresh towels lingered lovingly in the old man's memory I— and good things to eat and to drink; and tears were in the old man's eyes, and his voice broke quaveringly, as he told of how he loved the very thought of those gentle women of Philadelphia. "IIITllii """"">m.,uu„ ""ll'Ui, """»„., 149 CHAPTER X ROMANTIC BUSINESS HOUSE stately and tranquil and wide, with fluted Corinth- ian pillars upholding a squar- ish portico, a house of dull red brick and creamy marble, with its front door double-ap- proached up four or five isteps from the side- walk: such is the struc- ture that was put up almost a century ago for the offices of a company which even then was well on toward the completion of its first century of age; the office building of the oldest fire insurance com- pany of the United States. And it might be taken for a stately, old-fashioned dwelling, here on South Fourth Street, in the heart of old Philadelphia, now a busy but dingy region. You enter a wide, clear, fine hall, scrupulously buff as to wall and creamy as to paint, with classic inner doorways, and a leather firebucket or so hang- ing up as reminders of the past. You enter the drawing-room at the right; that is, you feel as if it must be the drawing-room, but it is really an office, 150 EOMANTIC BUSINESS a quiet and immaculate and soft-colored office, witli a quiet and buff-colored safe and a sedately quiet- seeming desk, and a general air of peaceful courtesy enveloping all. Beliind, and seeming to be an in- timate part of the offices, is aai old-time garden, orderly and fragrant and sweet. The general air is that of leisured ease, the air so typical, as one finds, of much of Philadelphia busi- ness ; and it seems only natural to find, not only that this company still exists in a strong and vigorous old age, but that its most important feature is that it insures property in perpetuity! — delightful touch, significant of the very atmosphere of the city. This ancient company, organized in 1752, owes its inception to Franklin ; for in fire-insurance, as in so many things, ^'Abou Ben Franklin's name led all the rest." The attention of Frankhn was early at- tracted to the general subject of fires and fire pro- tection, and while still a young man he organized a volunteer fire-fighting company which did fine serv- ice through the many years of its existence. After a visit to Paris he wrote urgently regarding safety in building, basing his ideas on the French avoid- ance of fire dangers ; and when he came to the build- ing of his own house he put all that seemed feasible into practice. The plan of a fire-insurance company met with the cordial approval which was customarily given to whatever he proposed; and the old company still exists, proud of its origin and of its long and busy life, an important factor in giving the color of 151 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA romance to the business of the city. The Hand-in^ Hand — so the company is generally and lovingly known, from its ancient design of four clasped hands, crossed in the unbreakable grasp of the *'My Lady goes to London" of childhood. A picturesque feature of the older portions of the city is the fire-mark still in place on the fronts of old- time houses. For it was long the custom, for the Hand-in-Hand and the early companies which fol- lowed it, to place their designs on the houses they insured: fire-marks of lead or iron, a foot or so in height ; not at all the insignificant flimsy little marks used in other cities some years ago, but big and ef- fective and noticeable marks that were honored orna- ments. The Hand-in-Hand design, the design of hose and hydrant, the design of a hand fire-engine, the eagle, the Green Tree, most romantic mark of all the marks — such are the principal designs still to be found on the old house-fronts of the city. And in early days they not only served to indicate which fire-insurance company held the policy, but their presence or ab- sence on the front of a building was likely to deter- mine whether or not it should burn if a fire started, for it came about that volunteer fire-fighting com- panies and the insurance companies had affiliations, and that a volunteer company protected or assisted by an insurance company would make an effort at a fire only if the fire-mark of its company were to be seen. The Green Tree company was formed from a ro- 152 ROMANTIC BUSINESS mantic cause. For it came to pass that the Hand-in- Hand decided, on account of the burning of several houses that had been closely surrounded by trees, that it would refuse insurance to any house thus situated; it was feared that dry trees would spread a fire and that green trees would prevent the getting at a fire, hence the ban; whereupon a company was quickly organized which made its special appeal to the owners of houses which were close-encompassed by trees, and this new and rival company adopted as its fire-mark a green tree ; and the mark was not only of a tree, but it was really green, as, like the other fire-marks, this was painted in color. The Green Tree became swiftly popular, and the prompt reversal, on the part of the Hand-in-Hand, of its own opposition, gave tree-surrounded houses a new popu- larity. On the same street as the old Hand-in-Hand com- pany, the almost as old Green Tree has its offices: in an old house, once a dwelling house, the home of the Cadwaladers : one of the names before which the natural Philadelphian knee naturally genuflects. It is a mansion of rather high effect, with two arched doorways. It is full of the feeling of charming old age. It has the atmosphere as of some old London business house such as one may dream about or find suggested in Dickens; only full of the charm of old Philadelphia and with a certain sweet American- ism. Climb the stairs, and you find a great draw- ing-room stretching through the house. There are old and lovely dewdrop chandeliers. There are 153 THE BOOK OF. PHILADELPHIA great Empire doorframes with ormolu ornaments. The doors are laterally paneled, and the panels are decorated in black and tawny gold; soft lacquer colors in classic arabesques. There are superb white marble mantels. There is a great old side- board and there is a long mahogany banqueting table; for this is one of the old Philadelphia houses which keeps up the custom of having dinner on the occasion of a meeting of directors. There is old Canton china in blue and gold. There are tureens, and there are tall jugs, and there is a veritable fleet of decanters, in varying degrees of fullness or empti- ness. It is very lovely in the old high-ceilinged rooms. And the hall of this second floor is magnifi- cently divided into anterooms by doors which are topped by great semi-circles of glass that are per- haps ten feet or so across. There is an unreality about this, which goes with the unreality of the powerful existing ancient com- panies, so charmingly named as they are. Of course the Green Tree has a more formal name, just as the Hand-in-Hand has a more formal name, but it is quite unnecessary to keep the formal names in mind ; although, after all, such a name as ''The Philadel- phia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire," is itself a delightful sonorous mouthful of words. To add to the unreality there is, in the Green Tree building, the best of all the portraits of Franklin; a Duplessis, but perhaps a replica, a painting warm in color, with the collar of minlc showing Franklin's 154 ROMANTIC BUSINESS face as quiet and strong, with tlie kind of moutli to utter terse and clinching sentences, and a look in the kindly face such as makes people listen and heed ; and the world certainly listened and heeded when Franklin spoke. He wears a coat of a redness not unlike the hue of the brick of the houses of this, his city. It is a superb portrait; and the president of the company said, simply, ''I do not think they paint portraits hke that nowadays." Further to add to the romantic sense of unreality, there hang on the walls portrait after portrait of successional directors and company presidents, early portraits by Neagle, later ones by Cecilia Beaux and Abbey and Sargent. Here is a portrait of S. Weir Mitchell, here is one of his father, and here is a por- trait of his son; thus illustrating, as nothing else could so absolutely do, the sense of continuance and inheritance in Philadelphia financial organizations. And, after all, it was in Philadelphia that the story was located of the young lawyer who, taken into his father's firm, hurried triumphantly in, one day, with the announcement that he had settled a case that had been pending for many years; at which the father groaned and said, ''My son, my son, I had intended that case to give you an income throughout your life!" And it is far from a jest, but a serious reality, that many an old house in this city stands for decade after decade, in charge of some trust or trust company, empty, going to ruin, the heirs re- ceiving nothing, the property depreciating. Philadelphia possesses the most effective depart- 155 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA ment store in the world, considering beanty of ap- pearance, size, the character of the displays and the unusual adjuncts. It also possesses the largest, the most beautiful and best equipped building iu the world that is devoted to publishing. In commercial museums and in technical schools the city is also far up among the leaders. Philadelphia might fairly claim romantic business on the single ground, even if there were not numer- ous other grounds, of possessing, as its old Stock Exchange, so perfect a structure as that at Third and Walnut and Dock streets, where Dock Street opens into the broad space of its old-time market; Dock Street itself being a romantic survival of early days, in its ramblings, its divagations, its un-Philadel- phia-like meandering course, following as it does the ancient waterfront, and still dingily but very busily occupied with old-fashioned businesses, with fish markets and produce houses. The old Stock Exchange is a rounding-fronted structure of stone, impressive in its uniformity of soft-toned gray; a classic structure, perfect in mass and in details, an upstanding, forthfacing, audacious building, looking out from its sweeping curve with such graceful bravery as gives a veritable Victory of Samothrace air. Its tall and fluted classic col- umns stand in a noble hemicycle. The building is exceedingly high-set, with no steps to break the curv- ing front, but with stairs of admirable design at either side. Around the edge of the flat roof of the structure is a wonderful line of classic pahnettes, 156 I I I M ROMANTIC BUSINESS and above the roof rises a tall, slim, audacious cupola, pilastered and lantern-sided. But there was a period when Philadelphia reveled in business structures of fearsome and depressing type ; I was on the point of saying the late Victorian period, but it seems unfair to seem to put the blame on a woman and a foreigner, especially as a principal architectural offender of that sad period made a podnt of proudly refusing to see Europe lest his taste be impaired; so let us say the Benjamin Har- rison or early Grover Cleveland period, when Phila- delphia outdid other cities in its erection of massive stone buildings, especially banlvs, with ponderous towers and bastions and a general originality in ugli- ness, with the unfortunate promise of standing for- ever, and with the air of conscious respectability which visitors think they see in Philadelphians them- selves. The city has not maintained much of the romantic along its waterfront; but there is still pre- served the memory of how William Penn himself loved both the Delaware and the Schuylkill, and loved to go a-boating, now on one river and now on the other, flying his flag of lord proprietor on his stately barge built high at bow and stern. And there is a pleasant tale about the building of an early bridge across the Schuylkill, for, there having arisen a good deal of doubt about the bridge's strength, the builder, when it was finished, cunningly offered one dollar each to every man who would drive upon it with a wagon loaded with stone and remain until the 157 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA bridge was filled from end to end. Thus the bridge was tested, satisfactorily, and at slight cost; and, it is recorded, without those out in the middle com- plaining of their greater degree of danger or their longer wait; and ill-natured folk used to point to this as an example of how attractive a dollar has always looked to a Pennsylvanian. The city is rich in traditions of its far-flung busi- ness line of even distant days ; it is rich in traditions of early trade with India and with China, and many is the old family which holds, among its precious treasures, punch-bowls of Chinese Lowestoft, crape shawls of the Orient, china and silks, and brass- bound chests of camphor-wood. Young men of family used to covet the chance of sailing to the Orient as (fascinating word, so familiar in the boys' books of a few decades ago!) supercargo of a clipper ship ; and a husband and wife, long-time dwellers on Spruce Street, are proud to say that on each side of the family a grandfather went out to the East, when a young man, as supercargo, and that their home contains two beautiful sets of Nankin china, because the taste of each of the supercargo ancestors ran to Nankin; the bleu de Nankin of thousand- chimneyed King-te-tching. Galloping across the great high plains among the Colorado Eockies, I noticed how fine was the effect of the most typically Western hats, broad of brim and goodlooking in shape, worn by the most typically Western of the horsemen of that region ; and I found that these most Western-appearing hats were of 158 BOMANTIC BUSINESS Philadelphia make and always thus spoken of, by name. Franklin has set down that when he was a boy his father loved to quote encouragingly, **Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings"; and that in the course of his long career he actually stood before five kings; stating this fact, in which he would be justified in feeling im- mense pride, in the simplest half dozen of words, without even itemizing the monarchs who welcomed him; and somehow this success with kings recalls a Philadelphia triumph with a President, for, only a few years ago, when a Philadelphia merchant wished to open a new retail store under the highest possible auspices, he just naturally sent an invitation to the White House, and the then President of the United States quitted his national duties long enough to come here to take part. I have seen thousands of people gathered in the great inner court of a Philadelphia store, listening to the playing of a mighty organ of the store; busi- ness thus becoming a social and musical affair 1 And I have seen and heard, in the same court, after our entry into the great war, thousands of people sing- ing national songs; business thus becoming a patriotic affair. And in this city business may also become an artistic affair, for in the great entrance hall of a publishing house is a mosaic of great length, and of wealth of color, softly glowing above a long pool of water which lies pictorially on almost the level of the floor. 159 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA Along the Scliuylkill, in tlie vicinity of tlie FaUs, is a PMladelpliia that is practically unknown except to such as labor there ; a district of endless stretches of close-crowded mills and factories, a district which seems a succession of English mill towns ; with much of picturesqueness too, for there is the river itself, and there are the steep-rising slopes up which lead streets that go straight or go twisting, and where little stone homes • alternately straggle or pack close for comradeship. And, to return to the center of the city, it is but typical of the ancient portion, that you may pass through an arch beneath a building and unexpectedly find yourself mthin a little court surrounded by of- fices thus quite tucked away. To enter through an archway is always felicitous ; and most fascinating of all is it to enter through an archway, closed at night with ancient wooden doors, on Second Street near Callowhill, for it is the en- trance to the ancient Black Horse Inn. And within the archway is still the ancient inn-yard, a long, rough-paved parallelogram, enclosed by simply balustraded doddering balconies. It is such an old innyard as used to be common in London, and which may still be seen in some of the English pro\'incial towns. From such an innyard Pickwick himself might have driven. Old windows look down into the ancient court, and wagons are still driven into the enclosure, and the imagination cannot but recon- struct all the busy life of an age that has vanished quite away. The flickering lights and glooming 160 •, <.' ■• ' .:...v .; II m ii I ■'' .A- ■ ^^9U ROMANTIC BUSINESS shadows, tlie old-time atmosphere of it all, serve to make it among the most romantic of Philadelphia memorials. It would seem as if the entrance of women into business must needs add touches of romance; and it has added at least one touch of diversion. At a war-charity rummage sale, or **gefoojet," one of the many features was the offering of chances on a sweater at twenty-five cents a chance. And as 1 stood there, getting something else at the same counter, the girl in charge of the sweater said, quite openly, to the woman in charge of that department, that she thought she had reached the limit on chances but could sell the article outright. **I have taken nine dollars and twenty-five cents on chances and have been offered four dollars for it outright," she said. *'Sell it! That will make over thirteen dollars 1" was the unhesitating reply. At a meeting of a business association, it was moved that some severe criticism of the Eeading Railway be adopted. (This was shortly before the taking over by the government of all the railways, during the war.) But one wealthy man rose quickly to his feet. His wealth, as everybody knew, had come to him through the killing of a rich uncle by this very railway. "I object!" he cried. *'Grod bless the Reading Railway!" The romantic or the unusual, may readily, in busi- ness, become the bizarre; and I remember a notice which I saw in the window of a big undertaking establishment on Chestnut Street: ** Wanted; Ten 161 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA intelligent men to act as Professional Pallbearers'*; and it was added, with praiseworthy attention to detail, that they must be at least five feet ten inches in height ; and the notice concluded with the extraor- dinarily practical touch that they ''must have black hair" ! After all, it was a South Street black woman who put on not only a black dress but black under- wear, when her husband died, because when she mourned she ''mohned all over." 162 CHAPTEE XI ART AND ARTISTS [HERE are two big canvases by the Philadelphia painter, Benjamin West, including his famous "Death on the Pale Horse," in the Academy of the Fine Arts of this city ; an- other great canvas — for West worked in a period when there was importunate demand for canvases of heroic size, and he was amply qualified to meet the demand — ^is in the Pennsylvania Hospital here; others are pre- served in the National Gallery of London, in the Grosvenor Gallery, and in many other public or pri- vate British collections. Benjamin West was also a personal favorite of George the Third, and by a remarkable chance it so happened that he was painting a portrait of that monarch when a messenger entered with news from West's own city, the most important news that ever came out of Philadelphia, that of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence. For a little while the King was agitated ; then his agitation ceased and he became silent and thoughtful; and at length he said 163 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA slowly: ''Well, if they cannot be happy under my government, I hope they will not change it for a worse. — I wish them no ill.'' West had been prominent in organizing the Eoyal Academy, and when its first president, Sir Joshua Eeynolds, died, he, American as he was, was unanimously chosen president to succeed the mighty Eeynolds, and held the office for more than a score of years. When he died, in 1820, he was laid to rest in St. Paul's, where Eeynolds and Van Dyck had similarly been honored, and his body was followed to the cathedral by a long line of lovers of art and by great and titled men. Yet in the very year of West's death Sydney Smith wrote his famous gibe: '*In the four quarters of the globe, who looks at an American picture or reads an American book?" And at the time, and ever since, the gibe has been accepted, not so much by the English as by Ameri- cans themselves, just because a very clever English- man said it; although Sydney Smith well knew of Benjamin West, and also of that other American, Lindley Murray — also to be deemed a Philadel- phian, for he was born in Lancaster County — whose Grammar was, when Smith wrote, the acknowledged standard for all British writers. So that Sydney Smith well knew, and every one ought to know, that everybody of taste or knowledge looked at Ameri- can pictures and honored American writing; and to West and Murray may be added Gilbert Stuart, a superior of West, and Benjamin Franklin, whose 164 AET AND ARTISTS writings were familiar to every Englislimaii. Yet what persistent life a gibe may have ! Enclosed within the campus of Swarthmore Col- lege is still preserved the farmhouse in which, far back in 1735, Benjamin West was bom. Indians were still common in the neighborhood at that period, and one day one of them, watching little Benjamin mak- ing a picture (for West was an instinctive artist from his very boyhood), silently gave the lad some pig- ment of red and some of yellow, such as the Indians used in painting their own bodies, so that the boy might make his pictures in color. Overjoyed, the boy ran to show the colors to his mother, whereupon she promptly handed him some indigo from beside her washtub, and thus did Benjamin West first come into possession of the three primary colors; one of the many examples of the ancient adage that truth is stranger than fiction. As a young man, we see West away from this farm and located in nearby Philadelphia, making pictures for one dollar each (the Spanish dollar was then our unit of money), and before long he has actually so improved, under such encouragement and advice as the town could then offer, and by virtue of his indefatigability, that he is receiving five pounds for every portrait ; and now he heeded the call of Eome, and sailed, armed with letters of introduction and preceded by letters of description; for Philadelphia was proud of him. And now came an incident which forever gave him standing. The painters in Eome arranged joyfully 165 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA to make game of the raw youth from the backwoods, and they so managed as to have him first led into the presence of the Apollo Belvidere. But West looked calmly at the statue, with intelligent appreciation; and then said, quietly, *'It is like a Mohawk war- rior." With that he attained, in an instant, in the judgment of European artists — for his words flew broadcast — to the pedestal of clear-sighted original- ity; no one else had ever thought of comparing the physical perfection of Greece with the physical per- fection of the American wilderness. He did not settle in Eome, but in London, and there he never failed to use every opportunity to aid other American artists, for he knew from his own experience how much an artist needs aid and en- couragement in his formative days. Gilbert Stuart, Copley, Allston, Trumbull; such and others were American artists that, in London, he nobly encour- aged and generously helped. And many Americans called who were not artists, and they were always genially welcomed; and in regard to this there is a story that is peculiarly typical of Philadelphia. For one day West had as a dinner guest one of the Whartons of Philadelphia, and a caller was an- nounced, and as West did not happen to know the name, Wharton volunteered to go and see who it was. In a few moments he came back beaming: *'He's all right!" he exclaimed. **He is connected with one of the most exclusive Philadelphia families ! ' ' The portraits of West and his wife by Matthew Pratt, said to be the first American artist that West 166 ART AND AETISTS helped, show the distinguished man to have been very distinguished looking, with long nose and high- arched eyebrows, with a slender, striking and un- usual face framed in dark hair; and Mrs. "West is an alert, winsome, highly likable woman, with pearl necklace, low-cut dress and filmy white scarf, and an odd suggestion of Mona Lisa about the mouth. They make a handsome pair, like a couple straight out of romance; and their marriage was indeed a romance. And never did a romantic tale concern so many distinguished Philadelphians. For before leaving Philadelphia for Eome, West had met pretty Elizabeth Shewell ; he had been intro- duced to her by Anthony Wayne; and an engage- ment followed acquaintance, but her brother — the two were orphans — frowned upon the engagement, for he was a wealthy merchant and saw no money in art. So West went to Europe alone. But as soon as he won his foothold abroad, West wrote to Elizabeth that he now was able to earn sufficient money to live on. His father, he said, was shortly going to England to see him, and he begged her to cross in his father's care, and they would be married in London. He must have given a good reason why he could not come back to Philadelphia to get her, for the high-spirited Elizabeth acceded to his urgency and told her brother that she was going to London to be married; at which the ogre of a brother promptly and literally locked her in her room. Elizabeth had unguardedly told him every- thing, even on what ship West's father was to sail, 167 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA and with that knowledge the brother determined to keep her under lock and key until after the boat had gone. But Elizabeth was not to be balked. She was going to be married to her Benjamin! So she con- trived to let one of his friends know of her plight, whereupon he and two other friends planned to aid her. There is no absolute certainty as to who were the three, but charming tradition has for decades had it that they were Benjamin Franklin, Francis Hopkinson, who was afterwards one of the Signers, and William White, who was destined to become the first Episcopalian bishop in America. And never was so romantic and youthful a scheme carried out by so many men who were later to win such grave dignities. Through collusion with Elizabeth's maid a rope- ladder was smuggled into the house, and after night had fallen the young woman and the maid descended from the window and, under the escort of the three friends, they galloped down to Chester — what a de- lightful galloping party that was! — and at Chester a small boat was in waiting to carry them out into the channel, where the brig which was bearing West's father had lain to, by arrangement with the captain, to wait for them. And so Elizabeth got to London and became Mrs. West. For over fifty years of married life the romance happily continued; and it adds fascinating interest to the groat pictures by West that his city of Phila- delphia still pridefuily preserves. 168 AET AND ARTISTS On the whole, the most distinguished portrait painter that America has produced was Gilbert Stuart, and it was in Philadelphia that his most superb portraits, those of President Washington, were made. The father of Gilbert Stuart was a Scotchman who gallantly went out for ** Prince Charlie" and, after fighting through the brief campaign and at Culloden, fled to America and started a little snuff mill a few miles from what is now known as Narragansett Pier, in Rhode Island. I was near there lately, and hunted the place up, and found the old mill and the old house still there, beside the thicket-bordered little stream, in the heart of a wild and little settled region (small though Rhode Island is!); and I thought it but natural that an American, born in so romantic a spot, should, after great success in England and the painting of King George and of his son who was to be another King George, romantically gave up his career of success for the sake of coming back to his native land to paint the greatest George of aU, George Washington. What is known as the Athenseum portrait, which was made by Stuart in Philadelphia while the seat of the national government was here, is by general consent, and has from the first been deemed, the finest and most adequate of all the portraits of Washing- ton, whether by Gilbert Stuart or others. And there were so many artists, in all, including Americans and foreigners, who wished to put Washington on canvas or into marble, that he could write, good-naturedly, 169 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA that **I am now altogether at their beck, and sit like Patience on a monument, whilst they are delineating the lines of my face ' ' ; and this is especially interest- ing from its incidental quotation from Shakespeare, which was not at all a customary matter with Wash- ington. The Athenaeum portrait, with the firm-set mouth, the steady eyes, the brooding, watchful greatness of it all, stands as the picture of a ruler of the ages; and I do not know that it has ever been remarked that it bears a striking resemblance to the Sphinx. Whether by accident or design, and I think it must have been by design, Gilbert Stuart followed the posi- tion, the pose and the angles of that mighty mystery of the past, and there is in his portrait the same massive dignity and gravity, the same calm unshak- ableness, that one sees in the Sphinx. The stoppage of Gilbert Stuart's portrait at the shoulders adds to the similitude, and even the hair of Washington, in the portrait, comes down precisely as does that of the great stone image. This portrait by Stuart did not remain in Phila- delphia, but went to Boston, but Philadelphia still possesses, in spite of this, the finest collection of Gilbert Stuart's portraits, in both number and variety, of any city. Most of them are gathered at the Academy of the Fine Arts, and they are superb and beautiful examples of portraiture. Hazlitt, who once filled a great space in the public eye, de- serves to be still remembered for some of his wise clevernesses, as, for example, his declaration that he 170 AKT AND AETISTS would rather leave a good portrait of himself behind him than a good epitaph; and he would have been more than ever justified in his remark could he have been painted by Gilbert Stuart. The Gilbert Stuarts are the glory of the Academy, and it is to be regretted that for the greater part of that time of the year during which visitors come to the city, the Gilbert Stuarts are heedlessly packed out of sight, to make room for hundreds of pictures, most of them necessarily mediocre, in spite of the numerous fine ones, shown in the annual exhibitions. On the whole, Philadelphia still holds the art leadership of the country, and it is odd that it should do so, for, although in the beginning it was the largest and richest American city, riches and size were soon more markedly attained by New York. Yet New York, in drawing to herself the national leadership in literature and the professions, was not able to grasp the leadership in art. To the Academy of the Fine Arts, **the Academy," the long leadership is owing ; it having been founded in 1805 by that original genius, Charles Willson Peale, who did so much for America in painting the portraits of her leaders, and who, similar to the many-sided Paul Revere, was not only of highly artistic bent, but was also a dentist, an engraver and a silversmith, a saddler, a clockmaker, a glass molder and a soldier; at the Battle of Trenton he served as a captain of volmiteers; but most of all he was artistic. And when it came to naming his children he did not name them after rich uncles or 171 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA famous statesmen but, with proper devotion to his art, gave such names as Rembrandt and Eaphael, Van Dyck, Titian and Angelica Kauffman. It was as if, like Bernard Shaw's Louis Dubedat, his con- fession of faith was: **I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez and Rembrandt, in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting." Or, if one wishes to be more prosaic, he may compare Peale's idiosyncrasy with that of the soldier of Charles Dickens who named his children from the garrison posts where they were born, as Malta, Quebec and Woolwich. One does not need to feel prosaic about anything connected with Charles Willson Peale, for he pro- foundly worshiped art from his early years to the very close of his long life. He worshiped art, in those early American days, under difficulties. And it is pleasant to remember that Washington liked him. He tried to establish an art collection and a school of art, in 1791, and was aided, but unsuccessfully, by the wood-carver Rush, and an Italian named Ceracchi who had come over to make busts of Wash- ington and others and who, unfortunately for him- self, went to France just in time to be guillotined. A few years later Peale made another attempt, but this time shocked Philadelphia by showing a Venus de Medici in his collection, and it had to be kept out of sight except for a privileged few. But he persevered, and the present Academy was started, by seventy-one leading citizens, who met to- 172 ART AND ARTISTS gether and decided to organize; and it was housed in a beautiful classic building designed by the dis- tinguished Latrobe. From the first the Academy was given acknowledged standing, even though its first formal exhibition, in 1806, was sorely shocking. For casts of statuary had been sent from Paris, and although they had been chosen by a Biddle (one of the names revered by Philadelphia) it was necessary to set aside Mondays for the ladies exclusively, so that they need not be embarrassed. In the course of years the classic structure was burned, and it was in 1876 that the Academy moved to its new quarters, the extremely uninteresting structure that it built at Broad and Cherry streets. It was a Philadelphia artist, Sargent, who gave Whistler the opportunity to flash one of the most brilliant lightnings of his caustic wit. For Sargent had on exhibition in London a painting which he had named ''Carnation Lily, Lily Rose," which swiftly brought from Whistler the ''Darnation silly, silly pose!" And, Sargent being a man of high ability, the clever fleer doubtless was of influence in keeping him from progress in a sentimental direction. I call Sargent a Philadelphian because he called himself a Philadelphian, although he was born in Italy, and his first childish language was German, and his first art study was in France, and England has been principally his home. Queen Victoria once offered to make him an Englishman, but he courteously declined. His parents were of wealth and social position in this city; his mother was a 173 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA Newbold ; so he was born in the Philadelphia purple, although the purple happened to be at the time in Florence. Admirable and distinguished though his work is, one fancies that perhaps a little more of AVhistler would have been good for his art, for an infusion of weakness, which it needed a peculiarly clearsighted man to discover, displayed itself when he came to make portraits of the really great and strong; for at the recent exhibition of 1918 at the Philadelphia Academy there were shown his Wood- row Wilson and his John D. Rockefeller, and in neither case was this really great painter able to put upon canvas the indomitable forcefulness of his subject. Plainly though that quality is to be seen in the faces of both of them, Sargent did not repro- duce it. William M. Chase, though born in Indiana, had much to do with Philadelphia. He was greatly stimulated by the Centennial. For thirteen years he taught in this city. Here he painted some of his best works. Here his finical dressing became recognized, his care as to every detail, even to every hair of his pointed beard. And he himself keenly appreciated the astonished question of a little ragged boy, who, playing on the Broad Street pave- ment, caught sight of him and, after a moment's stare of fascination, ran after him with the impulsive question, *'Say, mister, ain't you some- body?" As a man and as an artist. Chase impressed; and what is probably his finest portrait, the ''Lady with 174 ART AND ARTISTS the White Shawl," is in the Academy: a lovely por- trait, a thing of beauty, a portrait all in harmony, the fine and expressive face, the dark background, the dark gown and the white shawl. Whistler, rather critical of Sargent, was a close personal friend of Chase, and one of Whistler's most excellent portraits is in this city; not, however, at the Academy but lost amid the jumble of the ordinary at Memorial Hall; and yet, not really lost, for the eye singles it out at once; the portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell, a picture of splendid color in perfect modulations, the portrait of a beau- tiful woman, a woman all alive. Yet it is remem- bered that her husband did not like it! — which per- haps explains why it found its way to this city of Philadelphia. Friend of Chase though he was. Whistler would have been delighted to be the author of a pungent Philadelphia cleverness regarding him; for a visitor, looking first at the distinguished Sully portraits of lovely women, and then at the white-shawled portrait by Chase, remarked that if he were a woman he "would rather be Sullyed than Chased." In the very first city directory of Philadelphia is a reminder of an early and curious connection of art with this city, for in that directory, of 1785, Robert Fulton is set down as a miniature painter, at Second and Walnut streets; for Fulton was Lan- caster County born, and was a painter before he became inventor of the steamboat. I do not recall any of his portraits as retained in Philadelphia, but 175 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA Ms work may be seen (and it is fairly good work, too) among the portraits gathered at the City Hall in New York. Howard Pyle was nearly a Philadelphian, for his home was at nearby Wilmington; and he painted castles and feudal knights in armor excellently throughout many years; until, indeed, he went to Europe and for the first time saw the castles which his imagination and his brush had so well pictured; whereupon, whether with age or excitement, he shortly died. Edwin A. Abbey was born in Philadelphia, and was typesetter on a newspaper before getting his start as an artist. And mention of his name brings up the question of how English Eoyalty could get along without Americans, and especially without Philadelphians. For Charles Leslie, who painted the Coronation of Queen Victoria, was the son of a Philadelphia watchmaker and went to England to make his artistic fortune; and as to Abbey, it was the most curious of his life experiences, that, seated on the top of the tomb of Edward the Confessor, he made his studies, during the ceremonies, for the painting which at King Edward's request he made of that King's coronation in Westminster Abbey; and he had also the curious experience of refusing the formal request of the government to paint the coro- nation of George the Fifth: Abbey himself having become a veritable ''Westminster Abbey" indeed. John LaFarge was not a Philadelphian, yet he should be mentioned in references to Philadelphia 176 ART AND AETISTS art, because his father, a young officer of Napoleon the Great, having been sent to San Domingo as one of an expedition to suppress an insurrection, was compelled to flee and, after vividly exciting adven- tures, reached America, landing at Philadelphia. And the artist himself had another connection with this city, because he married a young woman who was not only the grandaughter of Commodore Perry of the Battle of Lake Erie but great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin. There are present-day Philadelphia artists, women as well as men; in fact, women rather more than men, as if to call attention to the fact that this is the Twen- tieth Century; who carry on the tradition of the city's artistic distinction, by not only doing excellent work but by winning fame far beyond the bounds of the city: among such artists being Elizabeth Shippen Green, Cecilia Beaux, Violet Oakley, Mary Cassatt, Alice Barber Stephens, and, notable among the world's etchers, Joseph Pennell. Maxfield Parrish, too, is a Philadelphian. A Philadelphia lawyer calmly remarked to a Philadelphia artist one day — I have the story from the lips of the artist himself — that the necessary men are the lawyer, the doctor, and the clergyman, the artist being but an unnecessary chance product ; to which cool assurance the artist instantly replied that the lawyer, the doctor, and the clergyman de- pend entirely for their existence upon the crimes or accidents of life, for not one of the three would be of any good whatever if nothing were the matter 177 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA with body or property or soul; but that the artist stands for the beautiful, and for things which nobly nourish the mind. 178 CHAPTER XII SOME ACTORS AND AUTHORS MONG the monuments and memorials of a city are to be included not only ma- terial evidences, but things impalpable, things intangible, permanent as- sociations, triumphs of mental achievement which the nation or the world does not forget. A song, for example, may be a memorial quite as much as a building; and "Hail, Columbia!" is such a monument for Philadelphia. For in 1798, when war was threatening between our country and France, and we were aflame with patriotism, Joseph Hopkinson, a lawyer of this city, was asked by an actor named Fox to compose some patriotic words for the tune which had become known as the ''President's March," and Hop- Ikinson did so, writing the lines in a fever of inspiration. The tune was the present tune for **Hail, Columbia!" and when Hopkinson 's *'Hail, Columbia!" words were first sung with it the audience went wild with joy and the song swept through the country on an immense wave of popu- larity. The excellent and fiery ''Sheridan's Ride" was 179 THE BOOK OP PHILADELPHIA also the work of a Pliiladelphian, Thomas Buchanan Eead; although he was temporarily away from Quaker influence, in Cincinnati, when he wrote it. The critical mind of Philadelphia holds itself aloof from the poem, willing rather to allow some degree of merit to his ''Brickmaker," which no one but a Philadelphian has ever read. Philadelphia, and in- deed Pennsylvania, love to place on pedestals authors or works that are elsewhere little known. A recent book by a former governor, Pennypacker, declares, for example, in regard to Bayard Taylor, whose home was but a few miles from Philadelphia, that "It is a grave question whether the 'Scarlet Letter' of Hawthorne or the 'Story of Kennett' by Taylor holds the higher rank among American novels." And on the next page he states, with ap- proval, that some sonnets about the local Susque- hanna region have been soberly likened to the work of Anacreon and Shakespeare. One can only think of the loyal Scotchman who, claiming the greatest writers for Scotland, asserted that even Shakes- peare was a Scotchman, and, when pressed for proof, exclaimed, ''Look at his style, mon!" Some years ago " Trilby *' gave new life and im- mense vogue to the old English ballad of "Ben Bolt"; but it is an English ballad only in having as its author Thomas Dunn English, who was an American in spite of his name and was born here in Philadelphia; and although, in the course of a long life spent in writing, he never wl'ote another line that is remembered, he did not need to do so; to 180 SOME ACTOES AND AUTHOES write one song that is known all over the earth is achievement sufficient. In the always interesting ''Table Talk" of Samuel Eogers he tells of his first meeting with Shelley. The great poet called on the banker-poet and, introducing himself, asked for a loan. It was not for himself, he explained, though he would give his personal bond for it; it was for Leigh Hunt. But the rich Eogers refused, and writes down his refusal as calmly as if refusing money to such a man as Shelley on behalf of the author of the noble "Abou Ben Adhem" were a mere commonplace of life. Poor Leigh Hunt — ''kind Hunt," as Keats terms him in one of his sonnets — was born in an atmosphere of pitiful poverty, and poverty re- mained the atmosphere of most of his life, even when Dickens was cruelly assailing him under the guise of Harold Skimpole. And Leigh Hunt was almost a Philadelphian ; in fact, he would have been had it not been for Philadelphians ! For his father was Isaac Hunt, an attorney of this city, and his mother was also of this city and of excellent connections. But with the approach of the Eevolutionary War, Isaac Hunt remained a Loyalist. Before me lies a thin little book, a pathetic little book, browned and yellowed with age, printed in Philadelphia in 1775, with Isaac Hunt's name bravely on the title-page, and bravely begin- ning: "The jealousies which at present unhappily subsist between Great Britain and her colonies, 181 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA render a discourse on this subject delicate and haz- ardous"; and continuing with such statements as: *'It is easy to believe, Great Britain will not tamely give up her right of regulating the trade of her colonies." That was indeed a ** delicate and hazardous" kind of book to write, and although there was a great deal of pro-British feeling in the city, it gradually vanished in the course of the war. A great deal of it vanished, in an extremely un- happy way, when General Clinton evacuated the city after having taken over the command from Howe, who had done little but give opportunities for gay parties and dances and for a great deal of display of their love for red coats on the part of the young women, of whom General Knox wrote that ''they love a red coat dearly." When Clinton went to New York, several thousands of Philadelphians, who had become known as frank British sympathizers, and who had never thought it possible that the British could so fail, left the city also, many of them on boats convoyed by the English fleet — and sad tales have been told of their sorrowfully looking back at their city while the ships lay becalmed — and the others, with baggage and household possessions, with the bulk of the army, who went overland. But the father of Leigh Hunt did not leave his home voluntarily. To leave, would mean hopeless disaster in the loss not only of home but of a way of support. He would fain have stayed. But he was not permitted to live down his unfortunate out- spokenness. One day a mob went to his house, and 182 SOME ACTOES AND AUTHOES carried him off in a cart to be tarred and feathered, stopping at corner after corner to gather additions to their number ; and poor Hunt tried to make a little speech at each such stopping place, thanking them for not doing worse to him than giving him blows and missiles and violent epithets, and hoping, to himself, that their terrible mood would change. It is a terrible and pathetic picture; and when they were through with him he could only flee, absolutely penniless, with his wife, to England; and there, in the year following the treaty of peace, Leigh Hunt was born to his inheritance of poverty, instead of into the condition of Philadelphia comfort which should naturally have been his. A still more interesting British literary connec- tion with Philadelphia is that which associates this city with Walter Scott, and it came about through the visit to Abbotsford of Washington Irving. For the two men liked each other, and had long walks and talks together, and one day, as they strode over the heather near the superb Eildons, the subject of Jews arose, and Irving told Scott of a rich young Jewess of Philadelphia, Eebecca Gratz, who was singularly beautiful, who had loved and been loved by a Christian, but who would not marry out of her sect, and had therefore devoted her life and her wealth to works of charity. Irving spoke with pro- found feeling of the unusual beauty and unusual qualities of Eebecca Gratz ; he knew her because she had been the close friend of the young woman, Matilda Hoffman, whom he was to have married, 183 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA but who had died ; and Scott was deeply impressed — ■ so deeply, that when, shortly afterwards, he wrote **Ivanhoe," he described one of the sweetest and finest characters in all fiction, Rebecca of York, from Irving 's description of Eebecca of Philadelphia. Philadelphians love to set forth the fact that here were written two of the most notable literary achievements of the world, the Declaration of In- dependence and the Constitution of the United States, both of them remarkable for fine literary quality, for precision of statement, for lucid presen- tation of facts, for logical arrangement. But it is possible, so it has been unkindly suggested, that they do not always remember that neither of these im- portant productions was written by a Philadelphian. But to any one who may make such a suggestion it may with justice be said that at any rate the ** Autobiography" of Franklin, one of the few great autobiographies of the world, was written by a Phila- delphian, and also his **Poor Richard" and other world-famous works. And in regard to Franklin there is a story that I think is very little known. Stopping one evening at an inn m Amiens, on his way to London, after the war was over, Franklin was told, an hour or so after his arrival, that the English historian, Gibbon, he of the "Roman Em- pire," had just arrived, on his way to his home in Lausanne. So Franklin sent his compliments to Gib- bon and suggested that they take advantage of this opportunity to become acquainted. To which Gib- bon sent the reply that, much though he should appre- 184 SOME ACTORS AND AUTHOES ciate the privilege of meeting Doctor Franklin, tlie scholar, and eminent man of science, he must regret- fully decline to meet him, as he had stood for rebel- lion against Great Britain. Whereat Franklin sent the reply that when Mr. Gibbon, following his present work, should come to the writing of ''The Decline and Fall of the British Empire," he would be able to acquire considerable information, not elsewhere at- tainable, by applying to himself. Doctor Franklin. One might believe Lausanne itself to be responsible for much of British self-consciousness, for there comes the thought of the famous Charles Kemble there, so jealous of his own importance that he actually disliked to hear the one familiar question of the place, ''How does Mont Blanc look this morn- ing?" for it so ignored himself. When Kemble came to America with his daughter, Fanny Kemble, Fitz-Greene Halleck wrote of their first appearance together, and referred enthusiastic- ally to the daughter's "dark, flashing eye" and her "brunette shin"; a typographical blunder still re- membered because of the importance of both the writer and the person written about. What a family of stagefolk the Kembles were! For there were Eoger Kemble and John Mitchell Kemble, and the Charles Kemble who was jealous of Mont Blanc, and that George Kemble who attained the unique distinction of becoming fat enough to play Falstaff without the aid of padding, and there was the mighty Mrs. Siddons, who was Sarah Kemble Sid- dons, and there was the Adelaide Kemble Sartoris 185 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA whose son married the daughter of President Grant, and the Elizabeth Kemble Whitlock whose playing in Philadelphia won the approbation and attendance of President Washington, and there was Fanny Kemble, who became a Philadelphian by marrying Pierce Butler, grandson of the Senator Butler who had built the great mansion which long since became the home of the Philadelphia Club. It was not a happy marriage. Washington Irving, so she herself has narrated, guardedly cautioned her against it, and, in a spirit which she was large-minded enough to appreciate, warned her not to be a ** creak- ing door," that being, he explained, a wife whose querulousness would be as nerve-racking as a door that constantly creaked. But she creaked ; and there at length came divorce. When Thackeray was here, he made a point of call- ing on Pierce Butler, hoping to get news of the children, for Fanny, the mother, then in London, but Butler probably surmised his object, for he would neither speak a word of the children nor show them, and Thackeray did not wish to make direct request or inquiry, and so he could only report failure. Thackeray got his inspiration and his material, in America, for *'The Virginians"; and how greatly he would have been interested to know that a Philadel- phian, a grandson of his friend Fanny Kemble, was to win wide literary fame, and especially with "The Virginian 1 ' * Thackeray wrote, of Philadelphia, that he found ''very good and kind friends" here, ''very tender 186 SOME ACTOES AND AUTHORS hearted and friendly"; and he writes that **the prettiest girl in Philadelphia, poor soul, has read * Vanity Fair' twelve times." He gives her '*a great big compliment about her good looks" and then sets down a gibe at her pronunciation in replying to the compliment: this, not from ill will toward the girl, but because he was nettled by the criticism of Phila- delphia newspapers regarding his own pronuncia- tion, which in some respects was London Cockney rather than English, and had such oddities as the persistent dropping of the **g" in words ending with that letter. Quite the oddest thing connected with his Philadel- phia visit was his casually making the statement, apparently apropos of nothing in particular, in a letter written from this city to Mrs. Brookfield, that **I can't live without the tenderness of some woman ' ' I Thackeray could not help being rude in America, but the manners and atmosphere of Philadel- phia checked him. It was at a city other than Phila- delphia that he boasted, at a dinner given to him, that he had himself given a dinner in New York which cost him four pounds a plate, adding that con- siderable of the expense was for wines, which turned out to be quite ordinary after all: ** About such as we are drinking here to-night." And it was not to a Philadelphia woman that he said, when she ex- pressed her gratification that he had asked for an introduction, that it was because he had heard of her as "the gayest woman in the South": but I think 187 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA that more tlian one Philadelphia woman would have been capable of her swift and sweet retort: "Oh, Mr. Thackeray, you must not believe everything you hear ! I actually heard that you were a gentleman ! ' ' a retort which piqued and pleased the big man mightily. In letters innumerable he writes of the money he is making by his readings. In one letter, written from Philadelphia, he estimates that he has been reading at the rate of a pound a minute. In another letter, to another friend, also written from this city, he declares that he has made two thousand pounds since landing in America. He seldom ceases to write greedily of money, except to speak of some woman's good looks. He admires a young girl at one of his Philadelphia readings. "Lord! Lord! How pretty she was ! There are hundreds of such every- where, airy looking little beings." In a long letter from Baltimore in 1853 (how often one is made to wonder how the men of the past, with- out stenographers and typewriters, could write such an infinite number of infinitely long letters!), he takes up the formal summary of our three largest cities of his time. "I think I like them all mighty well. They seem to me not so civilized as our London, but more so than Manchester and Liver- pool." He has found at Boston "a very good literary company indeed." The society of New York is "the simplest and most unpretentious." Then he is just going to give the last word on Phila- delphia when the letter is interrupted; and when it is 188 SOME ACTOES AND AUTHORS taken up again and completed, in Washington, he has forgotten about Philadelphia and goes on with other subjects instead. Getting to Washington from Philadelphia, even so recently as that, was by no means the easy matter that it is to-day; at least it was not when Dickens ifirst made the journey, ten years before the visit of Thackeray; for Dickens went by boat to Wilming- ton, thence by train to Havre de Orace, there he crossed the Susquehanna by ferry, thence he con- tined to Washington by rail. The mention of Dickens and Philadelphia is re- mindful that he thought and wrote little of the city except as to its prisons. On his first visit he stayed at the United States Hotel, long since vanished, and found on leaving that in the bill was a charge for not only the time of his actual stay but for the full week before his arrival, because he had arranged in advance to be there sooner. At this hotel, too, was enacted a scene such as he describes in '' Martin Chuzzlewit"; for a great public reception unsuspect- ingly surprised him, and his arm was nearly torn off by a line of thousands of volunteer handshakers. He was guest of honor, too, in Philadelphia, at a re- ception or ball where, the ladies importuning for a lock of hair for each of them, and he refusing from an aversion to baldness, at his age, they bribed a waiter, got hold of the Dickens hat, and pulled off all the nap in little pieces to keep as souvenirs. It was between the times of the Dickens and Thackeray visits that, in 1845, there came to Phila- 189 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA delphia a writer whose hat-nap was perfectly safe here; it was James Eussell Lowell, and he had recently married (his first romance, not his second), and although in time the Lowell house, Elmwood, in Cambridge, with some wealth, would come by in- heritance, he aimed first to make an independent position away from home, so as to be able to return conqueringly, when he should return, to Boston and Cambridge. But Philadelphia did not precisely welcome Lowell. Had he gone as a visitor it would have been different, but he went, apparently, with intent to be- come a resident, and so he was considered critically and left pretty much alone. The two made no social impression, because they boarded delightfully but modestly in the house mentioned in a previous chapter, at Fourth and Arch streets, "in a little chamber on the third story, quite low enough to be an attic, so that we feel classical in our environment ; and we have one of the sweetest and most motherly of Quaker women to anticipate all our wants, and make us comfortable outwardly as we are blessed in- wardly," as Mrs. Lowell wrote. A further pleasant touch comes from Lowell himself, as to "the little room in the third story (back), with white muslin curtains trimmed with evergreens." The house still stands; but the "Passing of the Third-Floor Back" came within the short period of five months. Lowell was very much of a social entity in Boston, where "the Cabots speak only to Lowells, and the Lowells — speak only to God": but here he was no- 190 SOME ACTOES AND AUTHOES body in particular. Oddly, too, lie made tlie un- forgivable social blunder of choosing to live north, of Market Street. He had written some charming verse, but that did not help him here; it is possible that, had he been a Pennsylvanian, he would have been compared to Anacreon and Shakespeare ; but as it was he was merely offered five dollars for an editorial, every two weeks, for the Pennsylvania Freeman, with the editorial privilege — which was exercised! — of rejection: in addition, he accepted an offer to write, for a New York publication, the Broadway Journal, a column or so a week at the same rate that the editor was paying Edgar Allan Poe : one dollar a column ! Mrs. Lowell did what she could, by translating, for an infinitesimal sum, a few of the poems of Uhland. So the couple very soon heeded the call of Cambridge. Lowell, while here, wrote of some long since forgotten Philadelphian named Elwyn, that ''he is somewhat literary for Philadelphia"; which caustic phrase would make it seem that there could be no particular grief on his part in parting from the city. And, too, it would seem that he and his wife were united in the feeling that an expected new edition of Lowell should ap- pear in Cambridge. The unhappy Edgar Allan Poe was happy for a time in Philadelphia, for he was assistant editor of Graham* s Magazine for practically three years, up to 1842, and for that time he and his wife had enough to eat. Graham's had every writer of any promi- nence. In this Philadelphia magazine appeared work 191 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA by Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, J. Fenimore Cooper — the list is amazing. Graham boasted that some of the numbers cost. him $1500 for the authors alone, Cooper being the most highly paid. Poe, when he quitted the editorship and be- came a contributor, received the rich remuneration of four dollars a page. Poe's necessities, and his varying income, caused him to shift his home now and then, but for the best part of his Philadelphia living he and his wife oc- cupied a little cottage which stood against a large house at what is now 530 North Seventh Street, at the corner of Brandywine. The house against which his tiny cottage leaned is still there ; and Poe would have been amused could he have seen the sign on the front of the building across the way, for it is, "Philadelphia Society of Free Letts"; whatever that may mean; and indeed, to avoid misunderstanding it is translated into, ''Fila- delfijus Brihwo Latwju Beedriba." Poe would have written a whimsical mystery tale about this place of mysteriously whimsical words. Mayne Keid, shortly to become the famous Captain Mayne Reid, seems to have been their principal visitor and friend; at that time a struggling Phila- delphia journalist, he was shortly to win his military title in the Mexican War, after which he hurried to Europe to fight alongside of Kossuth, only to find the fighting over; on which he settled in London and began to write the books that so fascinated boys of every age. And the finest thing in his career was 192 SOME ACTOES AND AUTHOES his devotion to the Pees, when he was a Philadel- phian. Tradition tells of a wealth of flowers at the Poe cottage, of a tiny garden and a clambering vine, and of Poe's wife, so weak and wistful, playing on the harp ; and I was glad to find a tree there which may actually have sheltered the Poes, and the general character of the immediate neighborhood not greatly changed, with much of neatness, and with quite a number of houses still there which were neighboring houses to the poet's cottage. Another poet with a connection with Philadelphia was *'Tom" Moore, who was in America in 1804 and went about extensively, getting even to what was in that day the wilderness of Lake Erie. But it was, as he wrote, at Philadelphia that he ** passed the few agreeable moments which my tour through the States afforded me," the rest of the United States being, to quote his own words further, but a "melancholy, heartless waste." On leaving the city he wrote some pleasant lines in regard to his impres- sions, ending with: **The stranger is gone — ^biit he will not forget, When at home he shall talk of the toils he has known, To tell, with a sigh, what endearments he met, As he stray 'd by the wave of the Schuylkill alone." In Fairmount Park is preserved an old cottage which is called ''Tom Moore's cottage," but with no particular reason, except that, in the course of his stay of ten days in the city, he was once in a while 193 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA "within the limits of what is now the park, and visited at the mansion known as Belmont. This cottage was at that time the home of an Aunt Cornelia, who washed clothes and sold ginger cakes and spruce beer, and it may also have been a casual meeting place. The subject of poets is remindful that Philadel- phia may claim, as her own, Walt Whitman, for although his home was in Camden, that city is directly across the Delaware from Philadelphia, and is essentially part of the big city. Of Whitman, Philadelphia may on the whole be proud. He was not an unintelligible poet, and he was certainly not the **good" gray poet, but now and then he sounded a fresh strong note. When he wrote of great men he expressed himself in great lines. Grant was **Man of the mighty days — and equal to the days"; Washington was "E'en in defeat defeated not"; and as to Lincoln, his '* Captain, my Captain!" is nobly unforgettable. He lived at 328 Mickle Street, and Hamlin Gar- land, pilgriming thither, about 1890, describes the home as one in which a very destitute mechanic might be living; as he mounted the stair to Whit- man's room on the second floor Garland's sense of resentment increased, for there was not a particle of beauty or distinction or grace. Whitman himself, a majestic old man, was seated in an armchair, with a broad Quaker hat on his head; he was spotlessly clean, as to his clothes and himself, and Garland found him a placid optimist. 194 SOME ACTOES AND AUTHORS The typical Philadelpliian is likely to feel a fine sense of certainty. One of the historical writers of the city — there are several, so it may be any one of them — was telling me of a work on which he was en- gaged which was to cover a period which, as I knew, is notable for the conflict of authorities. I made some obvious remark regarding the difficulties he had set himself to surmount; but he only replied, calmly: ''There will be no difficulties. I shall merely write it all just as it was"; than which the Recording Angel could say no more. Before me lies a set of books written by that eminent Philadelphian, Doctor Benjamin Rush, and published in Philadelphia in 1794. The publisher is one Dobson, "at the Stone-House, No. 41, South Second Street," and at the close is a list of other books published by Dobson, with their prices; and never were there prices so bewilderingly odd. Pope's ''Essay on Man" cost thirteen cents and Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" fourteen; Per- cival's "Moral Tales" cost sixty-seven cents and Chesterfield's "Advice to his Son" fifty cents; Charlotte Smith's "Elegiac Sonnets" could be ac- quired for the moderate sum of fourteen cents, but Taplin's "Farriery" was two dollars and twenty- five cents, while at the same time Winchester's "Dialogues on Universal Salvation" cost sixty-two and a half cents. And thus the revel of oddity goes on. There is no dollar sign used in the list. There is no period after the dollars, with the cents follow- ing decimally. Dobson 's only way of expressing 195 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA dollars was by the abbreviation *' dolls," and for cents the word "cents" had to be spelled out, and therefore to represent both dollars and cents in a price it was necessary to use the awkward form, '^2 dolls, and 50 cents." It is a pleasure to Imow that Munchausen was in Philadelphia in Revolutionary days. To be sure, Miinchausens are with all armies and in all wars, and their stories often appear in the solemn guise of official reports ; but a Miinchausen was literally here, a Hessian officer, and I like to think that he was probably the son of that Baron Miinchausen who won fame by his delightful exaggerations. The famous baron was born in 1720, and was a soldier of fortune who fought in Eussia and Turkey, there- fore he could easily, from the dates, have been the father of the Miinchausen, the Hessian soldier of fortune, who fought in America and was for a time located in Philadelphia. And I set it down as an interesting hypothesis. Richard Harding Davis, war-correspondent, short- story writer and novelist, was a Philadelphian by birth, his father being a newspaper editor and his mother being Rebecca Harding Davis, well-known some years ago as a short-story writer; well-known, that is, outside of Philadelphia, for here she was known as the wife of Mr. Davis, the editor, just as I noticed in New Orleans, some years ago, when an- other Mrs. Davis, M. E. M. Davis, had similarly won appreciation throughout the country as a short-story writer, tliat in her home city she was scarcely known 196 SOME ACTORS AND AUTHORS except as the wife of Mr. Davis of the Picayune. The home of the Philadelphia Davis family was on South 21st Street, near Locust. When Davis, as correspondent, was in Cardenas in Cuba, he was told that the American Consul there had been a correspondent in the Franco-Prussian War, so he asked the consul if he had chanced to meet a correspondent of that war, a German student named Hans, of whom Archibald Forbes, the most famous war correspondent, had made special men- tion. The consul smiled. **I'm the man," he said; ''only, I was never a German, and my name is not Hans, as Forbes had it, but Hance, and I was born and raised in your own city of Philadelphia." In the days of the old horse cars, in Philadelphia, Richard Harding Davis, then a mere boy, one day stumbled over the gouty foot of a fellow passenger, evoking a wild storm of picturesquely passionate profanity. The man with the gout was the actor Forrest: himself a Philadelphian, having been born here in 1806; he made his home here, died here in 1872, and was buried in St. Paul's, on South Third Street, having left his fortune for the establishment of the Edwin Forrest Home, for actors and actresses, aged and indigent. In St. Petersburg — for it was not then Petrograd — ^Forrest met a fellow-Philadelphian, Dallas, the United States Minister to Russia, and Dallas told him that he was much bothered by an American who actually wanted to meet the Czar; an uncouth-look- ing American, so he described him, over six feet in 197 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA height and carrying a cane that was really a club. A few days later Forrest found his fellow-towns- man in a state of petrified amazement: Dallas had just been to see the Czar, and had found there the uncouth American, actually sitting in close imperial conversation! Worse than that, the man had actually greeted Dallas with a condescending nod and the words, *'How d'ye do. Squire? I'm here!'* The man — ^whose name unfortunately was not re- corded — had managed to let the Czar know that he could give him ideas regarding military and other matters, and the Czar was so pleased with him that he made him a favorite at court, with one of the court carriages for his exclusive use. Forrest's first appearance was, as a boy, at what was then the new Walnut Street Theater; now the ''old" theater, for it has passed the century mark, and is the oldest Philadelphia theater still standing. It is only a decrepit memento of the past, shabbily bedizened for melodrama; but in its amplitude and proportions, in its low-standing, frontal pillars, it is remindful of its dignified past. Forrest's last Philadelphia appearance was also at this theater. In all, the great ones of a century of the stage have appeared here, with even Sarah Bernhardt among those of recent years. The wonderful Kachel — what a sense of somber greatness is evoked by the mention of her name! — got her death here, for a draughty dressing room gave her a desperate cold, from which she could not recover, and she hurried back to her beloved France only to die. 198 SOME ACTOES AND AUTHORS The old Academy of Music, on Broad Street, of dignified appearance and excellent acoustic proper- ties, is still a place where excellent music is given; and it has fine traditions of the music and musicians of many years. During the Revolution, the city's theater was a large and ugly building on South Street; thus located, at what was then the edge of the city, be- cause there was a good deal of criticism of any theater at all. The British officers interested them- selves deeply in the theater, and at times they even appeared on the stage as actors. This theater was burned, not long after the building of the theater on "Walnut Street, but meanwhile it had afforded theatrical entertainment to President Washington himself as well as to a great number of other dis- tinguished people during Presidential residence here. One wonders if Washington knew that some of the scenery at which he looked was painted by Major Andre! There was a still earlier theater than that of South Street, and here, in 1749, ' ' Cato ' ' was given, this being, as a recent book on Philadelphia by a Philadelphian expresses it, with delightfully uncon- scious humor, ^'the first Shakespearean representa- tion in America"; — Shakespearean! Joseph Jefferson was born in Philadelphia, and John Drew was born in Philadelphia, and the parent Drews were long residents of this city, as actors and managers; and to Mrs. Drew came both fame and the love of the public. In spite of the city's important theatrical associa- 199 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA tions, or perhaps on accotmt of them, Philadelphia has at times seemed arbitrary in her iudgments, and has not always followed that of other large cities; and from here the great Mansfield wrote to a friend in New York that he was on the point of inserting an advertisement in the papers which should read: **Mr. Richard Mansfield is sorry to disturb the in- habitants of Philadelphia, but he begs to announce that he appears every evening as King Eichard III.'* 200 CHAPTER XIII THE PLACE OP CLUBS [HERE are clubs and clubs. That is to say, there are Philadelphia clubs and there are others; the Philadelphia clubs being notable not only in their combination of age and traditions, with continu- ance of present-day impor- tance, but in their profound influence upon the basic char- acter of the city. The clubs of Philadelphia were a vital force in giving the city, long ago, its distinguishing qualities, and they still hold the city to the possession of those qualities. The characteristic clubs of Philadelphia, strong and long established, gray with age, are fortresses which, hold in exclusiveness the exclusive people who unitedly make up what is really Philadelphia. It is not a matter of how much the old clubs total in membership. The importance is in their undis- puted holding of authority; an authority never spokenly claimed but always unspokenly conceded. It lies in the unbroken continuance of social rule, in the stepping into line of sons and grandsons to fill 201 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA gaps made by death. The old clubs are the bulwark of the social organization which makes Philadelphia so enduring an aristocracy. And, too, the standards and characteristics of the older clubs have had profound influence upon the newer clubs. As new clubs arise and begin to develop, it is noticeable that they seem shortly to have become unconscious copies; they age rapidly; they look old though in years they may be young. Like the boys and girls of Maarken, who go about in clothes which exactly follow the ancient type of costume of their elders, the men's and women's clubs of the Philadelphia of to-day and yesterday seem like those of an ancient Philadelphia time. At the corner of Thirteenth and Locust streets, in the short block which separates the Historical Society and the Philadelphia Club, is something that seems, in a sense, to stand for both the society and the club ; for it is a thing of history, with roots down into the past, and it is at the same time a living thing of to- day. It is a cypress tree, here in the heart of this close-built, close-paved central portion of the city. By some impossibility it has fixed and fastened it- self, rooted itself, in a tiny narrowness between curb and sidewalk. It would not be surprising in a park or a woodland, although it is not, hereabouts, a common tree even in parks or woodland. But that it survives, here in this impracticable place, is very surprising indeed. Old men who have known it for years, love to watch its springtime bourgeoning, its setting forth of the first vague filminess of green; 202 THE PLACE OF CLUBS year by year they note its growth to a deeper and thicker fernlike luster, year by year they note the turning of the leaves to the dull orange brown that presages their falling. The old Philadelphia Club stands in popular fancy as the dean and leader of all the city's clubs, for, although by no means the oldest, its central location, the dignified old building which is its home, the strength of its membership, past and present, in character and influence, its reserve, its quiet pride, its exclusiveness, unite to give it distinction. In its ordered charm, and its perfect peace, it shows what a club, in this city, can be. It is housed in a long, broad, old building of dulled brick, at the corner of Walnut and Thirteenth streets, a building of three stories and a dormered attic in height, and a high basement, making full five stories in the gable, where, high up, there is a charming little balcony, bearing a flagstaif which rises above the peak. The building stands flush with the sidewalk, and its entrance is a dignified door at the very corner of tlie building; a building so wide as to be fronted with a row of six generous windows besides this door, and in the second story seven windows. This is the house which was built to be the Philadelphia home of that Southern Senator, Butler, whose grand- son married Fanny Kemble, but in size and im- portance it has all the appearance of a club house. Even more interesting than the outside is the in- terior, with its far-stretching length of halls, its fire- places and cornicing, with everywhere the atmos- 203 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA phere of mellowness and serenity ; and in the dining- room is the mighty mahogany table of some twenty- five feet in length, with old-time silver urns at either end and a table-service of old-time imported Canton for dinners. In the old days, and indeed in modern days np to the sudden change in public feeling that has so recently come, wines used to be an important feature of a good club 's outfit ; and it is more than tradition that this club was no exception. Philadelphia loves to tell, too, that three members of this club were dining, one evening, at the home of one of them, and, they being very old and close friends indeed, and feeling even more intimate than usual, the subject arose of what rare old wines really cost, taking into consideration not only the original price but the in- terest as well ; whereat all three took out pencils and laboriously figured, and suddenly the host, with a startled look, exclaimed: **I bought this lot of wine over forty years ago and I've just found out what it has cost me with compound interest! And I'll have the rest of it up to-night so we can drink it and stop the confounded interest!" It was this club at which a visitor, passing through the city, applied in vain for the address of one of its members whom it was important that he should see. ** "Write a letter and address it to him in care of the club," he was told. But, he explained, he had to leave the city within a few hours. Finally, after argument galore, the desired information was reluctantly given. The member was dead! And 204 THE PLACE OF CLUBS even that, so reluctantly vouchsafed, might be ob- jected to on the ground of indefiniteness of reply after all. The Philosophical Society is perhaps not literally a club, but at least it has more than its share of the exclusiveness of an old Philadelphia club, and is at least essentially a club, with its own little old- fashioned building, adjoining the State House, con- taining wealth of material regarding early American history. In one of its rooms Washington sat for his portrait to Charles "Willson Peale, and also, on ac- count of his liking for Peale, permitted his son Rem- brandt, a lad of eighteen, frightened and fluttered by the honor, to make a drawing of him: the only portrait which Eembrandt Peale made of him from life, although he afterwards painted a large number from this original drawing, aided by memory of the great man's appearance, and the study of Houdon's statue. The mantelpiece in front of which Washing- ton sat, and which was pictured by both the Peales, was years ago unphilosophically torn out and thrust as rubbish into the cellar. The Philosophical Society was organized by Ben- jamin Franklin, more than a century and a half ago, and there are members to-day who are able to boast, proudly, that some ancestor or even ancestors were members in the long ago ; just as stockholders of the Philadelphia Library hold with pride the original stock certificates issued to ancestors of the 1700 's. And that, here, is typical; and it stands for the sur- vival of brotherly love. 205 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA Benjamin Franklin was the first president of this still continuing society, and that other statesman- scientist, Thomas Jefferson, was its third president. One of the members was the white-robed Brother Jabetz, of that fascinating and altogether un-Ameri- can community of Ephrata, whose ancient monastic buildings, with their rooms of more than prison- like narrowness, still remain, out near Lancaster. Jabetz, devoted scientist that he was, used to walk into Philadelphia to attend the meetings, a walk of eighty miles in each direction. And such was his love for the new Eepublic as well as for science, that he translated the Declaration of Independence into seven languages; something of which probably no other American of that time was capable. Another connection of the Declaration with the Philosophical Society, besides those of Jefferson and Jabetz, was that, not long before the Eevolution, a platfarm was erected by the society, beside the State House, from which the Transit of Venus was to be observed, and that it was from this platform that the Declaration was first read to the people of Philadelphia. Among the most delightful of the city's clubs, and possessing even more than a usual degree of exclu- siveness, is the Wistar Party. To belong to this very limited club, membership in the Philosophical Society is prerequisite, and even that is by no means a certain open sesame, a unanimous vote of the Wistar members being required. And it is a club such as could come to existence in no other city than this. 206 THE PLACE OF CLUBS Doctor Caspar "Wistar was one of the descendants of a Wistar who was one of the early settlers of Pennsylvania. There were, indeed, two Wistars, brothers, and in course of time the descendants of one spelled their name **Wister" while the others continued it as ''Wistar": or it may be doubtful which was actually the original spelling: but at any rate, by some freak, some whimsy, there came to be a social cleavage, and those of the Wistars with an ''a" were gradually given, in general estimation, a higher social standing than the Wisters of the ''e.'* And this long-ago distinction has continued so strongly in force, even up to present times, that you will find many prejudiced and precise people, if they chance to speak of Owen Wister the distinguished author, consider, as much more important than his <' Virginian," the fact of whether his wife, also a descendant of the early Wistars, is of the present- day '*e's" or *^'a's." Doctor Caspar Wistar was a surgeon of high pro- fessional standing, and at the same time a man of highest social standing. He was also a man of most hospitable ways, and he gathered at his house, one evening in each week, numbers of his closest friends, with the understanding that any distinguished visitor from out of town was also to be brought by any of them. It was a gathering for men only, and the club still holds to that old-time rule. Wistar died in 1818, but so important had the parties become, as social features, that it was decided to continue them, and the club was formally organized, to meet in turn 207 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA at the homes of the members. And evenings with the Wistar Party are among the most delightful experiences that this city can offer. The form of invitation, for visitors, is still the form of long ago : a card, headed ''Wistar Party," bearing a little vignette of Doctor Wistar. And the doctor is remembered in one of the most charming of all possible ways, for there is named after him a vine which clambers up the front of myriads of houses in this and other cities, in this and other countries, one of the most beautiful of all flowering vines, delicately tossing to the breeze the pale purple of its plumes; for the French botanist Michaux, who visited America, and met Wistar, and loved him, named in his honor the Wistaria. The old Wistar House still stands, carefully tableted and preserved, and is one of the most in- teresting of early Philadelphia homes. It is at the southwest corner of Locust and Fourth streets, in the heart of the ancient city, and is of the familiar double-hued time-dulled red brick with black head- ers; but the brick is laid in an unusual bond, which shows not only lines horizontally straight, but also lines of diagonals. Here in Philadelphia, even the University Club, a modern institution as in other cities, has already ac- quired all the aspect of the old, for it is housed in an old residence on Walnut Street, a little west of Broad, and has already acquired a full share of the calm serenity, the assured decorousness, which usu- ally come only with age. 208 THE STREET OF LITTLE CLUBS THE PLACE OF CLUBS Even the modern Art Club, in its costly modern building, is beginning to be touclied with an aspect as of age, in a certain steadiness, a typical quiet, to be attained in full degree, in America, only in this city. It has also, like the old clubs, shown capacity for achieving the unusual; as, in the reception it ar- ranged, a few years ago, to Amundsen, who first reached the South Pole, Captain Peary, of North Pole fame, and Sir Ernest Shackleton, also of such distinction in polar exploration. I remember how extremely interesting it was to meet three Polar ex- plorers of such remarkable achievements in one single group. You will hear of vague traditions, or of memories almost as vague, of clubs which centered about the Schuylkill region; there was a skating club, whose members carried ropes to rescue such of the women or girls as should break through; the ice of the Schuylkill always having deceitful qualities near the dam and the falls at the water-works. And of course it was all a very exclusive matter, and none but men of this set might carry ropes and none but girls of the same set were to fall in and be rescued. And there is still a clubhouse, not far above the dam, for ladies; a most quiet little club — primarily for boating and canoeing, and just the place for a pretty dance to be given by a mother for her young daughter, not quite "out," or for bridge parties, or afternoon teas, and twice in the spring and twice in the autumn for a special luncheon for members. In describing such things from the Philadelphia 209 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA standpoint the word ''exclusive" is from necessity quite overworked! Philadelphia is naturally a clubable city: to use a word beloved of Doctor Johnson, himself a mighty club man; and of clubs for women the Acorn is of marked interest. It is located on Walnut Street, oc- cupying an old mansion as quiet and unostentatious as itself; the mansion possesses the distinction of a smallish garden beside it, entered from the street by a beautiful gateway with white marble pillars and wrought-iron grille. ''It is so pretty to give a dance here for a daughter," said one of the members. "It is so safe," added another, simply: "safe" being a word still honored in Philadelphia society. It is not a club with a set motive, it stands for no "ism" or reform: it is just a delightful meeting place for delightful women, it seems to be delight- fully managed, and in the old-time house that it has acquired in the choice residential district near Kittenhouse Square it has acquired not only the typical look of permanence but the appearance of having been in existence for a very long time. The college women of Philadelphia follow tradi- tions of the city's club life in their College Club, and, in their quiet, broad-fronted, properly-located old mansion, carry on their very modern activities in the atmosphere of the mellow and the old. And there are other clubs for women. One, Centennially de- scended, is on Twelfth Street, and teems with twen- tieth century activities. And "West Philadelphia, a great residence city in itself, has one of the most 210 THE PLACE OF CLUBS active womaii's clubs in the country, the Philomusian, which began romantically in a stable. The Union League, located centrally, on Broad Street, is a club of huge membership, composed of men who represent the professions and business. It dates from the time of the Civil War. It is Eepubli- can ; but this has been so strongly a Eepublican city, in fact so overwhelmingly so, that thus far this restriction has not greatly narrowed its representa- tive quality. Its great Lincoln Hall, with its dignified propor- tions, its somber Hall of Fame, the many paintings of Americans of modern days, all aid in giving the great club-house individuality and importance. The paintings are particularly interesting, for, leaving to other associations or organizations the preserva- tion of portraits of men of the Revolutionary and early formative years, the Union League has gath- ered portraits, that in time will become invaluable, of Grant and Stanton and Burnside, of Meade and Roose- velt and Dewey, of Thomas and Sheridan and Pope and Meade, and many another of the moderns. The club has already taken on that curious typical look of always having existed and of promising to exist forever. Yet it is a tremendously busy club, with hundreds of members lunching here every week- day. And yet, even at midday there are long stretches of quiet halls, and there are restful and quiet rooms, and there is a library, with case after case of books, and here — a sight not to be seen in New York or Chicago or even Boston — ^you will see 211 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA numerous men sitting, at noontime, quietly reading as if the afternoon had no demands. And entered by a door under the steps which the men ascend, is a great dining-room for tlie wives of members, and so famous is the cuisine that the room is crowded daily at luncheon. Fox-hunting has been a feature of social life since before the days of the Eevolution, and the first formal fox-hunting club was formed in 1766, with such names as Chew and Wharton and Willing, Cadwalader, Mifflin and Morris. A sport thus sanctioned by the most august names could not avoid popularity in perpetuity. Foxes still conveniently abound within much of the territory close to the city ; I have seen them running, wild and unpursued, with- in a dozen miles of City Hall; and there are several hunting clubs still existent, including the Eose Tree Hunt, the Whitemarsh, the Radnor, the Meadow- brook. And it is a pretty sight to see the hunters come sweeping across the fields, ^mth. their horses leaping the stone boundary walls, and with the scarlet-coated M. F. H. in the lead. Golf clubs are also numerous in the Philadelphia suburbs, perhaps the most widely known being the Huntington Valley, with its so highly attractive grounds. In the days that now seem old, though really but a few years ago, it was customary here, on the part of some of the members, to apply the lines that Pope almost wrote: "A little drinking is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the golf -playing spring." 212 THE PLACE OF CLUBS And I remember, one night, being on a south-bound trolley which stopped on the hill, at the clubhouse, for several of the members; the first managed, with difficulty, to reach the platform, only to lunge ahead and stumble to the pavement upon the other side. The second and third did the same, amid hilarious cries of joy. The fourth managed to check himself, the conductor sharply rang the bell, and the car went on. *'The Street of Little Clubs" is a fascinating feature of the city. It is also a unique feature. No other city has a street precisely like it. It is remind- ful of some parts of the Latin Quarter, but it is really not like the Latin Quarter. It is distinctly and dis- tinctively American. Outwardly, it is a bit of American antiquity. To enter the street is like stepping back into the past century. It is a pic- turesque street. And it is fresh and charming, though it bears the marks of age. ^'The Street of Little Clubs" runs south from Walnut Street, between Twelfth and Thirteenth. Of course it has another name, and that is Camac Street. It is a narrow street ; in fact, it was laid out as one of the early, old-fashioned alleys, with demure little homes along either side. And many of the houses are still here, dormer-windowed, low, squatty, dumpy, small; yet always picturesque. The street itself is rough-paved, giving thus an ad- ditional aspect of age, and the sidewalks are waver- ing and uneven and narrow, and the central pave- ment is so narrow that automobiles cannot pass, as a 213 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA single car fills the space from curb to curb. And along the curb lines are rows of iron posts which look like cannon, set in with muzzles downward, in a revel of the erratic as to angles. In front of some of the quaint little houses are little signs, as if they were inns ; but they are club signs, marking the club homes of some of the most interesting organizations of the city. One is the Plastic Club, a club for women artists and sculptors, another is the Sketch Club, a name which indicates what it really is. One, the Coin d'Or, was organized with the delightful artistic Intent of keeping alive the best traditions of French cooking. Among the others — for I need not name every one — is the Poor Richard Club, thus named to honor the patron saint of the city; and most important of all is the Franklin Inn, which is not an inn, but a club also named in honor of the greatest of all Philadelphians. These demure, old-time, little houses, with their fronts and shutters now showing blue or yellow or red or gray, or perhaps saffron or pink — for the colorists have not been content with the dun and the drab! — show interiorly much greater space and spaces than is indicated by the outsides, for several of them, notably the Franklin Inn, have turned two small houses into one, by taking out dividing walls, and most if not all have at least one large room, made by the throwing of the upstairs space into un- partitioned spaciousness. Behind some of them are little gardens, and they are likely to be classic in design. 214 THE PLACE OF CLUBS The big rooms are used for exhibitions, for meet- ing places, for lectures, for theatricals. Their ways are ways of pleasantness and all the arts increase. The clubs stand for all that is best in artistic advance- ment. Here the sacred fire is kept burning, rather than in more pretentious places in more pretentious quarters. And that the arts include not only paint- ing and modeling and cooking, but writing, is shown by the Franklin Inn, which stands not only for picture-makers but, more distinctively, for the Phila- delphians who aim at distinction with novels or histories, with plays or essays or short stories, with newspaper work or with education. And a general note of all the Little Clubs is the absence of extrava- gance. It seems impossible, incredible, but Philadelphia possesses the oldest existing club organization in the world, at least of those whose members speak the English language. It was founded in 1732, under the name of the Colony in Schuylkill, but changed its name in 1783 to the State in Schuylkill. This oldest of all clubs, whether in England or America, was organized with the love of fish and fishing as its basis, and at first, and for a long time, it was located on the Schuylkill Eiver, from which river it was driven by the growth of the city's manu- facturing and by public parks, and it sought refuge on the banks of the Delaware, near Andalusia, on the way to Bristol; thither, too, it removed its ''castle" and there lovingly set it up; this ''castle," as they call it, being a plain small building, of frame, look- 215 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA ing something like a rural chapel, with round-topped windows and tiny cupola. But this '* castle" is a serious matter, for it is one of the fortresses of ex- clusiveness. The Philadelphia Almanach de Gotha might be made up from the membership lists, past and present, of a few old organizations, and this is markedly one of the few. It is limited to a membership of twenty-five. It has a governor and council, the principal councillor being secretary of state. It has sheriff and coroner and purveyor, and others. Few of the twenty-five are plain citizens. There are also ''apprentices," waiting their chance of membership, and they must qualify as excellent cooks, and must serve the others ''cheerfully." The apprentices, all of them young men of family, must eat standing, unless asked to sit; and it is expected that their training will make them so expert as to turn the broiling fish in air. At their formal meetings the members still drink, standing, the toast of "Washington." And their "fish-house punch" is famous for savor and for potency, and the secret of its concoction is jealously kept. Lafayette, on his visit to this country half a century after his first coming, was made an honorary member of the State in Schuylkill, and went to the "castle," and, invested with white linen apron and broad straw hat, stood before the fire and did his part as cook. And he said, felicitously, that with this coming to the State in Schuylkill he had now completed his tour of all the States in the Union. 216 THE PLACE OF CLUBS The oldest in years of the original list of 1732 was Thomas Stretch, who, for it began as a club of young- ish men, was bom in 1695. He was made the first governor, and, such being the typical Philadelphia respect for age and experience, he was continued as governor until his death in 1766. The next gov- ernor, Samuel Morris, governed from that year to 1812. Only two governors from 1732 to 1812 1 An ardent collector of Germantown showed me one day a piece of old silver which, she said, had belonged to a governor of Pennsylvania, Samuel Morris; and she was amused to find that he had been Governor of the State in Schuylkill. CHAPTER XIV A CITY OF THE CLASSIC HEREVER one turns, in Philadel- phia, down any street, in any quar- ter of the city, one may expect to come upon buildings, new or old, designed on classic lines, with Grecian pil- lars and porticoes. The people should be connoisseurs of the classic, for the city is sprinkled with the classic, and its architects know and love the classic. This is largely owing to the influence of that Nicholas Biddle with whom, as head of the United States Bank, President Andrew Jackson carried on a contest. Biddle 's love for the classic in archi- tecture was intense, and being a man of wealth and influence his influence in this particular was strong. Nor did he exert classical influence on public buildings or churchly buildings alone. He carried out his ideas superbly with his own property. On 218 ■uAiutw iitwauuiajAjiui^iiy;-.j3jinj^jj5ijj;5j^aa,^3j^^ A CITY OF THE CLASSIC his great estate of Andalusia on the Delaware Eiver, on the way to Bristol (to be Philadelphian, one should mention that the estate belonged to his wife and thus came under his control), on this estate he built a mansion, with splendid classic-pillared front, a mansion notable not only for its pillared beauty, but for the beauty of its setting, with the great river sweeping by in front, with towering trees, with grass and greenery and seclusion, in all a triumph of beauty. It used to be that the name **Biddle'' stood in the public mind for '^ family" in Philadelphia, in a semi- jesting way ; and it is still told that at the reception given to the Prince of Wales, some sixty years ago, so many people were pointed out by the mentor who stood beside him, as ''Biddies," that he asked, after a while, ' ' Pray, tell me, what is a biddle ? ' * But the family can point to sober prominence in business affairs, and to honorable prominence in the various wars of our country, as well as to the architectural influence of the notable Nicholas. Among the finest of the classic buildings of the city is that of the old Girard National Bank, on South Third Street; a superbly proportioned structure, with central projecting pillared portico standing at the height of a few steps above the side- walk; this building being the oldest in the city that has classic pillars and portico, it having been built over a century ago. And, to show that age is not necessary to beauty, there is the unusually beautiful building of the Girard Trust Company, put up but a 219 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA few years ago at Broad and Chestnut streets from the designs of Stanford White : a building nobly fol- lowing the Pantheon in inspiration. The stately dignity of the big Custom House on Chestnut Street, the graceful attractiveness of the broad-fronted Presbyterian church on Washington Square; such are among the old; and among the many new are some beautiful new classic buildings of charitable foundations far out on Broad Street. The influence of Biddle for the classic was backed and increased by that of Benjamin Latrobe, who designed several of the most beautiful early classic structures of this city, among them that architectural gem, judging from pictures, the building of the Academy of Fine Arts which was destroyed by fire and in place of which the Academy, rather than re- produce, put up its present queer structure on Broad Street. A few years ago I chanced upon a quaint little place called Fulneck, not far from Leeds in England, a village of the Moravians, which still bore the aspect as of Moravia, there in the heart of England ; a place of immaculate neatness and cleanliness and gentle courtesy, a place of quaintness of roof -lines and gables. It is situated upon the highway, but it retains an ancient right to close the highway, and at times exercises the right so that it shall not fall into desuetude; and, apparently as a consequence of this, the distance between the village and Leeds is threaded with shoulder-wide footpaths, running deviously for the most part, between stone walls 220 A CITY OF THE CLASSIC standing at more than a man's height; in all, a queer corner, oddly approached; but I did not know, while there, that this was the birthplace of the great Lat- robe, his father being a Moravian clergyman. The closing of the highway must have prepared Latrobe to notice, without the surprise which it used to cause to other newcomers, the Philadelphia system of roping off the streets, beside the churches, during the hours of worship, thus effectively enforcing quiet, a system in vogue here until some years after the architect's death. Largest and most ambitious of the classic fronts is that of the Eidgway Library, at Broad and Christian streets. It has a Doric-pillared frontage of well over two hundred feet, it is a stately structure of gTanite and it is devoted principally to the gather- ing of books and manuscripts relating to American history; fiction being altogether taboo. The son of the famous Doctor Benjamin Eush, of Eevolutionary times — of whom the intelligent Phila- delphian of to-day will speak, as naturally as if it were of yesterday, commenting that he probably lost the friendship of Washington through some connec- tion with the Conway Cabal; for a hundred years are but a day to the typical Philadelphian — the son of that distinguished doctor, himself a doctor not particularly distinguished, married a Eidgway. She was wealthy; he was far from wealthy. She loved gayety, he quietude. She loved the glitter of society and the presence of throngs of friends; he loved books and seclusion. 221 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA She built a miglity mansion on Chestnut Street above Nineteenth. She gave dazzling social enter- tainments. Six thousand wax candles would be blazing, and there would be hundreds of guests. Her dinners were sumptuous affairs. But as a social leader she failed. She had not sufficient standing to begin with, and she tried to amalgamate South of Market Street with North, and this was the unforgivable sin. Naturally, there came, with the disappointment, bitterness and estrangement. It has even been whispered that there came jealousy; and a tale is vaguely told of a secret stair in that great mansion ; but likely enough it is based on nothing more than a desire to evoke some shadow of romance to go with the Arabian Nights tales of extravagant living. The wife died; and the huge fortune became the husband's. He died; and left it for the building of this library. It is officially a branch of the Franklin- founded Philadelphia Library, but never was money so wasted. It is a temple of learning, a treasure- house of the invaluable. But it is separated from the center of the city by the South Street neighbor- hood. It is really but a short distance away from where it ought to be. It is but ten minutes' walk from the heart of the city ; it is but a short ride ; it is less than five minutes by motor. But to this city, a minute to get to the wrong locality is more than an hour spent in getting to the right locality. No one goes to the. Ridgway. Even to historical students it looms in the imagination with its bookish 222 A CITY OF THE CLASSIC treasures, as if it were in some distant land. Most of the people of the city have never even seen the exterior of the building. It is a sort of myth. I have never seen more than three readers at one time in the huge building. I have seldom chanced to find even so many as three. I was there this very afternoon, and not a reader, besides myself, was anywhere within the mighty extent of space. As five o'clock approached, the closing hour, a man came in and, asking for some book, began to glance over it at the delivery desk; and I left him there, the sole reader or visitor. The location of the building was fixed by Kush on his deathbed; not content with putting his wife's money to a use with which she would have felt no sympathy, he ordered a building in a location that she would have intensely disliked. The courts were appealed to, on the ground of preventing waste of a fortune; but the dead hand bore too heavily. The Chestnut Street mansion was turned into a hotel apartment house, and so altered that no out- ward indication of the original remains; but there are stately rooms, corniced and high-ceilinged, which were rooms through which thronged the endless lines of the guests of the unhappy Mrs. Kush. The United States Mint, on Chestnut Street near Broad, was among the finest of the city's classic structures, and it had the admiration of every resi- dent and of every visitor. It was torn down, a few years ago, and the present Mint, a huge structure, was built on Spring Garden Street; rather an im- 223 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA pressive building, put in a far from impressive loca- tion, but a disappointment when compared with the beautiful structure that it supplanted. Paul Revere of Boston would have become a Phila- delphian could he have obtained the position of Director of the Mint, for which he applied. But he had no political friends at our republican court and his application was disregarded. Combined artist and artisan that he was, he would have given the Mint and its products high distinction. The Franklin Institute, on Seventh Street, is a classic building of unusual lines. It is nearing the century mark and its dark gray stone is growing grayer and darker with age. Across its front are four square-sided pillars ; but on a second glance one notices that they are not really pillars, but pilasters so hea\^ and projective as to be buttress-like. It is a front of dignity, and of absolute plainness except for a row of classic wreaths across the square-lined frieze. The Institute, devoted to technical scientific education, is almost a century old, and proud though it is of its scientific library, it is even prouder in the possession of Franklin's electrical machine. A striking feature of the city is the extent to which it has built enclosing walls. The natural tendency of old-fashioned folk here has been to put up walls of stone or brick around meeting-houses, hospitals, burial-grounds, gardens, schooUiouses, private gar- dens, public or semi-public institutions. It has served to express the Philadelphia desire for privacy and at the same time has added a great deal of 224 A CITY OF THE CLASSIC picturesqueness. And Girard College carried the idea to such an extreme that its mighty extent of mighty wall is remindful of some British park-en- closing wall of endless length. And fortunately we have Girard 's own idea, expressed in his own words, as to the kind of wall that should be built around the grounds of his college (which, by the way, was not to be a college in the usual meaning of the word, for boys were to enter under ten and were to leave at not over eighteen). It was to be "a solid wall, at least fourteen inches thick, capped with marble and guarded with irons on the top so as to prevent per- sons from getting over;" but he omitted to state whether the intent was mainly to keep the boys in or other boys out. Within the walled enclosures are numerous college buildings which have from time to time been erected, but noblest of all, and one of the noblest classic build- ings of this or any other city, is the main building, with splendid lines of Corinthian pillars along the face and sides and back; there are thirty-four of these columns, and each is fifty-six feet high. The building is two hundred feet in length and one hun- dred and fifty in width, and a flight of ten steps sur- rounds the entire structure, Girard directed, in his will, that the building be of white marble, plain sided and thus severely simple, with white marble roof and without pillars. The architect, when ready to proceed, reported to the building committee that the walls would not stand the strain if the building should be put up as the wiU. 225 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA directed. Fortunately, Nicholas Biddle, Nicholas of the Clfvssic, was a member of the committee and its ruling spirit, and he saw the opportunity for a superb display of classicism. The building should go up precisely as the will directed — ^but, to safe- guard it, there should be this line of mighty pillars on every side ! Girard was born in Bordeaux; from his youth he was a sailor ; and it was a fortunate chance that put the English ships outside of the Delaware capes and led him to settle in Philadelphia. He Americanized Etienne to Stephen; he became a merchant; *' mariner and merchant," as he loved to describe himself, the words sounding rhythmically pleasant to him. A shrewd, hard-headed, rigid man of business he was, a man whom none thought of as a man of special feeling or of love for the nicenesses of life. Yet, tireless worker though he was, stern, severe, exact- ing, he was ready to give with a liberal hand for excellent service, and in his home he had fine food and wines, and costly china, and fine furniture. He loved to entertain French visitors, and he had a pair of shoes for each separate day of the week, and his underclothing was of silk; yet he seemed only a plain, hard, prosaic man of business! When the yellow fever devastated and depopulated the city he went as nurse into the houses that reeked with the pestilence, and went about with the burial parties who cried dismally their dismal cry, *' Bring out your dead!" When he directed the founding of Girard College, 226 A CITY OF THE CLASSIC which, was to be for the education of poor orphan boys, he gave preference, first, to boys of Philadel- phia; secondly, to boys of Pennsylvania; next to those of New York, because that was the point he reached on his first voyage to America ; and lastly, to boys of New Orleans, that being the city with which he first traded as independent owner. His will directed absolutely that there be no re- ligious instruction in the college, and to make this sure he further directed that no minister of any denomination be even admitted within the grounds. The boys were to be taught morality and patriotism, and high ideals of life. The will was contested, and Daniel Webster was retained to break it; and the great orator was not above presenting, as his main argument, the claim that the will could not stand unless the distribution of property which was directed by it came under the head of charity, and that, as charity was not charity unless it was Christian charity, the will must be void. But the judges, listening tolerantly, merely smiled at such an argument in a State that had always stood for freedom of thought, and Webster went back to Boston defeated. In front of Girard^s store on Water Street, while he was still a youthful merchant, was a popular pump ; the only drinking water of the city was from street pumps in those early days ! And one day he noticed a pretty girl drawing a pitcher of water. The next day and the next he again saw and ad- mired her. Her name was Polly Lum: a name all 227 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA ready and ripe for romance I The ardent young French-American promptly fell ardently in love with Polly Lum and Polly Lum loved as ardently in return. And so they were married. But only tragedy came. Poor Polly Lum's mind failed. Her child died almost as soon as it was born. It was necessary to place her in the Penn- sylvania Hospital, and there she lingered for twenty-five years. And Girard's grief was pitiful when the end at length came, and he stood beside her dead body. Poor Etienne! Poor Polly Lum! And after that the grim-seeming man went about in his yellow gig as before, but more alone, more lonely, more aloof. He thought of what good he could do with his huge and mounting fortune. He gave generously to the hospital that had sheltered his Avife. In the War of 1812 he loaned without stint to the nation. He gave freely for public uses, and his will perpetuates broad public uses. To the end of his life a man strict in all his business affairs, there was a fine nobility about him, and always, in his letters of instruction to the captains of his ships, was the clause which strictly forbade them to re- ceive on board any passenger or cargo other than his own, followed invariably by, **But if you meet with American seamen in distress you are to take them on board and bring them home free of ex- pense." But because his own life romance had been broken, because Polly Lum was dead and the child of Polly Lum was dead, and he was a wifeless and childless 228 THE CLASSIC PORTICO OF THE OLD GIRARD BANK A CITY OF THE CLASSIC old man, his heart went out to poor and orphan children, and thus came his plan for the college, with its noble foundation of five millions — a huge fortune for that time — ^whioh has now increased to over thirty-five millions. That splendid building stands for stern and noble romance. When, an old man of over eighty, Girard found himself facing death, he would not yield. Feeble, scarcely able to see, he went about Ms business af- fairs. He was knocked down and run over, but somehow managed to get home. But he would not stay in bed. ''I will get up!'* And he walked across the room, but only to grope his way feebly back again, refusing help. Then he put his shaking- hand to his head, and his quivering lips whispered something about * 'violent disorder": and with that he died. CHAPTER XV FROM CITY HALL TO MEMORIAL HALL HEN", in the very beginning, the pro- posed city was mapped out, what is now called City Hall Square was planned as the center. That was William Penn's _ own idea, and it was a farseeing idea. He believed that the city would so spread as to take in the territory between the Delaware and the Schuylkill, although to his associates and to the early settlers in general, what we know as City Hall Square was absurdly far away. It was a positive Quakeresque delight to Penn to map out the gridiron of right-angled streets, and to put a square in the middle between the two rivers, and to plan four other squares, equi-distant from the central square, at regularly spaced intervals. Franklin Square is directly north of Washing-ton Square, and east of Logan. Rittenhouse Square is 230 FEOM CITY HALL TO MEMOEIAL HALL directly soutli of Logan Square, and west of WasH- ington. The comparatively modern names of these squares are apt to give the erroneous impression that the squares themselves were modernly planned, in- stead of having been marked out in 1682, and actually laid out not long afterwards. There was a precise- ness about the plan, which appealed to Penn. And it may be noticed that, although the four subsidiary squares are regularly spaced, and equi-distant, as regards each other and as regards the north or south distance and direction from the center, yet there is divergence as regards the east and west dis- tances from the center, because, owing to some un- recorded reason, the central square was laid out a little more to the westward than was planned. To be precise, it is four hundred and ninety-six feet farther west than Penn intended it to be ; the change having probably been on account of some matter of swamp or rock or long since leveled hill. The city was slow in growing to William Penn's plan. For generations it hugged the Delaware, and only reluctantly and gradually came to the ideas of its founder. To all except himself there seemed to be nothing central about the central square; and although, following his instructions, a meeting-house was built there, in what is now City Hall Square, as early as 1685, all effort to hold services there was soon abandoned. Penn's plan was to have a meeting-house, a market-house, and the administrative buildings of the colony built in the central square; so that the 231 THE BOOK OF. PHILADELPHIA placing of City Hall there was measurably carrying out Ills plan. But it was a long time before City Hall came ; for much of that intervening time, in the old days, there were gallows and stocks and pillory in this central square, in the good old-fashioned way. It was a time of few opportunities for amusement, and the people would not be balked of such as it was feasible to have; the spectacle of a man in the stocks, or a woman being whipped, or a man being hanged, was not lightly to be foregone. William Penn himself, so we have it on his own authority, could hurry from a burning-alive, in London, to a hanging in another part of the city. So it was naturally to be expected that hangings and other punishments would be a public spectacle here in this new country as they were in the old. It is amazing, considering the spirit of the times, that the criminal code and the practice of it, in Pennsylvania, were not more savage than they were. "Within a dozen years or so of the foundation of the colony a man from across the Delaware was tried for the murder of a Philadelphian ; and the murderer was led to confess through showing fear that the corpse would bleed when he was com- manded to touch it; the bleeding of a corpse being an infallible test in early days. Of one kind of so-called crime, that of witchcraft, which so disgraced some other Colonies, there was never a trace in Pennsylvania, and this was owing to the firm and politic stand made by Penn himself. 232 FEOM CITY HALL TO MEMOEIAL HALL Almost at the beginning, in the year 1683, such a case came up, for two Swedish women were charged with being witches. Following the laws of England, the laws of Pennsylvania were necessarily against witchcraft ; but Penn himself was of the clearsighted few who even in those days paid no heed to the delu- sion. At the trial of the women he personally pre- sided, determined as he was to have no Salem shadow on his Colony, and he so pleasantly befuddled the witnesses and so tactfully advised the jury, that the verdict was such as would have delighted Solomon: for the women Were soberly held to be guilty of having been suspected of witchcraft, but not guilty of having acted as witches! And that ended witchcraft for Pennsylvania. What is now Logan Square was also the possessor of gallows and stocks and other grim accompani- ments; but it has also noble and fine memories, for here, in the time of the Civil War, the Sanitary Commission held a great fair, with immense throngs crowding the space; and most memorable of all is the memory that Lincoln was here during the fair, and that he spoke, briefly and effectively as always, and with a saddened gravity which came from his sorrowful sense of the pitiful loss of life that was pitifully continuing. Washington Square is full of somber associations. Facing out upon this square was the old prison which won such terrible prominence in the time of the British occupancy of Philadelphia through the cruel- ties inflicted within its walls upon American soldiers ; 233 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA the provost being that Cunningham who is also notable in New York's annals of cruelty. It adds to the grimness, that it seems to have been a matter of money, Cunningham paying some man or men, higher up, for the privilege of exercising cruelties unchecked and then making what money he could, by cutting down on rations, and by levying blackmail from those who could pay for some shadow of humane treatment; meanwhile dealing starvation and death on every hand, partly for the very wanton- ness of it, partly to frighten more men into finding some means of getting money for him. He was paid by his government one guinea a day; but he grew enormously rich. It was a time of swindles and extortions, and the huge sums involved might be thought to be exag- gerated did they come on the authority of Americans alone; but details are given also by an Englishman, the historian Trevelyan, nephew of the historian Macaulay. And those who think that what we call ''graft" is of modern or American invention, need to be reminded of such facts as, that the quarter- master who provided teams and horses for General Howe's campaign in Pennsylvania cleared, by that single transaction, one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. And, so the British tell us, many a Quaker meeting-house hereabouts was turned over to this or that British officer, for the use of his men, with huge sums paid ostensibly for rent; w^ien not a penny actually went to the Quaker owners. Great part of Washington Square was a Potter's 234 FEOM CITY HALL TO MEMORIAL HALL Field, and thousands of American soldiers, who died in prison, were buried there in unmarked graves, and there too were buried thousands of those who died when yellow fever swept the city. A vague story which has come vaguely down, is that a young girl, of unusual beauty, having com- mitted suicide, was forbidden burial in a churchyard and so was buried here; and that her family, filled with bitter anger at such treatment, were buried here beside her, when they came to die, each one giving formal directions that this be done and each in turn being laid in an unmarked grave. I have not come upon the story with dates attached, or any names, but it doubtless represents, with at least shadowy basis of truth, some forlorn episode of the long ago. In the central square, now City Hall Square, the gallows stood so long as to threaten to become per- manent; but fortunately there are also picturesque recollections in regard to this central space. What a sight it must have been, when Rochambeau was encamped there with six thousand French soldiers! And what a sight it was when Anthony Wayne camped there with his soldiers on the return from the splendidly successful campaign in what in the 1790 's was the wilderness of Ohio ! And it has been thrilling to see, frequently, our own soldiers camped there, around scores of great motor trucks, on the last part of their journey from some inland city to some city of embarkation. At the beginning of the eighteen hundreds, a 235 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA pumping station was built here, for the new city water-works, and as the disting-uished Latrobe was the architect, his structure, designed on his favor- ite classic lines, was likewise distinguished. A fountain, too, was here set up; a fountain made by the wood-carver, William Push; but as it was sup- posed to represent Leda and the Swan it brought heavy criticism upon the artist, for Leda was not a lady, from the city's standards, and the fountain was banished. And after a while the pumping station itself vanished, when the water-works were established beside Fairmount. In the 1870 's the huge City Hall was put up. It has a lofty tower, surmounted by a statue of Penn. Philadelphians grow eloquent over the marvelous height of this tower, comparing it with various cathedral towers of Europe as to altitude, and point- ing out that it reaches up five hundred and fifty feet above street level. That, however, is two hundred feet less, in height, than that of the Woolworth Building, in New York, which rises to seven hundred and fifty feet; so that in at least one direction modern business distances old cathedrals. Theo- retically, the tall tower dominates the city, but in reality the height is successfully hidden and appears rather low. Although, from a long distance away, there are a few viewpoints whence there is an ex- cellent effect, there is nothing of this near at hand; yet, in a way. City Hall has attained unique distinc- tion, as being the only huge structure in the world which gains no dignity by its size. 236 FEOM CITY HALL TO MEMOEIAL HALL On street cars crossing Broad Street you will see men and women bending and bobbing and swaying and peering outward and under and upward, as if devoutly posturing before a shrine, and the thought comes of their thus doing honor to the high-exalted image of William Penn up there on his tower, look- ing benignly and broad-brimmedly down; but it is really only that it has become the custom for every one to try to get a look at the far-up City Hall clock. For a great city, and a city which has led in art, Philadelphia is oddly short of statues that can be deemed excellent; in fact, the central portion of the city has few statues of any sort. There are some set about City Hall, however, among these being an unobtrusive statue of the *' merchant and mariner," Girard. The statue which attracts the most atten- tion is an equestrian of General Reynolds, and, with- out being a great work of art, it is a spirited and adequate representation of that gallant officer who, born near Philadelphia, was killed in the mighty battle, fought on Pennsylvania soil, at Gettysburg. Few, however, of the many who look with pride and interest at this statue of a Pennsylvanian, know that the statue is by that recipient of so much of nation- wide ridicule, Rogers of the plaster groups! This Reynolds shows that he could do, with skill and spirit, more than his groups ; and even they did much to point people toward ^artistic standards in an in- artistic period. Against the south front of City Hall is one of the 237 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA masterpieces of sculpture. (As I write, it has been boxed and removed on account of subway work, and may not be put back in its original position here.) It represents the ''Puritan," the best of the works of that brilliant Irishman, Saint Gaudens; it is a replica of the original, which was put up beside the Connecticut Eiver, at Springfield; and down here in the Quaker City the ''Puritan" stands with odd effect. This statue, and that of Penn far up in the air, (literally "skied," if ever an artist's work was!) represent vividness of contrast. For the Quaker •stands, on top of the tower, a travesty on Penn, a travesty on Quakerism, impossibly benign, impos- sibly peaceful, impossibly lacking in manliness ; when it should have been remembered that Penn was a man of mental and physical vigor, of court training and bearing, a forceful man, who was determined to carry out his ambitions peacefully. And here is the contemporary Puritan as Saint Gaudens visualized him, with Bible in one hand and sturdy staff in the other, equally ready to fight or to pray, sternly stepping forward, domineering, aggressive and un- bending. In the past, Fairmount Park has been the most difficult to find and reach of any large park in any of the cities of the world, and this in spite of the fact that it begins within little more than a mile or so from City Hall. It is, too, by far the largest city park in the United States, and indeed in the world unless Denmark is justified in its claim of a four- 238 FROM CITY HALL TO MEMORIAL HALL thousand-acre city park as against the more than three thousand of Fairmount. Recently, at great expense, a parkway has been begun, and is indeed far on towards completion, stretching diagonally, in a broad straight line, from City Hall to the Spring Garden Street entrance of Fairmount Park, passing, on the left, the attractive building of the Academy of Natural Sciences, and on the right, facing out from Logan Square, the Roman Catholic Cathedral, a building all in brown stone, with a big dome rising from its center ; passing, too, on the right a felicitous entranceway which has been made, with all the reposeful effect as of age, into an old and high-walled graveyard and schoolyard of the Quakers, so as to have a fine entrance from the park- way ; and it is hoped that the entire parkway will in a short time be admirably bordered. At the Spring Garden Street entrance, at the end of the parkway, is a statue of Washington, of bronze on a granite base, which is notable among statues for the way in which it has been cluttered about with huge bronze animals and fish. This statue has been very much an object of admiration in this city of art leadership. The entire scheme displays marvelous thoroughness, not only with the variety of animals and fish and the number of huge symbolic human figures lolling in bronze, but in medallions which rep- resent every man who had any important part in the Revolution! It is noticeable that the general eifect is very like that of one of the big monuments, a ^'denkmal," such as one sees in the big German cities. 239 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA Even Washington, surmounting the heterogeneous- ness on horseback, is not permitted to ride as he actually rode, but like a German officer, and the tail of his horse is twisted into German-looking ringlets. It is a complete example of German ''thoroughness/' And all this, because it was actually designed by a German professor! This monument was erected by the Society of the Cincinnati, to honor him who was not only the first President of the United States but also the first president of that society. Contributions for its erection began to be collected over a century ago. And when money enough was gathered, the making of the monument and statue to honor this greatest of all Americans was entrusted to a professor of Berlin, who was something of a sculptor, and who made the monument in Germany and shipped it over. Here, where Spring Garden Street crosses the Schuylkill by a long double bridge, with its two dif- ferent heights for traffic, is the hill which in the long ago was specifically known as Fairmount and which gave name to the park. And here, at the river's edge, is a notable architectural achievement; here a beautiful classic effect was long ago secured, when the water system of the Schuylkill, for the supply of the city, was new. A considerable space is terraced and paved and balustraded, with the broad river stretching off, and the water, for the full width of the river, tumbling over a low fall; at one side is the double-bridge, at the other, and stretching up the bank of the stream, 240 FEOM CITY HALL TO MEMORIAL HALL are the boathouses of the pleasure craft, known as the '' Schuylkill Navy"; and facing out toward all this are the classic structures. There are three Greek temples; the center, the largest, being open like the temples of Paestum. The proportions and the Doric pillars of all three temple-like buildings are perfect; and they are not so large as to be out of place, but are quite small- ish; they are precisely right. Stone abutments of dull gray rise perpendicularly from the water, with a line of semi-lunettes, and with divisions in each of which is built a delightful little balcony, just above the level of the water. The abut- ments are +opped by a line of balustrades and it is behind thi ~j balustrade that the temple-like structures stand, in their uniform light gTay, which would be still more effective if white. It is beautiful, restrained, delightful; in this city so distinguished for its classic architecture, this group, with its setting, is thoroughly distinguished; even though, through some vandalistic utilitarian- ism, two other buildings, fortunately small, have been erected between the original buildings of classic inspiration. Underneath the terrace and the buildings, within and behind the abutment that rises sheer from the water, a utilitarianism that is altogether excellent has established the city's aquarium. And here, among these water-works buildings, are preserved some excellent examples of the unusual wood carving of William Rush. He was a Philadel- 241 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA phian ; he was born in this city and died in this city ; he was the son of a ship carpenter, and early began making figure-heads for clipper ships and then made wooden statues. Here, several of the statues are preserved. Here, too, is his supposed Leda and the Swan; not the banished original of wood, but a replica that the city procured, in bronze; and it is not Leda at all, but a thoroughly irreproachable young woman, hold- ing aloft a bittern ; a graceful piece of work, deserv- ing its bronze permanence. It was a century ago that the wooden original was made. But as I paused to look at this bronze replica just the other day, a well-dressed, well-to-do mother and daughter swept up and eyed it for a moment critically. And then came a remark which could not have been made in any other city of the world, after the lapse of a century; it was a remark all by itself, neither preceded nor followed by any other words; it was the kind of remark which, to typical Philadel- phians, illuminates and terminates every subject; for the mother said: ''Polly Vanuxem posed for that;" quite as if it were yesterday! And with that the mother and daughter swept on. Again one sees that in this city a hundred years are but a day, in matters of family. The vast park is a place of beauty. It is splen- didly diversified, with levels and rolling sweeps, with masses of trees and trees in isolation. Through the park flows the delightful Schuylkill, and dotted here and there are old mansions which the city has 242 FEOM CITY HALL TO MEMOKIAL HALL preserved. Into the Schuylkill flows the Wissa- hickon, and the valley of this little stream has been made a part of Fairmount Park; and never was there a more altogether charming bit of park than this Wissahickon portion, with rippling water, and high steep cliffs, and trees and bushes and flowering shrubs, all combined in a sort of joyous beauty. There is an enormous medleyed monument in Fairmount, of tremendous height and curious elaborations, which was put up under the will of a typefounder, Eichard Smith. It is essentially a military monument, with the statues of various gen- erals here and there upon it, and with the type- founder's own statue not very prominently perched. It was in Fairmount Park that Philadelphia set her Centennial Exposition. It was nobly conceived, nobly planned, nobly carried out. The National Government aided with a loan of a million and a half dollars, and Philadelphia likes to say that the loan was repaid and that a dividend of $1.73 was paid upon each share of stock after all expenses were met. The city still points to this financial achieve- ment with justifiable pride. The Centennial — one seldom adds the word ** Exposition," — did an immense amount for the United States in awakening and educating the entire nation. General foreign travel had not begun, so it was extremely illuminative that the best of the products and achievements of the entire world were shown here. And Americans of the different sec- tions became acquainted with one another. And a 243 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA certain invention was shown which made the people, when they went back to their homes, in this or that near or distant quarter of the land, tell amazedly that the human voice could now be heard for miles over a wire. And Japan and her art were dis- covered at the Centennial; before that Japan had been rather vaguely thought of as a sort of Chinese island. The Centennial profoundly influenced the develop- ment of American art. It drew the North and the South closely together. Indeed it drew the entire nation into unity. It seemed as if every family in the land sent at least one representative. There were ten million admissions to the grounds. "When it was all over, most of the exposition build- ings were swept away, and the park resumed its parklike aspect. One building, however, was re- tained; an unattractive structure. Memorial Hall; and it contains considerable collections of curios and paintings, with examples of early American artisan- ship, notably in glass and silver and to some extent in pottery and furniture; a collection of silver spoons of America's early days being especially noteworthy. The Centennial may fairly be considered the first broad national and international exposition of the United States, such a matter as the earlier Crystal Palace of New York not in any degree rivaling it. And when the Centennial was held it far outdid any- thing that Europe had at that time presented. Philadelphia is a slow city. Her own people will 244 FEOM CITY HALL TO MEMOEIAL HALL either admit it or be proud of it, according to temper- ament. One is tempted at times to say that she not only will not follow the Bostonian admonition to hitch her wagon to a star but that she will be content with a hitching post. All of which would show a marked misconception of the city. For, slow as she is, she has been first in many things, from the proud begin- ning when she stood for religious freedom and for fairness toward the Indians. Possibly her claims are not justified in every detail, but it is a highly interesting list of claims that she makes; among them being the first medical school in the country, the first hospital, the first fire-insurance company, the first bank, the first water-works, the first monthly magazine, the first daily newspaper, the first re- ligious magazine, the first juvenile periodical; and, although humor is not her strong point, the first illustrated comic paper! 245 CHAPTEE XVI THE FAIR MANSIONS OF FAIEMOUNT desired. He wishes IFFEESON, writing from Paris, in 1787, sends to Mrs. Smitli in London, the daugh- ter of John Adams, some ar- ticles which she had wished him to procure. ''Mr. Jef- ferson has the honor to present his compliments to Mrs. Smith, and to send her the two pairs of corsets she they may he suitable, as Mrs. Smith omitted to send her measure." Pic- ture the predicament of the tall statesman, at the Paris counter, and the restrained amusement of the clerk! The letter continues pleasantly, and con- cludes: *'Mr. Jefferson begs leave to assure Mrs. Smith of his high esteem and respect, and that he shall always be happy to be rendered useful to her by being charged with her commands." Other times, other manners! And John Hancock, when in Philadelphia as President of the Continental Congress, put his tremendous signature at the bottom of a pleasant note to his charming fiancee, ** Dorothy Q.," who was then in the Connecticut town of Fair- 246 THE FAIR MANSIONS OF FAIEMOUNT field: ''How did my Aunt like her gown, and do let me know if the stockings suited her; she had better send a pattern shoe and stocking. I warrant I will suit her. — I have sent you by Doer Church in a paper box, directed to you, the following things for your acceptance, and which I do insist you wear. 2 pair white silk stockings which I think will fit you, 4 pair white thread, 1 pair black satin, 2 capps, 1 fan, 1 very pretty light hat, 1 neat airy summer cloak.'* "With this last item he puts the parenthesized note ''I asked Doer. Church," but as to the others he pre- sumably followed his own unassisted judgment. One is astonished at his bravery ! And he modestly adds : **I wish these may please you. I shall be gratified if they do. I will attend to all your commands." After all, shopping was no easy thing in those pre- department-store days, particularly with the Eevolu- tion's disturbance of trade, and a man was expected to do his part. It is worth noting, as showing what a pleasant love affair it was, and that even being presiding officer of a revolutionary assembly could not make the big-signatured John forget to be de- voted, that he closed his note with: ** Adieu, my Dr. Girl, and believe me to be, with great Esteem and Affection, Yours without Reserve, John Hancock." It would seem from the above letters of Hancock and Jefferson that one need not argue any special intimacy, although it shows very friendly relations, between Andre — ^promoted from Captain to Major, the charming society man, dancer, friend-maker, and go-between — and the wife of Benedict Arnold, that, 247 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA before the negotiations with her husband to make him a traitor became known, Andre wrote to her in Philadelphia, from New York: *'It would make me very happy to become useful to you here. Should you not have received supplies I shall be glad to enter into the whole detail of cap-wire, needles, gauze, etc., and to the best of my ability render you in these trifles services from which I hope you will infer a zeal to be- further employed. You know the Mischianza made me a complete milliner." The home of Peggy Shippen, Peggy Arnold, Mrs. Benedict Arnold, still known as Mount Pleasant, one of the very finest of the numerous old-time mansions of America, is still preserved in the very scenical Fairmount Park (to use a word that Beaconsfield loved) : and it is by far the finest of the old houses of the park. In early days, rich folk delighted to come to this hilly river region, and the city, in an admirable spirit, has preserved the greater part of the fine houses that they built here. They are utilized mainly for restaurants or rest-houses ; the one known as "Wood- ford, among the finest, is the park-police station ; and even though some of the houses have been sadly altered to meet supposed modern needs or ideas others are still very much as the builders left them. The mansion of Woodford, built about 1740, is on the same side of the Schuylkill, the eastern, as is Mount Pleasant, which stands between what would be the line of Dauphin Street and that of Girard Avenue; Woodford being a little more to the north- 248 THE FAIR MANSIONS OF FAIRMOUNT ward, opposite the end of Dauphin Street. Wood- ford was for years the home of William Coleman, one of the close personal friends of Benjamin Frank- lin ; a member of his Junto ; a man of whom Franklin has written in the highest terms, for his clever head and irreproachable morals ; a man justifying Frank- lin's encomiums by the fine way in which, late in life, he filled important judgeships. This house, which was Judge Coleman's home, is a building of great attractiveness, of brick that has been dulled to variegated hues of softened reds and reddish yellows. Outwardly, there are quoined cor- ners, and brick pilasters; and inside one notes, in particular, the cove cornices in the parlors, and an exceedingly fine stair in a square-enclosed room: it being thus enclosed to prevent the downstairs heat from mounting upward on cold days. It stands as a house ought to stand for one so honored by Frank- lin and who, like Franklin, honorably rose from mod- est station. Shortly before the Revolution, David Franks, one of a Hebrew family that was prominent both socially and financially, took the house. But David Franks was of pro-British leanings; and it was one of the grim jests of those times that Benedict Arnold, of all men — his near neighbor and even at that time a traitor, although a hidden one — had him put under arrest on a charge of sedition. Scattered here and there in the great extent of parkland, some on one side of the Schuylkill and some on the other, are such old places as Lemon Hill, with 249 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA fine lines, even thongli spoiled by an encompassing balcony, and quoin-cornered Belmont, also sadly metamorphosed, and the almost quaint Letitia house, or Penn house, which Penn may very possibly have built, which was taken to pieces, brick by brick, in its original location in the city, and carefully rebuilt here. Near the Penn house is Sweet Briar, a mansion built a century ago by Samuel Breck, who claimed as unique the distinction of having shaken the hand of President Washington, and also the hand of Presi- dent Lincoln, and both of them in Philadelphia. And there is the Grove house, on a little hill, the spot where the family settled in the early 1700 's; an old dormered mansion, the precise date of whose con- struction is unknown. And there is Solitude; not a mansion, this, but a little house of large memories, a house built by a grandson of William Penn, one John Penn, who came over at the close of the Eevolution to look into the affairs of the Penn family. He seems to have been in some ways a queer sort; and assur- edly, if he had not had some queer qualities, he could not have built this Solitude, for it is a house precisely twenty-six feet by twenty-six ! The parlor is twenty- six feet by seventeen, and behind it is a hall which is twenty-six feet in length and the missing nine feet in width. Penn's wealth and connections and family import- ance drew important guests here during his occu- pancy. This tiny house loomed large as a social center. And, in particular, there was a fete cham- 250 THE FAIR MANSIONS OF FAIRMOUNT petre given here, with tents and marquees all about, and as guests the people of the highest stand- ing. This freakish house of John Penn, this house that Jack built, although it has no connection with the cow with the crumpled horn, has close neighboring with various other crumpled horns, for by an odd fate it is within the enclosure set apart for the city's Zoo. Most of the houses built within the district that in course of time has become Fairmount Park were the country homes of wealthy folk who at the same time had their town-houses in the near-by city, the people of Philadelphia having early set the fashion of having both city and suburban living, following in this the example of William Penn himself, who not only had his home in Philadelphia but also built a veritable mansion, not on the Schuylkill indeed, but on an island in the Delaware, above Bristol; a mansion which has quite vanished away, but from which some pieces of William Penn's own furniture have been preserved. When one thinks of the homes of the Schuylkill region, the Fairmount Park region, the mind goes at once to Mount Pleasant, noblest and most beauti- ful of them all, and far the most important, even though the importance was mostly a somber import- ance, from the character and the fate of some who lived here. One never forgets that superb Mount Pleasant was the home of Benedict Arnold. It is interesting to note the estimation in which his wife is still held in this city. She was of one of the 251 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA finest of Philadelphia families; she seems to have been bright and goodlooking ; she was a Shippen ; she was a social entity, of a family of important social entities ; so her name is still held m high estimation, A hotel has her name and her picture on its daily menu cards, in the expectation that this will win popu- larity; and the best-known woman newspaper writer of the city uses the name of '* Peggy Shippen," as a nom-de-plume, knowing that it will attract. Now, such things could only be in this city. All that Peggy Shippen did was to marry Benedict Arnold and to continue to be his wife, and to accept money, person- ally, from the British government, after her hus- band's treason became known; not extraordinarily good reasons for honored remembrance. The continued and widespread honoring of Mrs. Arnold makes it worth while to mention that when the general married her he was twice her age, a widower — ^his wife having died so recently as since the opening of the Eevolution — and that he had three children, the oldest being seventeen. He was living extravagantly at the time he married her, and was even then under charges which affected his integrity and on account of which, shortly after the marriage, he was officially censured. That the young wife not only overlooked her hus- band's traitorous schemes, but that she actively aided them, was the belief of many, among them being Aaron Burr, a contemporary, than whom a shrewder man never lived, and to whom was open many a source of information closed to people in general. 252 THE FAIR MANSIONS OF FAIRMOUNT Washington himself probably felt doubts of Peggy ^s loyalty, but when the crash came, at West Point, her position was so painful that he gave orders to let her, with her infant child, go back to Philadelphia, courteously refraining from criticism ; but the Coun- cil shortly ordered her into the British lines, on the expressed ground that her continued presence was a danger. Not only was Arnold given English money and the military rank that he craved, but, in time, four sons of this ** officer and gentleman," and his wife Peggy, were one by one, as they became old enough, taken into the British army: not as private soldiers, with muskets in their hands, to fight in an effort to blot out their father's disgrace, but as officers. One was made a lieutenant, another a captain, another a colonel, and the fourth a major-general. It is of still graver moment, so far as Benedict Arnold's wife, of the distinguished Philadelphia family, is concerned, that the British government paid to her personally, in addition to what it gave her husband and their sons, a pension of five hundred pounds a year. Arnold's courtship had been ardent, just as his soldiering had been ardent. As a soldier, he had carried out plans, such as conducting an army through pathless Maine in the depth of winter, in the face of incredible difficulties and dangers; and as a wooer, a three-child widower, a man under a cloud, a man of no ''family," the son of a bankrupt, he won a matrimonial prize. In his wooing he lost no time. He arrived in Philadelphia on June 20, 1778. Be- 253 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA fore September 25, of that year, he was on the foot- ing of a lover who had been paying his addresses and not without success, for on that date he wrote a long and passionate letter, with such ardent sentences as : "Suffer me to hope for your approbation. Con- sider before you doom me to misery, which I have not deserved, but by loving you too extravagantly." Eeally, it seems as if John Hancock wrote de- votedly, but this sort of letter quite out-Hancocks the big-signatured John. Arnold continues: *' Consult your own happiness; and, if incompatible, forget there is so unhappy a wretch; for may I perish if I would give you one moment's inquietude to purchase the greatest possible felicity to myself!" But Miss Peggy Shippen ought to have realized that all this did not ring true, that it was too studied and turgid. Better far the simple devotion of Hancock to *' Dorothy Q.," after all. And, indeed, it has been charged that this letter, which so captivated Peggy Shippen, was but a carefully made-up form, and that Arnold had sent it to some one else whom he would fain have married, before inditing it to Miss Peggy. But, at any rate, he goes on : * * My most ardent wish is for your happiness, and my latest breath will be to implore the blessings of Heaven on the idol and only wish of my soul." And so for the second time Arnold became ''Benedict the married man," for they were married in March of 1779. And it was at least as early as the early part of that year, although the precise date is not known, that his traitorous negotiations began. 254 THE FAIR MANSIONS OF FAIRMOUNT How General Arnold retained rank and place as long as lie did is surprising, for it mnst have been known that he was living beyond his means and bor- rowing money right and left. But we may suppose that it seemed incredible that a man in whom great trust was placed, and who had shown himself per- sonally heroic, could really do anything very wrong. While his home was here at Mount Pleasant, and he was military governor of Philadelphia; for thus high had he been raised; he tried to borrow money from the Chevalier de Luzerne; but the Frenchman dryly replied that when the envoy of a foreign power gives or lends money it is ordinarily to corrupt the receiver ; and for him to loan to Arnold would there- fore degrade them both; and so he declined ''with pain." All of which Arnold seems no more to have understood than does the painter in ''The Doctor's Dilemma," who, when his brazen request for money is refused can only uncomprehendingly say, "Oh, if you feel that way about it ! " At Mount Pleasant, vividly full as it is of stirring recollections, one feels in an exceptional degree the very life and movement of history; almost startling are the impressions of the past in their intensity. The place seems still alive with sinister influences. It stands unchanged in an unchanged environment. At the time of its construction. Mount Pleasant gave only suggestion of pleasantness. A rich retired one-armed privateer, Captain John Macpherson, was the builder; a capable, cheerful, even comical man. He published the first of Philadelphia directories, 255 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA giving the names in direct house-to-house sequence, by squares, setting down the names and occupations when they were told him, and, when they were not, putting down some brief description to insure di- rectorial immortality. *'I won't tell you," stood for many a number; for directories were at that time unknown, and people were suspicious about being questioned. For 93 S'outh Street he put do^vn ** cross woman"; for a number of houses: '*Wliat you please!" But he had not only wealth, but considerable posi- tion, and he secured prominent guests at his table, such as John Adams, who wrote of Mount Pleasant that it was ''the most elegant seat in Pennsylvania." The great show place was for sale when Arnold came to high command here ; and the general, fond of show and deeming show as in itself a means of re- taining power, coveted and secured the place, in the same spirit in which some Eoman general would have seized upon some mighty mansion in an ancient town. Arnold could not literally seize this house, but the way in which he took possession, and the way in which he pretended to settle the great place upon his wife, had all the appearance of seizing. Arnold's belief was that nothing was too good for him. And as military governor he had extraordinary powers, not definitely circumscribed. Mount Pleasant stands in a finely wooded portion of the great park, one tree in particular, in front of the house, being of enormous size. The house is near the edge of a high bank which rises from the level 256 THE FAIE MANSIONS OF FAIEMOUNT of the Schuylkill, and there are fine views of the bend- ing stream. There are still remains of a terraced garden along the bank, giving evidence that not only the house but the grounds were liberally planned. The house is double-fronted, and the more important front is away from the river, as if on one side one is expected to look at the river and on the other side at the house. It is a noble mansion, a beautiful mansion, a dis- tinguished, debonair, delightful mansion. It is of stuccoed stone darkened to a tawny or almost yellow- ish buff, with quoins of brickwork strDdngly in con- trast to the fagade. It is a high building, set in a high place; the im- possible was attempted and made a splendid success, by adding height to this building in its perched loca- tion and at the same time thus adding to effect- iveness. The basement windows are well out of the ground, surrounded with frames of stone; the chimneys are of enormous size ; there is a prominent balustrade ; the broad stone steps have iron banisters that are covered thick with vines; the dormers are high in proportion to their width ; above the fine front door is a still finer window. The entire building so more than justifies itself! On either side of the house are flanking wings, each of two-stories and a dormered garret. Eather, they are dependencies, and not wings, for they are not con- nected with thei mansion itself, but stand closely subsidiary to it as a highly important feature of the general design. 257 THE BOOK OF PHILADELPHIA The inside of the house well carries out the im- pressiveness of the exterior. There is richness of cornicing. There is paneling of fine design. The carved and paneled over-mantels are of unusual beauty. There are pilasters and pedimented doors. Finest of all is an upstairs room, overlooking the river, with exquisite beauty of carving over the doors, over the twin cupboards, over the fireplace. This room must surely have been especially the room of Mrs. Arnold; but the entire house, rooms and halls and stairs, seems still filled with the gay society folk and the gayly uniformed soldiers of so long ago. And how soon it was all to vanish! Here in this house the essentials of Arnold's plot were agreed upon. Here Arnold urgently asked to be transferred to West Point. The tragedy of it all seems so very vivid, so very recent, here in this beautiful house where the general lived so haughtily, entertained so lavishly, plotted so infamously. Immediately preceding the acquiring by Benedict Arnold of Mount Pleasant it had been leased by an enormously wealthy Spaniard, Don Juan de Mirailles, who had been sent to America by the Spanish Government as its official representative. Mirailles planned living in state, in Philadelphia, and, being of vast wealth, he fixed upon and secured this magnifi- cent suburban seat ; but found that, to be near General Washington, he must give up Philadelphia and go to Morristown. At Morristown the career of Mirailles was tragically short. He was taken ill and in a few days 258 THE FAIR MANSIONS OF FAIRMOUNT was dead. And the funeral was such as would have given satisfaction to Arnold himself, lover of pomi^ as he was. A Spanish priest conducted the services. Wash- ington, with many officers and members of Congress, walked in a funeral procession that was a mile in length. Candles blazed in the sunlight, and there was the solemn intoning of chants. The body of the grandee lay uncovered, in the coffin, and was clad in a magnificent suit of scarlet, embroidered in gold lace, and there were also diamonds and jewels and rings. The grave was guarded by soldiers night and day, until the body could be taken up, with the intent of sending it to Spain. -^ --1^:;^^_'- - 1 ,1^ :' Wfe^^S :^ 3] 1 .Jm^ »a&v j/Jf\^ /flf^ =--^-^=i^^,. '.