French fairy-tales, and often sang a ballad (which I found in after years in the works of Cazotte), which made a great impression on me—something like that of “Childe Roland to the dark tower came.”  It was called Le Sieur Enguerrand, and the refrain was “Oh ma bonne j’ai tant peur.”

That these and many other influences of culture stirred me strangely even as a child, is evident from the fact that they have remained so vividly impressed on my memory.  This reminds me that I can distinctly remember that when I was eight years of age, in 1832, my grandmother, Mrs. Oliver Leland, told my mother that the great German poet Goethe had recently died, and that they bade me remember it.  On the same day I read in the Athenæum (an American reprint of leading articles, poems, &c., from English magazines, which grandmother took all her life long) a translation of Schiller’s “Diver.”  I read it only once, and to this day I can repeat nearly the whole of it.  I have now by me, as I write, a silver messenger-ring of King Robert, and I never see it without thinking of the corner of the room by the side-door where I stood when grandmother spoke of the death of Goethe.  But I anticipate.

My father was a commission merchant, and had his place of business in Market Street below Third Street.  His partner was Charles S. Boker, who had a son, George, who will often be mentioned in these Memoirs.  George became in after life distinguished as a poet, and was Minister for many years at Constantinople and at St. Petersburg.

From Mrs. Rodgers’ my parents went to Mrs. Shinn’s, in Second Street.  It also was a very old-fashioned house, with a garden full of flowers, and a front doorstep almost on a level with the ground.  The parlour had a large old fireplace,

set with blue tiles of the time of Queen Anne, and it was my delight to study and have explained to me from them the story of Joseph and his brethren and Æsop’s fables.  Everything connected with this house recurs to me as eminently pleasant, old-fashioned, and very respectable.  I can remember something very English-like among the gentlemen-boarders who sat after dinner over their Madeira, and a beautiful lady, Mrs. Stanley, who gave me a sea-shell.  Thinking of it all, I seem to have lived in a legend by Hawthorne.

There was another change to a Mrs. Eaton’s boarding-house in Fifth Street, opposite to the side of the Franklin Library.  I can remember that there was a very good marine picture by Birch in the drawing-room.  This was after living in the Washington Square house, of which I shall speak anon.  I am not clear as to these removals.  There were some men of culture at Mrs. Eaton’s—among them Sears C. Walker, a great astronomer, and a Dr. Brewer, who had travelled in Italy and brought back with him pieces of sculpture.  We were almost directly opposite the State House, where liberty had been declared, while to the side, across the street, was the Library founded by Dr. Franklin, with his statue over the door.  One of his nieces often told me that this was an absolutely perfect likeness.  The old iron railing, now removed—more’s the pity!—surrounded the Square, which was full of grand trees.

It was believed that the spirit of Dr. Franklin haunted the Library, reading the books.  Once a coloured woman, who, in darkey fashion, was scrubbing the floor after midnight, beheld the form.  She was so frightened that she fainted.  But stranger still, when the books were removed to the New Library in Locust Street, the ghost went with them, and there it still “spooks” about as of yore to this day, as every negro in the quarter knows.

In regard to Franklin and his apparition, there was a schoolboy joke to this effect: that whenever the statue of

Franklin over the Library door heard the clock strike twelve at night, it descended, went to the old Jefferson Wigwam, and drank a glass of beer.  But the sell lay in this, that a statue cannot hear.

And there was a dim old legend of a colony of Finns, who, in the Swedish time, had a village all to themselves in Wiccacoe.  They were men of darksome lore and magic skill, and their women were witches, who at tide and time sailed forth merrily on brooms to the far-away highlands of the Hudson, where they held high revel with their Yankee, Dutch, and Indian colleagues of the mystic spell.  David MacRitchie, in a recent work, has made a note of this curious offshoot of the old Philadelphia Swedes.

And I can also remember that before a marble yard in Race Street there were two large statues of very grim forbidding-looking dogs, of whom it was said that when there was any one about to die in the quarter, these uncanny hounds came down during a nightly storm and howled a death duet.

And when I was very young there still lingered in the minds of those invaluable living chronicles (whether bound in sheepskin or in calf), the oldest inhabitants, memories from before the Revolution of the Indian market, when on every Saturday the natives came from their rural retreats, bringing pelts or skins, baskets, moccasins, mocos or birch boxes of maple-sugar, feathers, and game for sale.  Then they ranged themselves all along the west side of Independence Square, in tents or at tables, and sold—or were sold themselves—in bargains.  Even now the Sunday-child, or he who is gifted to behold the departed, may see the ghostly forms of Red-men carrying on that weekly goblin market.  Miss Eliza Leslie’s memory was full of these old stories, which she had collected from old people.

As for the black witches, as there were still four negro sorcerers in Philadelphia in 1883 (I have their addresses), it may be imagined to what an extent Voodoo still prevailed

among our Ebo-ny men and brothers.  Of one of these my mother had a sad experience.  We had a black cook named Ann Lloyd, of whom, to express it mildly, one must say that she was “no good.”  My mother dismissed her, but several who succeeded her left abruptly.  Then it was found that Ann, who professed to be a witch, had put a spell of death on all who should take her place.  My mother learned this, and when the last black cook gave warning she received a good admonition as to a Christian being a slave to the evil one.  I believe that this ended the enchantment.  There is or was in South Fifth Street an African church, over the door of which was the charming inscription, “Those who have walked in Darkness have seen a great light.”  But this light has not even yet penetrated to the darksome depths of Lombard or South Streets, if I may believe the strange tales which I have heard, even of late, of superstition there.

Philadelphia was a very beautiful old-fashioned city in those days, with a marked character.  Every house had its garden, in which vines twined over arbours, and the magnolia, honeysuckle, and rose spread rich perfume of summer nights, and where the humming-bird rested, and scarlet tanager or oriole with the yellow and blue bird flitted in sunshine or in shade.  Then swallows darted at noon over the broad streets, and the mighty sturgeon was so abundant in the Delaware that one could hardly remain a minute on the wharf in early morn or ruddy evening without seeing some six-foot monster dart high in air, falling on his side with a plash.  In the winter-time the river was allowed to freeze over, and then every schoolboy walked across to Camden and back, as if it had been a pilgrimage or religious duty, while meantime there was always a kind of Russian carnival on the ice, oxen being sometimes roasted whole, and all kinds of “fakirs,” as they are now termed, selling doughnuts, spruce-beer, and gingerbread, or tempting the adventurous with thimblerig;