many pedestrians stopping at the old-fashioned inn on Smith’s Island for hot punch.  Juleps and cobblers, and the

“one thousand and one American fancy drinks,” were not as yet invented, and men drank themselves unto the devil quite as easily on rum or brandy straight, peach and honey, madeira and punch, as they now do on more varied temptations.  Lager beer was not as yet in the land.  I remember drinking it in after years in New Street, where a German known as der dicke Georg first dealt it in 1848 to our American public.  Maize-whisky could then be bought for fifteen cents a gallon; even good “old rye” was not much dearer; and the best Havanna cigars until 1840 cost only three cents a-piece.  As they rose in price they depreciated in quality, and it is now many years since I have met with a really aromatic old-fashioned Havanna.

It was a very well-shaded, peaceful city, not “a great village,” as it was called by New Yorkers, but like a pleasant English town of earlier times, in which a certain picturesque rural beauty still lingered.  The grand old double houses, with high flights of steps, built by the Colonial aristocracy—such as the Bird mansion in Chestnut Street by Ninth Street—had a marked and pleasing character, as had many of the quaint black and red-brick houses, whose fronts reminded one of the chequer-board map of our city.  All of this quiet charm departed from them after they were surrounded by a newer and noisier life.  I well remember one of these fine old Colonial houses.  It had been the old Penington mansion, but belonged in my early boyhood to Mr. Jones, who was one of my father’s partners in business.  It stood at the corner of Fourth and Race Streets, and was surrounded on all sides by a garden.  There was a legend to the effect that a beautiful lady, who had long before inhabited the house, had been so fond of this garden, that after death her spirit was often seen of summer nights tending or watering the flowers.  She was a gentle ghost, and the story made a great impression on me.  I still possess a pictured tile from a chimney-piece of this old mansion.

The house is gone, but it is endeared to me by a very

strange memory.  When I was six or seven years of age, I had read Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” and duly reflected on it.  The works of Shakespeare were very rare indeed in Quaker Philadelphia in those days, and much tabooed, but Mr. Jones, who had a good library in the great hall upstairs, possessed a set in large folio.  This I was allowed to read, but not to remove from the place.  How well I can remember passing my Saturday afternoons reading those mighty tomes, standing first on one leg, then on the other for very weariness, yet absorbed and fascinated!

About this time I was taken to the theatre to see Fannie Kemble in “Much Ado About Nothing”—or it may have been to a play before that time—when my father said to me that he supposed I had never heard of Shakespeare.  To which I replied by repeating all the songs in the “Tempest.”  One of these, referring to the loves of certain sailors, is not very decent, but I had not the remotest conception of its impropriety, and so proceeded to repeat it.  A saint of virtue must have laughed at such a declamation.

As it recurs to me, the spirit which was over Philadelphia in my boyhood, houses, gardens, people, and their life, was strangely quiet, sunny, and quaint, a dream of olden time drawn into modern days.  The Quaker predominated, and his memories were mostly in the past; ours, as I have often said, was a city of great trees, which seemed to me to be ever repeating their old poetic legends to the wind of Swedes, witches, and Indians.

Among the street-cries and sounds, the first which I can remember was the postman’s horn, when I was hardly three years old.  Then there were the watchmen, “who cried the hour and weather all night long.”  Also a coloured man who shouted, in a strange, musical strain which could be heard a mile:

“Tra-la-la-la-la-la-loo.
Le-mon-ice-cream!
An’-wanilla-too!”

Also the quaint old Hominy-man:

“De Hominy man is on his way,
   Frum de Navy-Yard!
   Wid his harmony!”

(Spoken) “Law bess de putty eyes ob de young lady!  Hominy’s good fur de young ladies!

“De Harmony man is on his way,” &c.

Also, “Hot-corn!”  “Pepper-pot!”  “Be-au-ti-ful Clams!” with the “Sweep-oh” cry, and charcoal and muffin bells.

One of the family legends was, that being asked by some lady, for whom I had very little liking, to come and visit her, I replied with great politeness, but also with marked firmness, “I am very much obliged to you, ma’am, and thank you—but I won’t.”

In Washington Square, three doors from us, at the corner of Walnut Street, lived Dr. George McClellan.  He had two sons, one, John, of my own age, the other, George, who was three years younger.  Both went to school with me in later years.  George became a soldier, and finally rose to the head of the army in the first year of the War of Rebellion, or Emancipation, as I prefer to term it.

Washington Square, opposite our house, had been in the olden time a Potter’s Field, where all the victims of the yellow fever pestilence had been interred.  Now it had become a beautiful little park, but there were legends of a myriad of white confused forms seen flitting over it in the night, for it was a mysterious haunted place to many still, and I can remember my mother gently reproving one of our pretty neighbours for repeating such tales.

I have dreamy yet very oft-recurring memories of my life in childhood, as, for instance, that just before I was quite three years old I had given to me a copy of the old New England Primer, which I could not then read, yet learned from others the rhymes with the quaint little cuts.

“In Adam’s fall
We sin-nèd all.”

“My book and heart
Shall never part,” &c.

Also of a gingerbread toy, with much sugar, colour, and gilding, and of lying in a crib and having the measles.  I can remember that I understood the meaning of the word dead before that of alive, because I told my nurse that I had heard that Dr. Dewees was dead.  But she replying that he was not, but alive, I repeated “live” as one not knowing what it meant.

I recollect, also, that one day, when poring over the pictures in a toy-book, my Uncle Amos calling me a good little boy for so industriously reading, I felt guilty and ashamed because I could not read, and did not like to admit it.  Whatever my faults or follies may be, I certainly had an innate rectitude, a strong sense of honesty, just as many children have the contrary; and this, I believe, is due to inherited qualities, though these in turn are greatly modified by early association and influences.  That I also had precocious talent and taste for the romantic, poetic, marvellous, quaint, supernatural, and humorous, was soon manifested.  Even as an infant objects of bric-à-brac and of antiquity awoke in me an interest allied to passion or awe, for which there was no parallel among others of my age.  This was, I believe, the old spirit which had come down through the ages into my blood—the spirit which inspired Leland the Flos Grammaticorum, and after him John Leland, the antiquary of King Henry VIII., and Chrs. (Charles) Leland, who was secretary of the Society of Antiquaries in the time of Charles I.  Let me hereby inform