Memoirs | Page 6

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 AEsop'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