Elizabeth Oakes Smith.
ET us stroll through ancient Philadelphia this clear frosty morning November 28, 1848 ing, and visit the few fossil remains of the primitive period that lie amid the elegant structures and "be-Gothic'd things" of the present, like trilobites in secondary limestone. We shall have little to do with the great town stretching away to the Schuylkill; it is near the banks of the Delaware that we must seek for the places hallowed by the remembrance of
"The deeds of our fathers in times that are gone;
Their virtues, their prowess, the fields they have won;
Their struggles for freedom, the toils they endured,
The rights and the blessings for us they procured."
One of the most interesting buildings in Philadelphia is the "Slate-roof House," on the southeast corner of Norris's Alley and Second Street, a little south of Chestnut Street. It was built about 1690 for Samuel Carpenter, and was occupied by William Penn as his city residence in the year 1700. * There was the birth-place of John Penn, the governor of Pennsylvania when the Revolution broke out, the only child of William Penn born in this country. From that circumstance he was called "the American." There, in 1702, Lord Cornbury, then governor of New York and New Jersey, was magnificently entertained, with his suite of fifty persons. James Logan, William Penn's agent, also entertained him at Pennsbury, in a style quite in dissonance with the plain character of Quakers. This house was sold to William Trent, the founder of Trenton, in 1703. For nearly fifty years afterward it was occupied by some of the first men of Philadelphia (among whom was Deputy-governor Hamilton), when it became noted as a superior boarding-house. There General Forbes, the successor of Braddock, died in 1759. In 1764 it was rented by the Widow Graydon, mother of Captain Graydon, the author of "Memoirs of Sixty Years' Life in Pennsylvania." Captain Graydon describes the house as "a singular, old-fashioned structure, laid out in the style of a fortification, with abundance of angles, both salient and re-entering Its two wings projected to the street in the manner of bastions, to which the main building, retreating from sixteen to eighteen feet, served as a curtain. It had a spacious