"Benjamin and Deborah Franklin. 1790."
Beyond that graveyard you will see a meeting-house of the Friends, one of the best-known in all that grave city which their patron founded. It is the meeting-house of the Free Quakers, and to its building both Franklin and Washington, himself, lent a liberal aid. And you can still see upon a tablet set in one of its faded brick walls these four lines:
"By General Subscription,
For the Free Quakers.
Erected A. D. 1783,
Of the Empire 8."
That "Empire 8" has puzzled a good many tourists. In a republic and erected upon the gathering-place of as simple a sect as the Friends it provokes many questions.
"They must have thought it was goin' to be an empire like that French Empire that was started by the war in '75," the aged caretaker patiently will tell you with a shake of the head which shows that he has been asked that very question many times before and never found a really good answer for it.
A few squares below its graveyard is Christ church itself—a splendid example of the Georgian architecture as we find it in the older cities close to the Atlantic seaboard. Designed by the architect of Independence Hall it is second to that great building only in historic interest. Its grave-yard is a roster of the Philadelphia aristocracy of other days. In its exquisitely beautiful steeple there hangs a chime of eight bells brought in the long ago from old England in Captain Budden's clipper-ship Matilda freight-free. And local tradition relates that for many years thereafter the approach of Captain Budden's Matilda up the Delaware was invariably heralded by a merry peal of welcome from the bells.
Where William Penn looks down upon the town he loved so well
Philadelphia is rich in such treasure-houses of history. To the traveler, whose bent runs to such pursuits, she offers a rare field. In the oldest part of the city there is hardly a square that will not offer some landmark ripe with tradition and rich with interest. Time has laid a gentle hand upon the City of Brotherly Love. And no American, who considers himself worthy of the name, can afford not to visit at least once in his lifetime the greatest of our shrines—Independence Hall. Within recent years this fine old building has, like many of its fellows, undergone reconstruction. But the workmen have labored faithfully and truthfully and the old State House today, in all its details, is undoubtedly very much as it stood at the time of the signing of the Declaration. It still houses the Liberty Bell, that intrepid and seemingly tireless tourist who visits all the world's fairs with a resigned patience that might well commend itself to human travelers.
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