Another French teacher, by the by, was not of Gallic race, but that of Albion le perfide: this was none other than William Cobbett, with his reputation all before him, known only to the Wilmington millers for the French lessons he gave their daughters and the French grammar he had published. He lived on "Quaker Hill" from 1794 to 1796. He then went to Philadelphia, and began to publish Peter Porcupine's Gazette. "I mean to shoot my quills," said Cobbett, "wherever I can catch game." With the sinews of Wilmington money he soon made his way back to England, became a philosopher, and sat in the House of Commons. Another British exile was Archibald Hamilton Rowan, an Irish patriot, and one of the "United Irishmen" of 1797. Escaping from a Dublin jail in woman's clothes, he found his way to Wilmington after adventures like those of Boucicault's heroes; lived here several years in garrets and cottages, carrying fascination and laughter wherever he went among his staid neighbors; and after some years flew back to Ireland, glorious as a phoenix, resuming the habits proper to his income of thirty thousand pounds a year.
WEST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
A familiar figure on the wharves of Wilmington was the gigantic one of Captain Paul Cuffee, looking like a character in a masquerade. His athletic limbs forced into the narrow garments of the Quakers, and a brim of superior development shading his dark negro face, he talked sea-lingo among the trading captains, mixed with phrases from Robert Barclay and gutturals picked up on the coast of Sierra Leone. Captain Cuffee owned several vessels, manned by sailors as black as shoemaker's wax, and he conducted one of his ships habitually to the African ports. Coming back rich from Africa, this figure of darkness has often led its crew of shadows into port at the Brandywine mouth, passing modestly amongst the whalers and wheat-shallops, dim as the Flying Dutchman and mum as Friends' meeting. It is possible that from some visit of his arose the legend that Blackbeard, the terrible pirate, who always hid his booty on the margins of streams, had used the Brandywine for this purpose. At any rate, some clairvoyants, in their dreams, saw in 1812 the glittering pots of Blackbeard's gold lying beneath the rocks of Harvey's waste-land, next to Vincent Gilpin's mill. They paid forty thousand dollars for a small tract, and searched and found nothing; but Job Harvey hugged his purchase money.
ST. JOHN'S PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH.
Latrobe the architect lived here in the first quarter of the century, midway between Philadelphia (where he was building waterworks and banks) and Washington (where he was seating a young nation in legislative halls worthy of its greatness); using Wilmington meanwhile as a pleasant retirement, where he could wear his thinking-cap, educate his beautiful young daughter, and mix with the French and other cultured society of the place. Here, too, about fifty years ago, a pretty French girl used to play and eat peaches, maintained by funds mysteriously supplied from Louisiana, and ignorant of all connections except a peculating guardian. It was little Myra Clark (now Mrs. Gaines), who woke up one day to find herself the heroine of the greatest of modern lawsuits, and the credited possessor of a large part of New Orleans—the same who has recently gained a million, while she expects to gain a million more, and to be richer than Lady Burdett-Coutts.
Thus has the pretty city ever played its part as a storing-house where things and people and ideas might be set by to ripen. It is not wonderful that it now and then found itself, quite unintentionally, a museum, where the far-brought rarities were living souls. In a heavenly climate, just where the winged songsters of the South held tryst with those of the North, and where the plants of both latitudes embowered the gardens together, Nature arranged a new garden wherein were brought together almost all the races that had diverged from Babel.
The antiquities we have been examining, however, yield in age to the venerable walls which were built to shelter a worship no longer promulgated among us. The Swedes' churches of Philadelphia and Wilmington are among the oldest civilized fabrics to be found in this new country of ours. That of Wilmington was built in 1698, and that at Wicaco in Philadelphia in 1700. Rudman, a missionary from Sweden, preached the first sermon to the Wilmingtonians in May, 1699; and after him a succession of Swedish apostles arrived, trembling at their own courage, and feeling as our preachers would do if assigned to posts in Nova Zembla or Patagonia. The salary offered was a hundred rixdollars, with house and glebe, and the creed was the Lutheran doctrines according to "the Augsburg Confession of Faith, free from all human superstition and tradition." Dutch ministers alternated peaceably with the Swedish ones, who bore such Latinized names as Torkillus, Lokenius, Fabricius, Hesselius, Acrelius. The last wrote in his own language an excellent history of the Swedish settlements on the Delaware, only a part of which has been rendered into English by the New York Historical Society. William Penn proved his tolerance by giving the little church a folio Bible and a shelf of pious books, together with a bill of fifty pounds sterling. The building was planted half a mile away from the then city, in the village of Christinaham. Its site was on the banks of the Christine, and its congregation, in the comparative absence of roads, came in boats or sleighs, according to the season. The church was well built of hard gray stone, with fir pews and a cedar roof: iron letters fixed in the walls spelled out such holy mottoes as "Lux L. I. Tenebr. oriens ex Alto," and "Si de. pro Nobis Quis contra Nos," and commemorated side by side the names of William III., king of England, William Penn, proprietary, and Charles XI. of Sweden. Swedish services were continued up to about the epoch of the Revolution, when, the language being no longer intelligible in the colony, they were merged into English ones: the last Swedish commissary, Girelius, returned by order of the archbishop in 1786, and the intercourse between the American Swedish churches and the ecclesiastical see in the fatherland ceased for ever. The oldest headstone in the churchyard is that of William Vandevere, who died in 1719. Service was long celebrated by means of the chalice and plate sent over by the Swedish copper-miners to Biorch, the first missionary at Cranehook, and the Bible given by Queen Anne in 1712. The sexes sat separately. In our grandfathers' day the old sanctuary used to be dressed for Christmas by the sexton, Peter Davis: he was a Hessian deserter, with a powder-marked face and murderous habits toward the English language. Descending from their sledges and jumpers, the congregation would crowd toward the bed of coals raked out in the middle of the brick floor from the old cannon stove: to do this they must brush by the cedars which "Old Powderproof" had covered with flour, in imitation of snow; and then Dutch Peter, as they complimented him on his efforts, would whisper the astonishing invocation, "God be tankful for all dish plessins and tings!"
