table old district of the Quaker City, and occupying the same
relation to it that Kensington in England does to London. Beyond both
Kensingtons is a Richmond, but the English Richmond is a beauteous hill,
with poetical recollections of Pope and Thomson, while our Richmond is
the coal district of Philadelphia, flat to the foot and dingy to the
eye.

Kensington, however, was once no faint miniature of the staid British
suburb. The river bending to the eastward there conducts certain of the
streets crookedly away from the rectangular Quaker demon who is ever
seeking to square them. Along the water side, or near it, passes a sort
of Quay Street, between ship-yards and fish-houses on the one side, and
shops or small tenements on the other, and this street scarcely
discloses the small monument on the site of the Treaty Tree, where
William Penn in person satisfied the momentary expectations of his
Indian subjects.

Nearly parallel to the water side street is another, wider and more
aristocratic, and lined with many handsome dwellings of brick, or even
brown-stone, where the successful shipbuilders, fishtakers, coal men,
and professional classes have established themselves or their posterity.
This street was once called Queen, afterward Richmond Street, and it is
crossed by others, as Hanover, Marlborough, and Shackamaxon, which
attest in their names the duration of royal and Indian traditions
hereabout. Pleasant maple, sometimes sycamore and willow trees shade
these old streets, and they are kept as clean as any in this ever-mopped
and rinsed metropolis, while the society, though disengaged from the
great city, had its better and worser class, and was fastidious about
morals and behavior, and not disinclined to express its opinion.

One winter day in a certain year Kensington had a real sensation. The
Delaware was frozen from shore to shore, and one could walk on the ice
from Smith's to Treaty Island, and from Cooper's Point to the mouth of
the Cohocksink. On the second afternoon of the great freeze fires were
built on the river, and crowds assembled at certain smooth places to see
great skaters like Colonel Page cut flourishes and show sly gallantry to
the buxom housewives and grass widows of Kensington and the Jerseys. A
few horses were driven on the ice, and hundreds of boys ran merrily with
real sleighs crowded down with their friends. A fight or two was
improvised, and unlicensed vendors set forth the bottle that inebri