eet, 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