ulture and of courtly
manners was here centered. Even the houses were more imposing than
elsewhere throughout the country. They were usually well constructed of
stone or brick with either thatched or slated roofs. They were supplied
with barns bursting with the opulence of the fields. The countryside
round about was teeming with fatness. Indeed, in all the colonies no
other place was so replete with affluence and comfort.

Nor was it without its gentry, cultured and dignified. Its inhabitants
were, for the most part, made up of members of old Quaker families and
others faithful to the Church of England and devoted to the political
principles of the Mother country,--the proud possessors of wealth and
the exemplars of the most dignified deportment. Already were its fair
sex renowned abroad as well as at home for their "beauty, grace and
intelligence." They moved with all the gayety and charm of court ladies.
The wealth and luxury of a capital city were there; for even in the
infancy of the republic, Philadelphia had attained a distinction,
unique and preeminent. What was more natural, then, than that their
allegiance should be divided; the so-called fashionable set adhering to
the crown; the common townsfolk, the majority of whom were refugees from
an obnoxious autocracy, zealously espousing the colonists' cause, and
the middle class, who were comprised of those families holding a more or
less neutral position in the war, and who were willing to preserve their
estates and possessions, remaining undecided, and in their manner
maintaining good offices with both sides throughout the strife.

The British Army took possession of the city, after its victorious
encounter on the Brandywine, on the twenty-sixth of September, 1777. Sir
William Howe selected for his headquarters the finest house in the city,
the mansion which was once the home of Governor Richard Penn, grandson
of William Penn. Here General Howe and his staff of officers passed a
gay winter. They were much more interested in the amusements, the
gayeties, the dissipations carried on in this old Quaker City than in
any efforts to capture the army of General Washington.

The infatuate populace, indifferent to the progress of the Revolution,
unaffected for the most part by the righteousness of the cause of the
Colonists, became enamored of the brilliance and the fashion and the
display of the English nobility. They cordially welcomed General Howe
and his young officer