eeting. 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.

[Illustration: 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 missionar