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an accurate delineation of it as made in 1798, and preserved in my MS. Annals, page 243, in the City Library. It was then perceived too late

-that finished as it was,

It still lack'd a grace, the loveliest it could show

A mine to satisfy th' enormous cost!"

Mr. Morris, as he became more and more sensible of his ruin in the above building, was often seen contemplating it, and has been heard to vent imprecations on himself and his lavish architect. He had besides provided. by importation and otherwise, the most costly furniture; all of which, in time, together with the marble mansion itself, had to be abandoned to his creditors.

"Drained to the last poor item of his wealth,

He sighs, departs, and leaves th' accomplished plan
Just where it meets his hopes!"

He saw it raised enough to make a picture and to preserve the ideal presence of his scheme; but that was all-for the magnitude of the establishment could answer no individual wealth in this country; and the fact was speedily realized, that what cost so much to rear could find no purchaser at any reduced price. The creditors were therefore compelled, by slow and patient labour, to pull down, peace-meal, what had been so expensively set up. Some of the under-ground labyrinths were so deep and massive as to have been left as they were, and at some future age may be discovered to the great perplexity of the quid nuncs. The materials thus taken down were sold out in lots; and the square being divided into building lots and sold, gave occasion to employ much of the former material therein. Mr. William Sansom soon procured the erection of his "Row" on Walnut street, and many of the houses on "Sansom street," thereby producing a uniformity in building ranges of similar houses, often since imitated, but never before attempted in our city.

It always struck me as something remarkable in the personal history of Mr. Morris, that while he operated for the government as financier, his wisdom and management was pre-eminent, as if "sky-guided and heaven-directed," leading to a national end, by an overruling providence; but, when acting for himself, as if teaching us to see that fact by contrast, all his personal affairs went wrong and to ruin!

LOXLEY'S HOUSE,

AND

BATHSHEBA'S BATH AND BOWER.

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THE frame house of singular construction, No. 177, south Second street, at the junction of Little Dock and Second streets, was memorable in its early day for affording from its gallery a preaching place for the celebrated Whitfield-his audience occupying the street (then out of town) and the opposite hill at the margin of Bathsheba's bath and bower. All these facts must sound strange to modern ears, who so long have regarded that neighbourhood as a well compacted city. It may therefore serve as well to amuse the reader, as to sustain the assertions above, to adduce some of the authorities on which those traditions are founded.

I had long heard traditional facts concerning the rural beauty and charming scenes of Bathsheba's bath and bower, as told among the earliest recollections of the aged. They had heard their parents talk of going out over the Second street bridge into the country about the Society Hill, and there making their tea-regale at the above-named spring. Some had seen it, and forgotten its location after it was changed by streets and houses; but a few, of more tenacious memories or observing minds, had preserved the site in the mind's eye-among these was the present aged and respectable Samuel Coates, Esq.-he told me that, when a lad, he had seen Whitfield preaching from the gallery, and that his audience, like a rising amphitheatre, surrounded the site of the bath and bower, on the western side of Second street. That the spring, once surrounded by shrubbery, sprang out of the hill on the site of the lot on which Captain Cadwallader (afterwards a General) constructed his large double house-the same site on which S. Girard, Esq. has since erected four brick houses. Mrs. J. and Mrs. R. daughters of Mr. Benjamin Loxley, the owner of that house, told me that. they had heard him say he had heard Whitfield preach from that balcony, and also that there was originally a celebrated spring on the opposite side of the street. The springy nature of the ground was sufficiently indicated, to the surprise of the citizens and the builders, when Mr. Girard attempted to build the above-mentioned

houses further out than Cadwallader's house; they could find no substantial foundation, and were obliged to drive piles on which to build. Mrs. Logan, too, had a distinct recollection of an old lady who used to describe to her the delightful scenery once around the spring, and that it lay somewhere towards the Society Hill.

Mr. Alexander Fullerton, aged 76 years, told me he was familiar with this neighbourhood when a boy, and was certain the spring here was called "Bathsheba's Spring and Bower." He knew also that the pump near there, and still at the south east corner of Second and Spruce street, was long resorted to as a superior water, and was said to draw its excellence from the same source.

The street in front of Loxley's house was originally much lower than it now appears to the eye, being now raised by a sub-terrene tunnel. It was traversed by a low wooden bridge half the width of the street, and the other half was left open for watering cattle.

The yards now in the rear of Girard's houses are much above the level of Second street, and prove the fact of a former hill there; on which Captain Cadwallader used to exercise and drill his celebrated silk stocking company."

Mr. Loxley himself was a military chieftain of an earlier daymade the talk and dependence of the town in the days of the Paxtang boys. His intended defence of the city against those outlaws has been facetiously told by Graydon in his memoirs. He had been made a lieutenant of artillery, in 1756, on the occasion of Braddock's defeat. His father before him, owned these premises; and the family mansion near there, now shut in and concealed from Spruce street, was once at the base of a rural and beautiful hill, displaying there a charming hanging garden, and the choicest fruits and grapes. The Loxley house is deserving of some further distinction as the residence, in the time of the Revolution, of Lydia Darrach, who so generously and patriotically undertook to walk beyond the lines to give our army timely information of the meditated attack.-Under her roof the Adjutant General of the British army had his office.

DUCHE'S HOUSE, &c.

It was

THIS was one of the most venerable looking, antiquated houses of our city, built in 1758, for Parson Duché, the pastor of St. Peter's church, as a gift from his father, and taken down a few years ago, to give room to erect several brick houses on its site. said to have been built after the pattern of one of the wings of Lambeth Palace. When first erected there it was deemed quite out of town, and for some time rested in lonely grandeur.* In after-years it became the residence of Governor M'Kean, and when we saw it as a boy, we derived from its contemplation conceptions of the state and dignity of a Governor which no subsequent structures could generate. It seemed the appropriate residence of some notable public man.

Parson Duché was as notable in his time as his mansion, and both for a time run their fame together. He was withal a man of some eccentricity, and of a very busy mind, partaking with lively feelings in all the secular incidents of the day. When Junius' letters first came out, in 1771, he used to descant upon them in the Gazettes of the time under the signature of Tamoc Caspipina,-a title formed by an acrostic on his office, &c. as "the assistant minister of Christ church and St. Peter's in North America." At another time he endeavoured to influence General Washington, with whom he was said to be popular as a preacher, to forsake the American cause; and for this measure he was obliged to make his escape for England, where he lived and preached some time, but finally came back to Philadelphia and died. His ancestor was Anthony Duché, a respectable Protestant refugee, who came out with William Penn.

The church of St. Peter, to which he was attached, on the south west corner of Third and Pine streets, (the diagonal corner from his own house,) was founded in the year 1758, as a chapel of ease to the parent Christ church. It was built by contract for the sum of 3310£. and the bell in its cupola, (the best at present in the city for its tones) was the same which had occupied the tree-crotch at Christ church. The extensive ground was the gift of the proprie

*A penciled picture of the house is preserved in my MS. Annals in the Philadelphia Library.

taries; level as the whole area was, it was always called “the church on the hill," in primitive days, in reference to its being in the region of "Society Hill,” and not, in familiar parlance, within the city walks.

In September, 1761, just two years after it was begun to be built, it was first opened for public worship. On that occasion all the clergy met at Christ church, and with the wardens and vestry went in procession to the Governor's house, where being joined by him and some of his council, they proceeded to the new church, where they heard a sermon from Doctor Smith, the Provost of the college, from the words "I have surely built thee an house to dwell in," &c. The same words were also set to music and sung by the choir.

BINGHAM'S MANSION.

LONG after the peace of 1783, all of the ground in the rear of "the Mansion House" to Fourth street, and all south of it to Spruce street, was a vacant grass ground enclosed by a rail fence, in which the boys resorted to fly their kites. The Mansion House, built and lived in by William Bingham. Esq. about the year 1790, was the admiration of that day for its ornaments and magnificence. He enclosed the whole area with a painted board fence and a close line of Lombardy poplars-the first ever seen in this city,* and from which has probably since come all the numerous poplars which we everywhere see. The grounds generally he had laid out in beautiful style, and filled the whole with curious and rare clumps and shades of trees; but in the usual selfish style of Philadelphia improved grounds, the whole was surrounded and hid from the public gaze by a high fence. An occasional peep through a knot-hole was all the pleasure the public could derive from such a woodland scene. After Mr. Bingham's death the whole was sold off in lots, and is since filled up with finely finished three-story houses. When the British were in Philadelphia they used this ground as a parade and exercise.

*The Athenian poplars have only been introduced here about six or eight years William Hamilton, at the Woodlands, first planted the Lombardy poplars there in 1784. from England.

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