The Treaty House was a fine, old-fashioned brick, with a long saloon or double parlor containing many curiosities, such as pieces of old ships of war, weapons used in Polynesia and brought home by old sea captains, the jaws of whales and narwhals, figure-heads from perished vessels, harpoons, and points of various naval actions. In those days, before manufactures had extended up all the water streets, and when domestic war had not been known for a whole generation, the little low marble monument on the site of William Penn's treaty with the Indians attracted hundreds of strangers, who moistened their throats and cooled their foreheads in the great bar parlor of the Treaty House. It was still a secluded spot, shady and dewy with venerable trees, and the moisture they gave the old brown and black bricks in the contiguous houses, some of them still stylish, and all their windows topped with marble or sandstone, gray with the superincumbent weight of time or neglect. Large rear additions and sunless sideyards carried out the idea of a former gentry. Some buttonwood trees, now thinning out with annual age, conveyed by their speckled trunks the notion of a changing social standard, white and brown, native and foreign, while the lines of maples stood on blackened boles like old retired seamen, bronzed in many voyages and planted home forever. But despite the narrow, neglected, shady street, the slope of Shackamaxon went gently shelving to the edges of long sunny wharves, nearly as in the day when Penn selected this greensward to meet his Indian friends, and barter tools and promises for forest levels and long rich valleys, now open to the sky and murmurous with wheat and green potato vines. Sitting before the inn door, on drowsy June afternoons, Duff Salter heard the adzes ring and hammers smite the thousand bolt-heads on lofty vessels, raised on mast-like scaffolds as if they meant to be launched into the air and go cleared for yonder faintly tinted spectral moon, which lingered so long by day, like the symbol of the Indian race, departed but lambent in thoughtful memories. Duff had grown superstitious; he came out of the inn door sidewise, that he might always see that moon over his right shoulder for good luck. One morning Andrew Zane appeared at the Treaty House before Duff Salter had taken his julep, after the fashion of malarious Arkansas. "Mr. Salter, it is all over. There is a baby at our house." "Girl?" "Just that!" "I thought so," exclaimed Duff Salter. "It was truly mother's labor, and ought to have been like Agnes. We will give her a toast." "In nothing but water," spoke Andrew soberly. "I hope I have sown my wild oats."