* * * * * CHAPTER I. THE MURDER. Between the Delaware River and Girard Avenue, which is the market street of the future, and east of Frankfort Road, lies Kensington, a respectable old district of the Quaker City, and occupying the same relation to it that Kensington in England does to London. Beyond both Kensingtons is a Richmond, but the English Richmond is a beauteous hill, with poetical recollections of Pope and Thomson, while our Richmond is the coal district of Philadelphia, flat to the foot and dingy to the eye. Kensington, however, was once no faint miniature of the staid British suburb. The river bending to the eastward there conducts certain of the streets crookedly away from the rectangular Quaker demon who is ever seeking to square them. Along the water side, or near it, passes a sort of Quay Street, between ship-yards and fish-houses on the one side, and shops or small tenements on the other, and this street scarcely discloses the small monument on the site of the Treaty Tree, where William Penn in person satisfied the momentary expectations of his Indian subjects. Nearly parallel to the water side street is another, wider and more aristocratic, and lined with many handsome dwellings of brick, or even brown-stone, where the successful shipbuilders, fishtakers, coal men, and professional classes have established themselves or their posterity. This street was once called Queen, afterward Richmond Street, and it is crossed by others, as Hanover, Marlborough, and Shackamaxon, which attest in their names the duration of royal and Indian traditions hereabout. Pleasant maple, sometimes sycamore and willow trees shade these old streets, and they are kept as clean as any in this ever-mopped and rinsed metropolis, while the society, though disengaged from the great city, had its better and worser class, and was fastidious about morals and behavior, and not disinclined to express its opinion.