We can imagine the young soldier, far from home and friends, reading of those far-off times of war and peril, the winter wind howling up and down the river and beating against the Block House, carrying with it the echo, perhaps, of an Indian death halloo! Doubtless he wondered what the stern Spanish campaigner would have done if brought to the western wilderness to fight the red man, and, if he lived to return to his English home with his scalp intact, it is more than probable that Ensign Francis Howard's tales of America warfare and adventure were the delight of many a hunting dinner or evening fireside. Few indeed are the tangible relics of the most romantic period of our local history. The writer owns a copy of the edition of "Charles Fifth," and in all probability it is the one that the English ensign read at Fort Pitt. A few old letters, maps and account books, some cannon balls, rusty swords and bayonets, the handsome carved stone sun dial which the Chapter has placed for safe keeping in Carnegie Museum until its own home is built, are about all we can show of the works and possessions of the men who made our early history. Here was the scene of a mighty struggle for empire, a struggle of which the only vestiges left are the Block House and the names of our streets, too many of which have been changed in recent years to suit the vulgar needs of convenience and at the cost of our historical identity. JULIA MORGAN HARDING. [Illustration: PITTSBURGH IN 1795 COPYRIGHT 1892 BY JOS. EICHBAUM & CO.] Postscript. 1914. Much water has run under the bridges of the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers, since the sketch, "The Names of Pittsburgh Streets" was written, and changes as radical as those that took place between the first years of the Nineteenth Century and the early days of the twentieth, have revolutionized the historic "Point" in the last decade. Just as the French and Indians stole down the river before the advance of Gen. Forbes and his British and Colonial troops in 1758, so did the denizens of the aforesaid "Point" melt away in every direction before the steam shovels, creaking derricks and snorting engines of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1904-05.