which Longfellow blended with the hospital in _Evangeline_; Carpenters’ Hall, the only Guild house in the colonies; the bit of wall still standing of the brewery at Fifth and Wharton; of the first play-house in the city and, most important of all, the two chief colonial monuments of the city, Christ Church and Independence Hall. [Illustration: CARPENTERS’ HALL, PHILADELPHIA. WHEREIN MET THE FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS, 1774.] [Illustration: THE PENNSYLVANIA HOSPITAL. FROM AN OLD ENGRAVING BY W. BIRCH & SON.] These buildings mark much. The city from a mere “Front” Street on the river, and two behind it, had grown up to Seventh and Eighth in a half ellipse which ran in thriving homes from Kensington, grew thronged about Chestnut, now passing Market in the race,—so that Market and Arch have the oldest house-fronts to-day,—and then thinned out again towards the scene of the Mischienza. In this area are scattered the mansions of the Colonial and immediate post-Revolutionary period, with Mrs. Ross’s house on Arch Street as type of the mechanic’s dwelling of the day, happily preserved and now bought as a memorial of the flag first made there. Beyond them begins the modern city of this century, of machine-made brick, of lumber sawed by steam, and house plans fitted to the growing value of the city lot. The growth which thus expanded the city of Penn into the city of Franklin was no mere accretion of population. It came of a profitable trade, of a share in adventures by sea and land, not always legal, and always dangerous, and of a close connection between the merchants of this city and those of London, from which the ancestors of more than one Philadelphia Friend were drawn, for Penn had borne his testimony in the Grace Church and Wheeler Street meeting-houses in London. When the richer men of the city came to erect its chief church, it was Gibbs’s St. Martin in the Fields which suggested the interior of the building on Second Street, and it was London brick architecture which was followed in Independence Hall and its open arches,—now restored,—despoiling the record of recent history to decorate and sometimes disfigure an earlier period, as is the manner and method of restoration the world over. These buildings in their size, their grace, their Georgian flavor, their cost,—for both were extravagant as times then went,—stood for an opulent mercantile connection between the metropolis of colonial and of royal England, a connection never quite lost, as the resemblance of the younger city to the older has never quite vanished. New York suggests Paris in spots, but no Philadelphian in his wildest flight ever thought that Philadelphia did.