When the Revolution came, Philadelphia sacrificed its English trade as promptly as ninety years later the city, loyal to its principles, sacrificed its Southern trade, and in both times and both sacrifices New York lagged to the rear in action and came to the front in assertion. Independence Hall still looked out on green fields to the west, and Rittenhouse’s little observatory—earliest of American star-gazing spots, whose telescope, earliest of our astronomical instruments, is in the American Philosophical Society—still stood in the square where Howe’s artillery was to be parked. The jail of “Hugh Wynne” was on the southeast corner of Sixth and Chestnut, on whose site Binney’s home was to stand later, the hero of another struggle for freedom. In the northeast corner of Washington Square was the potter’s field, last opened a century ago for yellow-fever victims. The house, Dutch built, and hence close to the street edge, in which Jefferson was to write the draft of the Declaration, preserved by the American Philosophical Society, was on Seventh and Market, its commemoration tablet on the wrong lot. A tavern fronted the Hall, and its stables ran opposite to the main door, its flies worrying the Continental Congress on a hot historic afternoon. The sharp rise which still ascends between Callowhill and Spring Garden was crested by the British works, of which the first was at Second and Poplar. From the Market Street Bridge it is still possible to make out the hill on which Hamilton planted his field-pieces to engage the British _tête-du-pont_, held by the 72d Highlanders. The Hessians camped in the open space at Gray’s Ferry, as the bridge of many years is still called. The stately house which held the Mischienza has disappeared only within a few years. The houses on the main street of Germantown still bear the mark of the battle, and look unchanged on the street whose fogs still veil it as on the day of conflict. The city now had from the river the sky-line which it substantially retained up to twenty years ago, when the steeples and the towers the Revolutionary period knew were dwarfed by the many-storied steel frames of to-day. [Illustration: INDEPENDENCE HALL, PHILADELPHIA, BEFORE 1876.] [Illustration: THE MORRIS HOUSE, GERMANTOWN, PHILADELPHIA.]