The seeing eye and loving can still trace all these changes of a century. The very kernel of the city, and its warehouses about Dock Square, and the river front, the expansion before the Revolution, the pause just after, the growth in the period after 1787, the addition early in the century and the great growth before and after the war and for twenty years past. Each has its character and quality, its message and purport, and these as they extended have met a growth as distinct and recognizable, north, west and south. The marks of these things and their metes and bounds, the current and course of population, the monuments of the past, the changing fashion of each decade and the desire of the present, these are all written in this moving tide of houses which has flooded all the wood-grown fields of two centuries ago. Generation by generation has seen a wider comfort, a higher level of life, an improving education and more abundant resource for the Many for whom this city has always existed. Dull, sordid, narrow, much of this life has been. From its dawn, it has had its seasons of stagnant corruption, and Penn but wrote the despair of all who have served it since, yet no man has labored and lived in it but has come to know its charm, to feel its life, to trust to the sure tides of its being, welling always towards a more complete comfort, and to love this vast amorphous city which broods over its children with a perpetual home nurture. [Illustration: SEAL OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA.] [Illustration] WILMINGTON “Her mingled streams of Swedish, Dutch and English blood.” BY E. N. VALLANDIGHAM When the adventurous William Usselinx, native of Antwerp and merchant of Stockholm, was growing old, he proposed to King Gustavus Adolphus that Sweden organize a trading company to operate in Asia, Africa, America, and Terra Magellanica. The King lent ear to Usselinx, and Usselinx was able to picture to the Swedish people the beauty and fertility of the region bordering on the Delaware, “a fine land, in which all the necessaries and comforts of life are to be enjoyed in overflowing abundance.” The proposed plans sped well for a time; the King pledged a great sum from the royal treasury in aid of the new company, and the Swedish people, nobles and commons, subscribed to the stock. But the King was shortly to be busied in the wars of Germany, and when he died at his great victory of Lützen, the plans of Usselinx were yet unexecuted. One biographer of Gustavus, indeed, says that the little fleet intended for America was seized by the Spaniards, but it is by no means certain that such a fleet ever set sail.