My aunt lived in summer on the farther slope of Chestnut Hill, where, when the road was in order, came her friends for a night, and the usual card-play. When of a Saturday I was set free, I delighted to ride over and spend Sunday with her, my way being across country to one of the fords on the Schuylkill, or out from town by the Ridge or the Germantown highroad. The ride was long, but, with my saddle-bags and Lucy, a new mare my aunt had raised and given me, and clad in overalls, which we called tongs, I cared little for the mud, and often enough stopped to assist a chaise out of the deep holes, which made the roads dangerous for vehicles. Late one day in August, I set out with my friend Jack to spend a Sunday with my Aunt Gainor. Jack Warder was no w a prime favourite, and highly approved. We rode up Front street, and crossed the bridge where Mulberry street passed under it, and is therefore to this day called Arch street, although few know why. The gay coats of officers were plentiful, farmers in their smocks were driving in with their vegetables, and to the right was the river, with here and there a ship, and, beyond, the windmill on the island. We talked of the times, of books, of my father’s voyage, and of my future stay with my aunt. Although Jack’s father was a Quaker, he was too discreet a business man not to approve of Jack’s visits to my aunt, and too worldly not to wish for his son a society to which he was not born; so Mrs. Ferguson and Mrs. Galloway made much of Jack, and he was welcome, like myself, at Cliveden, where the Chews had their summer home. The Tory ladies laughed at his way of blushing like a girl, and, to Jack’s dismay, openly envied his pink-and-white skin and fair locks. They treated him as if he were younger than I, although, as it chanced, we were born on the same day of the same year; and yet he liked it all--the gay women, the coquettish Tory maids, even the “genteel” Quaker dames, such as Mrs. Sarah Logan or Mrs. Morris, and the pretty girls of the other side, like Sarah Lukens and the Misses Willing, with their family gift of beauty. These and more came and went at my aunt’s, with men of all parties, and the grave Drs. Rush and Parke, and a changing group of English officers. In the little old house at Belmont, the Rev. Richard Peters was glad to sit at cards with the Tory ladies, whose cause was not his, and still less that of Richard, his nephew. At times, as was the custom, sleighing parties in winter or riding-parties in summer used to meet at Cliveden or Springetsbury, or at a farm-house where John Penn dwelt while engaged in building the great house of Lansdowne, looking over trees to the quiet Schuylkill.