It was a very well-shaded, peaceful city, not "a great village," as it was called by New Yorkers, but like a pleasant English town of earlier times, in which a certain picturesque rural beauty still lingered. The grand old double houses, with high flights of steps, built by the Colonial aristocracy--such as the Bird mansion in Chestnut Street by Ninth Street--had a marked and pleasing character, as had many of the quaint black and red-brick houses, whose fronts reminded one of the chequer-board map of our city. All of this quiet charm departed from them after they were surrounded by a newer and noisier life. I well remember one of these fine old Colonial houses. It had been the old Penington mansion, but belonged in my early boyhood to Mr. Jones, who was one of my father's partners in business. It stood at the corner of Fourth and Race Streets, and was surrounded on all sides by a garden. There was a legend to the effect that a beautiful lady, who had long before inhabited the house, had been so fond of this garden, that after death her spirit was often seen of summer nights tending or watering the flowers. She was a gentle ghost, and the story made a great impression on me. I still possess a pictured tile from a chimney-piece of this old mansion. The house is gone, but it is endeared to me by a very strange memory. When I was six or seven years of age, I had read Shakespeare's "Tempest," and duly reflected on it. The works of Shakespeare were very rare indeed in Quaker Philadelphia in those days, and much tabooed, but Mr. Jones, who had a good library in the great hall upstairs, possessed a set in large folio. This I was allowed to read, but not to remove from the place. How well I can remember passing my Saturday afternoons reading those mighty tomes, standing first on one leg, then on the other for very weariness, yet absorbed and fascinated! About this time I was taken to the theatre to see Fannie Kemble in "Much Ado About Nothing"--or it may have been to a play before that time--when my father said to me that he supposed I had never heard of Shakespeare. To which I replied by repeating all the songs in the "Tempest." One of these, referring to the loves of certain sailors, is not very decent, but I had not the remotest conception of its impropriety, and so proceeded to repeat it. A saint of virtue must have laughed at such a declamation. As it recurs to me, the spirit which was over Philadelphia in my boyhood, houses, gardens, people, and their life, was strangely quiet, sunny, and quaint, a dream of olden time drawn into modern days. The Quaker predominated, and his memories were mostly in the past; ours, as I have often said, was a city of great trees, which seemed to me to be ever repeating their old poetic legends to the wind of Swedes, witches, and Indians.