Philadelphia presented many strange spectacles on those days. Apart from the blowing of a brass band on every corner, the patrolling of every sidewalk by a recruiting officer with fife and drum, and the requisite number of human "stool-pigeons," and the exhibition of the placard before noted, offering every inducement in money and every plea of patriotism for "State defence,"--there were other and yet more marked indications of a period out of the common order even for war-time. The American and the Merchants', favorite resorts of mercantile buyers from the rural counties of the State, were full of guests, but they lounged in the reading and smoking-rooms, and had no thought of commercial transactions. Gold was going up, its higher rate marking increased fever in the pulse of the national patient; and yet business was almost as stagnant in the broker's offices of Third Street as were wholesale transactions in the heavy houses on Walnut and Chestnut and Market below Second. The old Tonawanda and the still older Saranac, lying idle at the foot of Walnut Street, their yards lank and bare as winter trees, and the ships waiting for freight that seemed to be long in coming, found a new use in illustrating the hopeless stagnation of the city. The theatres had nearly all closed before, and the last hurried its unprofitable season to an end. The red bricks of old Independence Hall seemed more dingy than ever; and those who glanced into the hall where the great Declaration was signed in Seventy-six, at the cracked bell and the other sad reminders of a past age and a by-gone patriotism, thought whether new masters would not claim those relics for their own, before many days, issuing a new manifesto of slavery from that second Cradle of Liberty, while their gaunt steeds were picketed in Independence Square. Men saw the sleepless eye of the clock look down from the old steeple, at night, with a helpless prayer, as if something of protection which had before lived in the sacred building was to be found no more; and the bell woke many a sleeper at midnight, with its slow and melancholy stroke, to a feeling of loss and sorrow like that which it might have evoked when sounding for the burial of dear friends. All day long crowds gathered and held their place, wearily moving to and fro, but never dispersing, in the open space in front of the historic pile; and "peace" orators, who had before been awed into silence by the threats and demonstrations of earlier days, once more ventured treasonable harangues to sections of those crowds, while the policemen scarcely found energy enough to disperse the hearers or arrest the disturbers. The bulletin boards were besieged; the newspaper offices had a demand for extras unknown to the oldest inhabitant of the quiet city; and the telegraph offices, busied alike with messages of public and private interest, had never before known such a test of their capacity since Morse first set Prometheus at his new