Even a slow-moving Philadelphia trolley car eventually accomplishes its purpose and you will find yourself slipping from the older town into the oldest. The trolley car grinds around an open square--Franklin square, the conductor informs you and then tells you that despite its name it is not to be confounded with that aristocrat, Rittenhouse square, nor even with the more democratic Logan square. You see that for yourself. There are mean streets aroundabout this square. Oldest Philadelphia assuredly is not putting her best foot forward. And yet these sordid streets are not without their fascination. The ugly monotony of flat-roofs is gone. These roofs are high-pitched and bristle with small-paned dormer windows and with chimneys, for the houses that stand beneath them are very, very old indeed. And they are typical of that Georgian architecture that we love to call Colonial. A brave show these houses once must have made--even today a bit of battered rail, a fragment of door or window-casing or fanlight proclaims that once they were quality. Fallen to a low estate, to the housing of Italians or Chinese instead of quiet Quakers, they seem almost to be content that their streets have fallen with them; that few seem to seek them out in this decidedly unfashionable corner of Philadelphia. "Arch street," calls the conductor and it is time to get out. It is time to thread your way down one of the earliest streets of the old Red City, time to pay your respects at the tomb of him who ranked with Penn, the Proprietor, as the greatest citizen. You can find this tomb easily--any newsboy on the street can point the way to it. He is buried with others of his faith in the quiet yard of Christ church at Fifth and Arch streets. And in order that the passing world may sometimes stop to do him the homage of a passing thought, a single section of the old brick wall has been cut away and replaced by an iron grating. Through that grating you may see his tomb--a slab of stone sunk flat, for he was an unpretentious man--and on its face read: "Benjamin and Deborah Franklin. 1790." Beyond that graveyard you will see a meeting-house of the Friends, one of the best-known in all that grave city which their patron founded. It is the meeting-house of the Free Quakers, and to its building both Franklin and Washington, himself, lent a liberal aid. And you can still see upon a tablet set in one of its faded brick walls these four lines: "By General Subscription, For the Free Quakers. Erected A. D. 1783, Of the Empire 8." That "Empire 8" has puzzled a good many tourists. In a republic and erected upon the gathering-place of as simple a sect as the Friends it provokes many questions.