One of the most interesting buildings in Philadelphia is the "Slate-roof House," on the southeast corner of Norris's Alley and Second Street, a little south of Chestnut Street. It was built about 1690 for Samuel Carpenter, and was occupied by William Penn as his city residence in the year 1700. * There was the birth-place of John Penn, the governor of Pennsylvania when the Revolution broke out, the only child of William Penn born in this country. From that circumstance he was called "the American." There, in 1702, Lord Cornbury, then governor of New York and New Jersey, was magnificently entertained, with his suite of fifty persons. James Logan, William Penn's agent, also entertained him at Pennsbury, in a style quite in dissonance with the plain character of Quakers. This house was sold to William Trent, the founder of Trenton, in 1703. For nearly fifty years afterward it was occupied by some of the first men of Philadelphia (among whom was Deputy-governor Hamilton), when it became noted as a superior boarding-house. There General Forbes, the successor of Braddock, died in 1759. In 1764 it was rented by the Widow Graydon, mother of Captain Graydon, the author of "Memoirs of Sixty Years' Life in Pennsylvania." Captain Graydon describes the house as "a singular, old-fashioned structure, laid out in the style of a fortification, with abundance of angles, both salient and re-entering Its two wings projected to the street in the manner of bastions, to which the main building, retreating from sixteen to eighteen feet, served as a curtain. It had a spacious * Penn had a fine eountry residence, sometimes called "The Palace," in Bucks county, on the bank of the Delaware, nearly opposite Bordentown. It was constructed in 1683, at an expense of $35,000. [[[Loxley's House.--Mrs. Darrah and the British Adjutant General.]]] {301}yard half way to Front Street, ornamented with a double row of venerable, lofty pines, which afforded a very agreeable rus in urbe in the heart of the city." * [Illustration: 9311] John Adams and other members of the first Continental Congress boarded in the _Slate-roof House_; and there many British officers had lodgings while the city was in possession of the royal troops in 1778. A young ladies' boarding-school was kept there at one time, in which a daughter of General Wayne was educated. ** General Arnold occupied it as his residence while military governor of Philadelphia in 1778; and there were given those splendid entertainments before and after his marriage with Miss Shippen, which contributed to involve him in those debts that aided in producing his defection to the American cause.