Parties of the _Queen's Rangers_ were almost every day at Frankford, where the Americans did not keep a fixed post. Simcoe had trained his men to quick and energetic movements with the bayonet, and his standing order was, "Take as many prisoners as possible, but never destroy life unless absolutely necessary." On one occasion, a patroling party of the Rangers approached Frankford undiscovered by an American sentinel at the bridge. They were so near that they might easily have killed the guard, but a boy was sent to warn him to run for his life. He did so, and no more sentinels were posted there afterward; "a matter of some consequence," says Simcoe, "to the poor people of Philadelphia, as they were not prevented from getting their flour ground at Frankford Mills." * Passing through a portion of the Kensington suburb of Philadelphia, its mud and wretchedness, its barking dogs and squalling babies, where society seems in a transition state from filth to cleanliness, and consequently from vice to godliness, I wheeled down Second Street, amid its glowing shops, and reined up at _Congress Hall_, just as the last hue of daylight faded away. It was Saturday night, a season as welcome to the traveler as a "cross day" in the calendar to the faithful. I was in Philadelphia' the city of brotherly love; the quiet Sabbath near; a glorious harvest of Revolutionary reminiscences spread out around me, inviting the pen-sickle to reap for my garner; and the broad and sunny South, its chivalry and its patriotism, beckoning me onward. Busy thought kept sleep at bay until midnight. The Sabbath morning dawned brilliant and frosty. As I went up to worship in the venerable _Christ Church_, around which cluster so many interesting associations of the past, I felt that it was a two-fold sanctuary--a sanctuary of religion and of patriotism. The exterior is the same as it was when the later colonial governors and officers of state--when Washington and Franklin--when Congress and the officers of the Continental army went there to worship; but the interior has been greatly changed by that iconoclast, _improvement_--that breaker of the images which patriotism delights to worship! One vestige of the olden time remains untouched--the pulpit _sounding-board_, the indispensable canopy of the old pastors.= ```"That sounding-board, to me it seem'd ````A cherub poised on high-- ```A mystery I almost deem'd 1````Quite hid from vulgar eye ```And that old pastor, rapt in prayer, ```Look'd doubly awful 'neath it there." `````--E. Oakes Smith.=