The first building completed was a block-house twelve feet wide and twenty-two feet long, called the “Blue Anchor” and forced to serve a variety of purposes. It was used as a general place of business, and being on the bank of the river, formed a landing place for vessels, as well as a tavern. Later it was also used for a post-house, for Penn, realizing the necessity of some regular means of communication between Philadelphia and the outlying settlements to the west, soon established a messenger post service by which news could be sent and received once a week. Travellers could also be provided with horses if desired. Few availed themselves of this service at first, it is true, for the rates were very high; the delivery of a letter from Philadelphia to Trenton Falls in New Jersey, for example, costing threepence, and ninepence to Baltimore, Maryland. The “Blue Anchor” soon had companions, however. In the course of a few months as many as eighty houses had been built and a regular trade gradually developed. Merchants set up shops supplied with merchandise such as was constantly arriving by vessel from England. Trained artisans were now available to do the work that every man had been hitherto obliged to perform for himself as best he could. The husbandman betook himself to the hoe and plough wherever there was a clearing large enough to use them and won such rich harvests from the virgin soil that it soon became no longer necessary to bring grain from abroad. The interiors of the houses were quite as rude and rough as the outsides. Once sure of a sound roof to cover them, the settlers were content with only the barest necessities in the way of household furniture, whatever luxuries and comforts they may have been accustomed to in the past. Costly furnishings would have formed indeed a strange contrast to the rough bark-covered logs that constituted the walls, and the covering of lime and moss that served as hangings, or the hard-packed clay that took the place of boards for flooring. A table, a bench or two, a bed, all hewed by hand with an axe and innocent of saw or plane, besides a few necessary cooking utensils,—these sufficed for the needs of the hard-working settlers, who only sought the shelter of a house when night or stormy weather made work without impossible and the axe and plough must needs be laid aside. Not until the original block-houses began to be replaced by stone buildings was any thought given to interior convenience, but as soon as it became possible to employ the services of skilled workmen the question of comfort and even elegance began to be more considered. Nor was this long in coming, for in less than a year from the time when Penn first landed at Newcastle there were more than a hundred stone houses erected in Philadelphia, and two years later the number had increased to six hundred. Penn could with truth assure his English friends that his American colony was the