galleries, in much seeming distress of mind, she exclaimed, "See now to your standing, for thus is the Lord about to search and examine his camp." About the same time another Friend, of the name of Robert Walker, publicly declared that their counsels were double minded, and that the end would show it. As if to add to the stir of the day, one of the Friends,-whose name I purposely omit,acting with more zeal than discretion, delivered to a ship master, going to England, and then at anchor down the river, sundry letters to correspondents abroad, much censuring therein men and measures, &c. Of these letters, the Committee of Associators got wind, went down to the vessel by night,-brought off the letters, and made an expose and blow-up, much to the annoyance of sundry individuals.

I give the facts without comment and "without partiality," as things picturing the incidents of an eventful period. Their descendants have some right, I suppose, to know, even by a little, that their forefathers were once so straightened, in a very narrow pass.

PERSONS AND CHARACTERS.

"A mingled group-of good or ill."

"The charm of biography consists of minor truths neglected by graver history."

THE following facts concerning the persons severally named, are not intended as their proper biography, but as slight notices of individual character, which might be usefully preserved. As a general list, it will embrace alike, noble or ignoble-not solely a roll of merit, but rather of notoriety, to wit:

The First Born-John Key.

John Key, "the first born" of our city, of English parentage, was born in 1682, in a cave at "Penny-pot landing," i. e. at the northwest corner of Vine and Water streets. William Penn was pleased to distinguish the person and the circumstance, by the gift of a city lot; the original patent of which is in my possession through the politeness of George Vaux, Esq. The tradition of the spot granted was utterly lost to common fame; but this patent shows its location to have been on the south side of Sassafras street, nearly opposite to Crown street, say vis-a-vis to Pennington's sugar house.

The parchment and seal are in fine preservation. The seal is flat, circular, four inches wide, of brown wax, appended by a green riband. It may be curious to preserve the following abstract, to wit: "William Penn, Proprietary and Chief of Pennsylvania, sends

greeting, &c., that a certain lot of ground between the Fourth and Fifth streets, bounded on the north by Sassafras street, &c.—in breadth 49 feet and in length 306 feet; first granted by warrant from myself bearing date the 26th day of 3 mo. 1683, unto John Key, then an infant, being the first-born in the said city of Philadelphia," &c. The patent to confirm the warrant aforesaid is dated the 20th of July, 1713; the first-born being then a man of 31 years of age. The lot it appears he sold at the age of 33 years (say on the 24th of May, 1715,) to Clement Plumstead; and the latter, in 2 years afterwards, sold it to Richard Hill for only twelve pounds! This he joined to many other lots, and made of it "Hill's Farm." Further particulars may be read in my MS. Annals in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, page 50.

This notable first-born lived to good old age at his home in Chester county, and was accustomed to come occasionally to the city, always walking the streets with an unusually active step, although necessarily wondering at the changing scenes he constantly witnessed. Considering that he only died in his 85th year, as late as the year 1767, (July) persons may be still alive who may have heard him talk of those things! When the hospital was founded in 1755, he was present by request, to lay the corner stone!

It was remarkable that the same year (August 10th, 1767,) was also the year of the death of "the first-born" child in the province of English parents, born in 1681, one year before John Key, in a cave by the side of the Delaware river. This venerable man of 86 died at Brandywine Hundred, Emanuel Grubb by name. He was active and vigorous to the last, and actually rode to Philadelphia and back on horseback, equal to forty miles-only a few months before his death. His habits were temperate, never drinking any ardent spirits.

As those two venerable "first-borns" lived both near Chester, they had means of intercourse; and strange must have been their several emotions in talking over the years of improvement which they had witnessed down to the year 1767! What a feast they might have afforded to younger minds!

But another and a still earlier first-born, than either of the preceding, dwelt also in their neighbourhood, in the person of Richard Buffington, (son of Richard) he being "the first-born Englishman in Pennsylvania," having been born in what was afterwards "the province," in the year 1679. The facts in his case were peculiarly commemorated in the parish of Chester on the 30th of May. 1739; on that day the father, Richard, having attained his 85th year, had a great assemblage of his proper descendants, to the number of 115 persons, convened in his own house, consisting of children, grandchildren, and great-grand-children-the first-born being then present in his 60th year.

These affections and respects to "first-borns" were alike commendable and natural. They possessed a peculiarity of character,

and a relationship to things around them, which none others could enjoy, or even share with them. They were beings by themselves -alone! Others also have had and signalized their first-born! The New Yorkers had their first-born, in the person of Sarah Rapaelje, born in 1625, and the maternal ancestor of the Bogerts and Hansens. When she became the widow Forey, Governor Stuyvesant, in consideration of her birth, granted her a valley of land near the city. The Virginians had theirs, and such was their respect to him, that in the case of his rebellion, his life was spared to him, and he lived to be 80 years of age. Our sister city of Baltimore honoured their first-born, in the person of Mrs. Elen Moale, who died in that city in 1825, in her 84th year-she having been the first-born white woman in that place. Strange it was, that she in her own person could say of such a city as Baltimore, that she had seen it first, covered with woods, then becoine a field, next a village, and at last a city of 70,000 souls!

Edward Drinker.

Edward Drinker was born on the 24th of December, 1680, in a small cabin, near the present corner of Walnut and Second streets, in the city of Philadelphia. His parents came from Beverly, in the state of Massachusetts. The banks of the Delaware, on which the city of Philadelphia now stands, were inhabited, at the time of his birth, by Indians, and a few Swedes and Hollanders. He often talked to his companions of picking whortleberries and catching rabbits, on spots now the most improved and populous in the city. He recollected about the time William Penn came to Pennsylvania, and used to point to the place where the cabin stood, in which he, and his friends that accompanied him, were accommodated upon their first arrival. At twelve years of age, he went to Boston, where he served his apprenticeship to a cabinet maker. In the year 1745, he returned to Philadelphia with his family, where he lived until the time of his death. He was four times married, and had eighteen children, all of whom were by his first wife. At one time of his life, he sat down, at his own table, with fourteen children. Not long before his death he heard of the birth of a grand-child, to one of his grand-children, the fifth in succession to himself.

He retained all his faculties till the last year of his life. Even his memory, so generally diminished by age, was but little impaired. He not only remembered the incidents of his childhood and youth, but the events of latter years; and so faithful was his memory to him, that his son has informed that he never heard him tell the same story twice, but to different persons, and in different companies. His eye sight failed him many years before his death, but his hearing was uniformly perfect and unimpaired. His appetite was good

VCL. I.-3 P

Vide Samuel Bownas' Journal

till within a few days before his death. He generally ate a hearty breakfast of a pint of tea or coffee, as soon as he got out of bead, with bread and butter in proportion. He ate likewise at eleven o'clock, and never failed to eat plentifully at dinner of the grossest solid food. He drank tea in the evening, but never ate any supper; he had lost all his teeth thirty years before his death, which was occasioned, his son said, by drawing excessive hot smoke of tobacco into his mouth: but the want of suitable mastication of his food did not prevent its speedy digestion, nor impair his health. Whether the gums, hardened by age, supplied the place of his teeth in a certain degree, or whether the juices of the mouth and stomach became so much more acrid by time, as to perform the office of dissolving the food more speedily and more perfectly, is not known; but it has often been observed, that old people are most disposed to excessive eating, and that they suffer fewest inconveniences from it. He was inqusitive after news in the last years of his life. His education did not lead him to increase the stock of his ideas any other way. But it is a fact well worth attending to, that old age, instead of diminishing, always increases the desire of knowledge. It must afford some consolation to those who expect to be old, to discover, that the infirmities, to which the decays of nature expose the human body, are rendered more tolerable by the enjoyments that are to be derived from the appetite for sensual and intellectual food.

He was remarkably sober and temperate. Neither hard labour, nor company, nor the usual afflictions of human life, nor the wastes of nature, ever led him to an improper or excessive use of strong drink. For the last twenty-five years of his life, he drank twice every day of toddy, made with two table spoonfuls of spirit, in half a pint of water. His son, when a man of fifty-nine years of age, said that he never saw him intoxicated. The time and manner in which he used spirituous liquors, it is believed, contributed to lighten the weight of his years, and probably to prolong his life. "Give wine to him that is of a heavy heart, and strong drink to him that is ready to perish with age, as well as with sickness. Let him drink and forget his sorrow, and remember his misery no more."

He enjoyed an uncommon share of health, insomuch that in the course of his long life he never was confined more than three days to his bed. He often declared that he had no idea of that most distressing pain called the headach. His sleep was interrupted a little in the last years of his life with a defluxion on his breast, which produced what is commonly called the old man's cough.

The character of this aged citizen was not summed up in his negative quality of temperance: he was a man of the most amiable temper: old age had not curdled his blood; he was uniformly cheerful and kind to every body; his religious principles were as steady as his morals were pure. He attended public worship about thirty years in the Rev. Dr. Sprout's church, and died in a full assurance

of a happy immortality. The life of this man is marked with several circumstances, which perhaps have seldom occurred in the life of an individual. He saw and heard more of those events which are measured by time, than has ever been seen or heard by any man since the age of the patriarchs; he saw the same spot of earth, which at one period of his life was covered with wood and bushes, and the receptacle of beasts and birds of prey, afterwards become the seat of a city not only the first in wealth and arts in the new, but rivalling in both many of the first cities in the old world. He saw regular streets where he once pursued a hare: he saw churches rising upon morasses, where he had often heard the croaking of frogs; he saw wharves and warehouses, where he had often seen Indian savages draw fish from the river for their daily subsistence, and he saw ships of every size and use in those streams, where he had often seen nothing but Indian canoes; he saw a stately edifice filled with legislators, astonishing the world with their wisdom and virtue, on the same spot, probably, where he had seen an Indian council fire; he saw the first treaty ratified between the newly confederated powers of America and the ancient monarchy of France, with all the formalities of parchment and seals, near the spot where he once might have seen William Penn ratify his first and last treaty with the Indians, without the formality of pen, ink or paper; he saw all the intermediate stages through which a people pass, from the most simple to the highest degrees of civilization. He saw the beginning and end of the empire of Great Britain, in Pennsylvania. He had been the subject of seven successive crowned heads, and afterwards became a willing citizen of a republic; for he embraced the liberties and independence of America in his withered arms, and triumphed in the last years of his life in the freedom of his country.

It might have been said of him also, that he was in spirit and politics a real whig of the Revolution, and liked to get the King's proclamations and make them into kites for the use of his grand and great-grandchildren. The late Joseph Sansom, who used to often see him at his father's, described him to me as a little withered old man, leaning heavily upon his staff, whilst Mr. Sansom's father, to please the ancient man, searched, his clock-case for old tobacco pipes to serve him. When Dr. Franklin was asked in England to what age we lived in this country, he said he could not tell till Drinker died!

Alice- —a black woman

Was a slave, born in Philadelphia, of parents who came from Barbadoes, and lived in that city until she was ten years old, when her master removed her to Dunk's Ferry, in which neighbourhood she continued to the end of her days. She remembered the ground on which Philadelphia stands when it was a wilderness, and when the Indians (its chief inhabitants) hunted wild game in the woods, while the panther, the wolf, and the beast of the forests we