he old city. They seldom took the general cut
through Maiden and Laurel Streets to Second, but kept down the river
bank by Beach Street, to see the ship-yards and hear the pounding of
rivets and the merry adzes ringing, and see youngsters and old women
gathering chips, while the sails on the broad river came up on wind and
tide as if to shatter the pier-heads ere they bounded off.

In the afternoons Duff Salter sometimes called on Rev. Silas Van de
Lear, who had great expectations that Duff would build them a
much-required new church, with the highest spire in Kensington.

"Here, Brother Salter, is an historic spot," wrote the good old man. "I
shouldn't object to a spire on my church, with the figure of William
Penn on the summit. Friend William and his sons always did well by our
sect."

"Is it an established fact that he treated with the Indians in
Kensington?" asked Duff Salter, on his ivory tablets.

"Indisputable! Friend Penn took Thomas Fairman's house at
Shackamaxon--otherwise Eel-Hole--and in this pleasant springtime, April
4, 1683, he met King Tammany under the forest elm, with the savage
people in half-moon circles, looking at the healthy-fed and
business-like Quaker. There Tammany and his Indian allies surrendered
all the land between the Pennypack and Neshaminy."

"A Tammany haul!" interrupted young Calvin Van de Lear, rather
idiotically. "What did the shrewd William give?"

"Guns, scissors, knives, tongs, hoes, and Indian money, and
gew-gaws--not much. Philadelphia had no foundation then, and Shackamaxon
was an established place. We are the Knickerbockers here in
Kensington."

"An honest Quaker would not build a spire," wrote Duff Salter, with a
grim smile.

Duff Salter was well known to the gossips of Kensington as a fabulously
rich man, who had spent his youth partly in this district, and was of
Kensington parentage, but had roved away to Mexico as a sailor boy, or
clerk, or passenger, and refusing to return, had become a mule-driver in
the mines of cinnabar, and there had remained for years in nearly
heathen solitude, until once he arrived overland in Arkansas with a
train from Chihuahua, the whole of it, as was said, laden with silver
treasure, and his own property. He had been disappointed in love, and
had no one to leave his riches to. This was the story told by Reverend
Silas Van de Lear.

The people of Kensington were less concerned with the truth of this tale
than with the future intent