furnished by its use, for a time, as the city
post-office.

[Illustration: OLD SWEDES' CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA.]

New York is poor in old buildings, and especially poor in old churches.
Besides St. Paul's, the comparatively modern St. John's Chapel and the
John Street Methodist Church, it really has nothing to show to the
tourist in search of ancient places of worship. The vicinity can boast a
few colonial temples--the quaint old Dutch church at Tarrytown, dear to
the readers of Irving; the Tennent Church on the battle-ground of
Monmouth, New Jersey, with its blood-stains of wounded British soldiers;
and a charmingly plain little Friends' meeting-house, no bigger than a
small parlor, near Squan, New Jersey, being the most strikingly
attractive. In Newark one notes the deep-set windows and solid stone
walls of the old First Presbyterian Church, and the quiet plainness of
Trinity Episcopal Church, which looks like Boston's King's Chapel, with
the addition of a white wooden spire.

Philadelphia is richer than any other American city in buildings of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the older streets it is a
frequent sight to see quaint little houses of imported English brick
modestly laid in alternate red and black, curiously like the latest
modern fashion. The ample room for growth possessed by this
widespreading city has saved many an ancient house for present use as
dwelling or store. One is not surprised, therefore, to find on the old
streets near the Delaware three churches of weather-stained brick which
seem trying to make the piety of an elder age useful to the worshippers
of to-day. All three of these churches--Gloria Dei, Christ and St.
Peter's--now have their chief work among the poor people whom one always
finds in a business quarter near the river-front, but each attracts, by
its old-time associations and its modern missionary spirit, a goodly
circle of attendants from the western parts of the city. Gloria Dei
Church, the oldest of the three, was built in 1700 by Swedish Lutherans
on the spot where the Swedish predecessors of the Friends had located
their fortified log church twenty-three years earlier. Its bell and
communion-service and some of its ornamental woodwork were presented by
the king of Sweden. It is surrounded by the usual graveyard, in which
lies Alexander Wilson, the lover and biographer of birds, who asked to
be buried here, in a "silent, shady place, where the birds will be apt
to co