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The Treaty House was a fine, old-fashioned brick, with a long saloon or
double parlor containing many curiosities, such as pieces of old ships
of war, weapons used in Polynesia and brought home by old sea captains,
the jaws of whales and narwhals, figure-heads from perished vessels,
harpoons, and points of various naval actions. In those days, before
manufactures had extended up all the water streets, and when domestic
war had not been known for a whole generation, the little low marble
monument on the site of William Penn's treaty with the Indians attracted
hundreds of strangers, who moistened their throats and cooled their
foreheads in the great bar parlor of the Treaty House. It was still a
secluded spot, shady and dewy with venerable trees, and the moisture
they gave the old brown and black bricks in the contiguous houses, some
of them still stylish, and all their windows topped with marble or
sandstone, gray with the superincumbent weight of time or neglect. Large
rear additions and sunless sideyards carried out the idea of a former
gentry. Some buttonwood trees, now thinning out with annual age,
conveyed by their speckled trunks the notion of a changing social
standard, white and brown, native and foreign, while the lines of maples
stood on blackened boles like old retired seamen, bronzed in many
voyages and planted home forever.
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