and aristocracy of the rocky old port.  The antiquarian who has seen these old temples and asks for others on the New England coast will turn with scarcely less interest to St. John’s, Portsmouth; the forsaken Trinity Church, Wickford, Rhode Island, built in 1706; or Trinity, Newport, where Bishop Berkeley used to preach.  In Newport, indeed, one may also speculate beneath the Old Mill on the fanciful theory that the curious little structure was a baptistery long before the days of Columbus—­the most ancient Christian temple on this side the sea.

It is not uncommon to find comparatively new American churches to which their surroundings or their sober material or their quiet architecture have given a somewhat exaggerated appearance of age.  Such is the case with the curious row of three churches—­the North and Centre Congregational and Trinity Episcopalstanding side by side on the New Haven green in a fashion unknown elsewhere in our own country.  Any one of these three churches looks quite as old as that shapely memorial of pre-Revolutionary days, St. Paul’s Chapel, New York, built in 1766 in the prevailing fashion of the London churches.  As with St. Paul’s, there was also no marked appearance of antiquity in the North Dutch Church, New York, removed in recent years.  The poor old Middle Dutch Church in the same city, with its ignoble modern additions and its swarm of busy tenants, would have looked old if it could have done so, but for modern New Yorkers it has no more venerable memory, in its disfigurement and disguise, than that 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.