The Author
Narrates That She And A Young Companion, In Their Strolls To The
Suburbs, Where They Went To Visit The Pennsylvania Hospital (Eighth And
Pine Streets, Now In The Heart Of The City), Were Timid Because Obliged
To Pass The Place Where The "French Neutrals" Were Located.
These people, because they were foreigners, and there was some mystery
about them which the girls did not then
Understand, inspired them with
fear; though Philadelphia residents of that time testify that the
homeless and destitute strangers were in reality a very simple and
inoffensive company, when, "friendless, homeless, hopeless, they
wandered from city to city." Through the influence of Anthony Benezet, a
member of the Society of Friends, they were provided with homes on Pine
Street above Sixth, where the two little wooden houses still stand; one,
when we last saw it, being painted blue.
What a picturesque company of adventurers were those French noblemen,
who, turning their backs upon the luxuries and fascinations of court
life, sailed away to this wild and distant land, where, in the pursuit
of gain, fame, or merely adventure, they were to suffer absolute
privation and hardship; consorting with savages in place of the plumed
and pampered denizens of palaces.
After a probably tempestuous voyage across the bleak Atlantic, and a
merciless buffeting from Fundy in the spring of 1604, the prospective
Governor of the great territory known as Acadia was sailing along this
coast, which presents such a forbidding aspect from the Bay, making his
first haven May 16.
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