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I scarcely know how Strickland began his early professional career. 

 He drew the plans for the first Masonic hall that stood in Chesnut 

 street, before he was of age; and some years afterwards devised a 

 cunning little specimen of bijou architecture for the Swedenborgian 

 Church. But there was very little for an architect or an engineer to 

 do in Philadelphia, or indeed anywhere else about the country, when 

 he left his master's studio. His father had died ; and he was fairly 

 adrift upon the world. 



He set himself to work as a sort of artist in general; drew patterns 

 for plasterers and carpenters, and models for machinists and paten- 

 tees, aquatinted fanciful likenesses of victorious commodores and 

 other notorieties for the shop windows, painted scenes for the theatres, 

 (excellent ones they were,) now and then tried his hand at a street 

 view in oil, (I have one of these, a noble perspective of old Christ 

 Church and Second street: he sold it for two hams, ten dollars, and 

 a box of segars, and bought it back ten years afterwards for three 

 hundred dollars,) levelled a house plot, or computed a water power, or 

 surveyed a field or a farm when the lines were too complex for the 

 every day workers in mensuration ; and then or in the mean while, 

 artist like, married a wife, giving his only five dollar bill to the 

 clergyman. 



He was trying on his uniform jacket as a volunteer, the night be- 

 fore he was to set out for camp: it was in the fall of 1814, and all 

 who had nothing else to do, and a good many besides, were marching 

 off to keep away the British ; when an accident brought him into 

 more public view. 



The older part of the town had turned out to make fortifications, 

 those stranse lookinjr earth-works that manv of us remember at all 

 the road crossings, and some of which promise to remain there like 

 Indian mounds to puzzle the coming generation of antiquaries. Dr. 

 Patterson had been elected one of our virtuoso engineers, and he be- 

 thought him of Strickland as another. Of course there was no diffi- 

 culty in getting his commission from the committee of safety : old 

 general Bloomfield added a furlough to relieve him from camp duty: 

 and before six o'clock the next morning Strickland had mounted the 

 blue cockade, and was teaching all sorts of patriotic people to toss 

 sods to the music of a fife. 



I have heard him refer much of his professional success to this tri- 

 vial incident. It happened that some of our influential citizens were 

 struck by the efficiency he manifested in his extempore office. He 

 thought they over-valued it; though he complained for a while that, 



