_The Port of Philadelphia_ The day before Christmas, the warden of the port of Philadelphia, standing glass in hand on one of the wharves, noticed a strange vessel slowly coming up the bay.

This in itself was not an unusual sight.
Many vessels during the course of a year arrived at, or departed from, the chief city of the American continent.

Not so many small traders or coasting-vessels or ponderous East Indiamen, perhaps, as in the busy times of peace before the war began; but their place was taken by privateers and their prizes, or a ship from France, bringing large consignments of war material from the famous house of Rodrigo Hortalez & Co., of which the versatile and ingenuous [Transcriber's note: ingenious ?] M.de Beaumarchais was the _deus ex machina_; and once in a while one of the few ships of war of the Continental navy, or some of the galleys or gunboats of Commodore Hazelwood's Pennsylvania State defence fleet.

But the approaching ship was evidently neither a privateer nor a vessel of war, neither did she present the appearance of a peaceful merchantman.

There was something curious and noteworthy in her aspect which excited the attention of the port warden, and then of the loungers along Front Street and the wharves, and speedily communicated itself to the citizens of the town, so that they began to hasten down to the river, in the cold of the late afternoon.