Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/49

 prothonotary's offices in the wings. A fine easy double staircase leads to the great room over the hall for the courts. This room is now used as a temporary place of worship by the English Presbyterians, until their own meeting house is finished, which is of brick and in great forwardness. From each corner of this room a door opens into the register office, the library and two jury rooms.

There is as yet no other place of publick worship in Harrisburgh, except an old wooden house used as such, by a congregation of German Lutherans.

{28, i.e., 25} This town which is now the capital of Dauphin county was laid out twenty-three years ago by the late proprietor, Mr. Harris, whose father is buried near the bank of the river, opposite the stone house he lived in, under a large old tree, which, once during his life, concealed and saved him from some Indians, by whom he was pursued.

I observed in the office of a Mr. Downie, a magistrate, a newly invented patent stove, made of sheet iron, consisting of two horizontal parallel cylinders, about a foot apart, one over the other and communicating by a pipe; the upper one is heated by the smoke from the lower, which contains the fuel. Mr. Downie informed me that it saved much fuel. The patentee lives here.

On returning to my inn, I found there a Mr. W. P, of Pittsburgh, just arrived. In the course of the evening he gave me much good information of the western country, accompanied by a friendly invitation to call on him in Pittsburgh, should I be detained there until his return from Philadelphia, where he was now going. He had formerly lived in Harrisburgh for some years after his arrival from Ireland, his native country. The joyful eagerness with which numbers of his old acquaintance flocked to Bennet's to visit him, evinced his having been much esteemed and respected.