Page:Life of Isaiah V Williamson.djvu/22

8 matter how humble; and it was a healthy atmosphere for a boy to grow up in that large family of eight children, making a little world of itself in the farmhouse, with its dairy and barns, smokehouse and toolhouse, cattle, and chores for the six boys and two girls to do. The schoolwork, too, had to go on in the wintertime. The long evenings for lessons and talk around roaring fires of wood-logs burning in the great fireplace, near the old clock which Grandfather Peter brought from England, sixty-odd years before, and their father, Mahlon, recounting often, doubtless, the events of those Revolutionary days, when the British came up the Delaware and fired a cannon at their grandfather's house, at Penn Manor ; and Isaiah's father was a baby in that old cradle, in yon corner, when a cannon ball struck the doorstep and bounced over the cradle without hitting anything—and there that same cannon ball was lying in their sight, on the strong corner shelf of their home room. That cannon ball is missing today, but the old