Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/108

 Reed, smooth-faced and intellectual, had been district attorney and Minister to China; an old-line Whig, become a Democrat at the most inopportune time. With a lack of financial judgment, which has characterized the whole family from the time of its origin, he deserves appreciation for his literary attainments and for the fact that we owe to him the earliest of the real biographies of the Revolution. He lost his practice, his money and his social position, and, drifting to New York, died in poverty as a writer on the New York World. Ingersoll, a tall, slim figure, with dark eyes and a long neck, wore a stock and a collar five or six inches wide. His manner was courtly, but ever suggested idiosyncracy. While crossing the ocean some years later, he died and was buried at sea. Time and again from my room on Chestnut Street I watched a psychological phenomenon characteristic of the time and illustrating the prevailing temper. The billboards at the newspaper offices announced a defeat or check which had happened to one of our armies and the hurrying newsboys cried aloud the disheartening event. Instantaneously almost, an angry crowd gathered. With a common impulse, and with stones, bits of iron or whatever could be grasped, broke in the doors and windows and destroyed the property of The Age.

One of the features of the time was the provost guards who tramped the town, and I have seen them firing upon a fugitive at the corner of Sixth and Chestnut streets in the very heart of the city. Courtland Saunders, my old schoolmate in West Philadelphia, who went out as a captain in the Corn Exchange Regiment, met his death within a very few days at Shepherdstown. Another playmate of my boyhood, J. Henry Workman, with whom I have maintained a friendship all through life, joined the cavalry regiment known as Rush's Lancers, and before they left for the front I saw him a number of times in camp in the northern part of the city. While away he wrote me many letters of army life which I still preserve. He became a captain, but had a 98