Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/111

 to the Delaware River and there crossed over to the south side of Chestnut and after hours reached Fifth, only to find that there the line had been broken up by the undisciplined crowd. Not to be balked, I fought my way with some of the more fortunate to the hall where the body lay in state, and so it happened that I saw Lincoln both upon the first and the last time that he came to the Pennsylvania State House.

In my early days, in every community existed what was called a literary society, composed of young men who there experienced themselves in the arts of composition, declamation and debate. With such facilities as they afforded, many a youth strengthened himself for the later and perhaps more serious combats of life. They seem now to have been abandoned and if so it is a distinctive loss. At home I had belonged to and been president of the Young Men's Literary Union. In the city a number of such organizations were doing their work. In 1864 I hunted up and joined the Bancroft Literary Society, named for the historian who had given it a set of his works. At this time, or very soon thereafter, I formed the acquaintance among its members of Frank K. Sheppard, a Democrat, on the editorial staff of the Ledger; Joel Cook, likewise connected as correspondent with the Ledger, who had written a book on the McClellan Campaign on the James, also a Democrat, who afterwards grew rich and became a Republican member of congress; W. A. Sliver, a long, white-haired declaimer, who afterward went on to the stage under the name of Marsden, married, and finally killed himself; Nathaniel K. Richardson, who had a great gift as an elocutionist; Jerome Carty, who came to the bar and whose career, like that of the swallow of the ancient Bede, came into the light of the hall for a while, but began in darkness and ended in darkness; John I. Rogers, related to my Irish friends on Tunnel Hill, who made money at the bar and as president of the Philadelphia Base Ball Club, and became a colonel on the staff of Governor Pattison; Chester N. Farr, a brainy fellow who became private Rh