Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/116



HEN a stranger for the first time met Peter McCall, the strongest impression made upon him was that he confronted a man instinctively a gentleman, and this impression grew with each succeeding interview. A descendant of George McCall, a merchant in Philadelphia in the early colonial period who owned McCall's Manor at Manatawny, he had a thin, Celtic face, refined by long time and, perhaps, cross-breeding, with pronounced lips and chin. Slim, perhaps five feet eight inches in height, he possessed a certain power of oratorial speech and much latent combativeness. He had been mayor of the city. He had been a professor of law in the University of Pennsylvania. Often nominated for a judgeship in the court of common pleas by the minority party, he each time failed of election, but no man could have been better fitted for the office. When clients were about to leave his inner room after a closed interview, with the sweetest courtesy of manner he escorted them to the outer door. With timid visitors at his home, he broached one topic of conversation after another until he discovered the subject in which they were interested or informed, and then he sat and silently listened. Coming of a family of social importance, whose members had participated in the dancing assemblies from their beginning, having inherited what he once described to me as “a little patrimony,” holding a position at the bar, everywhere recognized as close to the top, he had nevertheless encountered some of the adverse currents of life. He married a Southern woman, a descendant of General Hugh Mercer who was killed at Princeton. She 106