Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/167

 County and going from there to Philadelphia about 1790, built a brewery, made a fortune and founded a family. Nothing of his antecedents is known, but both physical and mental traits in his descendants suggest a Hebrew lineage. Dr. Pepper was the real founder of the present great fortunes of the University, and under his management it advanced with huge strides. Charles C. Harrison, short, stout, with dark eyes, succeeded him and has devoted the efforts of a lifetime to the benefit of the institution. He is more direct in his methods, stronger in character and intelligence and possesses a larger fortune which, with continuous generosity, he devotes to the same object. I know no other instance of such self-sacrifice for the sake of general good. Under his direction the institution has made still greater progress in all ways, and has taken again its former place in the foremost rank of American universities.

Among the trustees those in my time who have taken the most active interest in the work have been Dr. S. Weir Mitchell; Samuel Dickson, chancellor of the Law Association; Joseph S. Harris, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway; Joseph G. Rosengarten; Samuel F. Houston and J. Levering Jones.

Dr. S. Weir Mitchell has won success in medicine in the treatment of nervous diseases and in literature in the production of novels. Among American historical novels Hugh Wynne is probably unexcelled. A tall, gaunt and homely man with a thin beard and mustache, he is autocratic, assertive and full of egotism, but, nevertheless, companionable and entertaining. He wrote to me a long autograph letter, which I still have, in a scrawling hand, about the construction of Hugh Wynne, in which he says the old narrow-minded Quaker father was an attempt to delineate the traits of a Presbyterian he had known. Once when he had completed an address at the Academy of Music he brought and gave to me the proof with his Rh