Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/215

 and judges are all more or less sympathetic and after all of the sifting process the residuum is unlikely to include much innocence.

Fell kindly exchanged courts with me. I began in the common pleas, and one of my earliest cases was an involved land damage suit against the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company for land taken for track purposes in Manayunk, in which so good a lawyer as William White Wiltbank was counsel. In one of my early cases I rather astonished the lawyers present by entering a non-suit in a case represented by such eminent counsel as John C. Bullitt, who himself seldom came into court.

I was qualified as a judge January 12, 1889, and, therefore, the people had ten months in which to grow accustomed to seeing me on the bench before the election in November. At that time Edwin H. Fitler was mayor of the city, and under the Bullitt bill had great power.

“You had better call on him,” said Quay to me. “Do you know him?”

“I never met him in my life.”

Quay waited an instant, smiled and turned to me with only these words:

“His head is quite large.”

This is a characteristic illustration of the ways of the Senator. He did not read to me a dissertation upon the effect of flattery upon some classes of minds. He simply gave me a hint. An illustration of another sort is contained in a letter about a president written to William Linn, May 7, 1892:

“In reply to your inquiry as to whether or not the Republican State League should endorse Harrison, I would say ‘No’.”

At the time of the Bregy appointment McManes had been decided in his opposition to me because of my participation in independent movements and my course in the board of education. But he was a warm friend of Simon Rh