Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/217

 very many and an event which happened September 3d nearly interrupted the current. In 1883 I bought for my mother, who had about a hundred thousand dollars, inherited from her father, Moore Hall, a property of 105 acres in Chester County, near Phœnixville. It is one of the famous colonial places of the state, having been owned by William Moore, a colonel in the French and Indian War and President Judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Chester County for forty years. He is buried under the front step of St. David's Church, at Radnor. I managed the property for my mother and each summer we spent three months there. After dark on the evening mentioned, I was driving toward home in an open wagon with two seats, on the rear of which sat James Sommers, a faithful and ugly old Irishman with a hare lip. From Nutt's road, another road runs at right angles, to the house. As we approached this sharp corner a wagon came rapidly up behind us, my horse made a sudden plunge around the corner and threw both James and myself out in the road. I lay with my feet caught and my head on the ground between the wheels of the wagon, but holding fast to the lines succeeded in stopping the horse with the hind wheel against my neck, while James, in distress, was crying out, “The Judge is kilt.”

The Press said, editorially, April 15, 1889, that an eminent criminal lawyer announced “that he had heard at least twenty members of the bar declare that the quickness with which Judge Pennypacker grasped the points of a case and the clearness of his charges had not been excelled in the Philadelphia Courts.”

Quay, pleased with his venture, wrote to me October 25th: “If I told you all the good things I heard said of you by Democrats and Republicans this week in Philadelphia you would blush to the point of apoplexy.”

George Tucker Bispham, whose book upon Equity is everywhere accepted as a text, said, in the nominating Rh