Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/25

 flowers. Two large box bushes grew in the front yard. In the back yard were a burning bush and a fringe tree. There was a meadow in front of the house stretching to the Pickering, and the outlook was to the Valley Hills. There was a parlor, a spare room with high-post bedstead, stately and chill. Water was brought in pipes to the house from a distant spring and ran out of the nozzle of a pipe into a trough continuously, which was a great wonder to me who had seen nothing like it anywhere else, but the water had to be carried up a long flight of stone steps to the kitchen. The only indication of art in the house were profiles cut at Peale's Museum, and, in fact, the desire to have the features of the face preserved was regarded as a vanity to be condemned. There was no music, cards were an iniquity and there were no devices for other games. The mental attitude was stiff and cheerless, but rugged and sincere. To be honest and to tell the truth were the virtues inculcated. The letters written were in the main didactic and religious, and they tell much about going to meeting and hearing sermons. The welfare of the soul was a continual subject of contemplation. There was no liquor of any kind used during the lives of my great-grandfather, grandfather and father save that the housewife would have a cut-glass bottle filled with lavender brandy put away on the upper shelf of the closet in the spare room, to be ready in cases of emergency.

My grandfather, like his father, was a member of the Mennonite meeting at Phœnixville, and he paid the expense of having the Dordrecht Confession of Faith of 1632 reprinted at West Chester. My grandmother was fond of reading Pollok's Course of Time. My grandfather, in his marriage, doubtless without intending any such result, brought about a great change in the race. He courted Sarah Anderson, born February 10, 1784, whose parents lived upon the opposite side of the Pickering Creek. He gave to her as “a token of my esteem” a little porcelain box with a mirror Rh