Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/260

 Hall the judges put on the silk gowns which they have since worn when performing their duties.

In 1895 my uncle, Joseph R. Whitaker, died. He was a bachelor about seventy-one years of age, masterful but good-hearted, who had a great influence upon my fortunes. He left property of the value of perhaps a million dollars, which, on his death, he distributed among his nieces and nephews and he made me one of his executors. Amid the vicissitudes of my later life among politicians, the fact that I had my own resources on which to rely saved me from those intimations which are so often ruthlessly and recklessly made concerning those holding public office.

The same year I became one of the vice presidents of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the president of the Pennsylvania German Society and the vice president of the Colonial Society.

One of the brightest retorts (in baseball language, “right off the bat”) I have ever known occurred in the trial of a case before me about this time. The question was the right of an alleged political party to have a place on the printed ballot. John C. Bell, afterward Attorney General under Governor John K. Tener, represented the applicants, and James Gay Gordon, later a judge in No. 3 Court, represented the opponents. Bell's client, a noisy, blatant fellow, told how he and two or three others had met on a Broad Street corner and concluded to organize the new party. Bell, when he came to the argument, explained this rather dubious beginning by saying that it often happened in nature that important matters had an insignificant origin, that the acorn became the mighty oak and the Amazon River, a hundred and fifty miles wide at its mouth, started in a little rill in the Andes Mountains. “Yes,” said Gordon in reply, “but this party began in a big mouth and ends in a little rill.”

In December, 1896, Judge Hare resigned from the Bench after a service of forty-five years and the effect of his 246