Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/271

 mothers will tell their children, poets will sing the story, and historians will write in their pages, how the burghers fought and died upon the kopjes of South Africa to save their homes.

On the 19th of May, 1900, I was elected president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. This venerable institution is the strongest in the United States devoted to its line of investigation and possesses volumes and manuscripts worth two or three millions of dollars. The papers which tell the story of Pennsylvania are within its walls. I had a long line of distinguished predecessors—William Rawle, Peter S. Du Ponceau, Thomas Sergeant, Joseph R. Ingersoll, John William Wallace, Brinton Coxe and Charles J. Stillé.

In 1901 Judge Charles B. McMichael sat with me in the License Court. He was a cultivated person who read Latin books for entertainment and, like all the McMichaels, was handsome. We granted very few more licenses than we found already in existence. One outcome of the session was the printing, only thirty copies however, of a little volume of reports of the cases as they came along, which I wrote while in the court.

In curia currente calamo scribentur

Weber, an old German who, after leaving the saloon of Celia B. Gilbert, at 11, fell and fractured his skull, from the effects of which he died.

Noyes, Carter and Brownley, detectives of the law and Order Society, who ferret out speak easies and bawdy houses, and applicants for license—German, Italian, Irish and the like—innumerable.

“License they mean when they cry liberty”—Milton.

“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.”—Dr. Johnson. Rh