Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/325

 him. As had been expected, the newspapers in cartoons and editorials told the people that I was afraid to ride a horse. I met this proposition in my own way. At the inauguration of Roosevelt, I rode down Pennsylvania Avenue, in command of a division of ten thousand men from different states, before a crowd of two hundred thousand people, and all over the country it was learned that the journals had been scattering false reports. They kept me, however, all the while playing a game in which the effort was to thwart the ill effects of misrepresentation upon the public work. To me personally it was often an interesting amusement. One day I sat on my porch with a reporter and he asked:

“Does not this continual objurgation disturb you?”

As it chanced there was a slight rumbling in the west and I replied:

“I have often sat upon this porch when the clouds gathered out yonder, and presently the lightnings flashed and the thunders rattled until in the uproar my voice could not be heard. Where those storms have gone no man knows, and here I am sitting on this porch still,” and he was man enough to print the illustration.

On the way home from Somerset, a town among the mountains, where the first Bible was printed west of the Alleghenies, where George F. Baer, the wonderfully able president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company, was born, and which has the most elevated court house in the state, Mrs. Pennypacker and I were taken in charge by Colonel Samuel Moody, a high official of the Pennsylvania Railroad at Pittsburgh. He was very droll, agreeable and entertaining. His influence with his road was great and he was ready to show it to us. Somerset was the terminus of a little single-track railroad which branched off from the main line. He had a car ready at Somerset, but, behold! it had not been dusted for a month. He kept us outside on some pretext while he swore at the man in Rh