Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/36

 merit of the American cause, in which tradition I have little faith, but at all events he became weary of the service. While the army was on its way from the Head of Elk to Philadelphia in the campaign of 1777, he mounted his horse and rode away. There was a pursuit and shots were fired, but he escaped unhurt and thereafter made his home in a hilly region in the northern part of Chester County. He had a small farm with a log house upon it, but the ground was poor and stony, and the crops, wrested from an unwilling soil, were scant. He cut wood for the neighboring furnaces, but he had not been trained to this kind of labor and almost any other wood-chopper could excel him. He married Sarah Updegrove and had a family of thirteen children. It was a life of hardship in which there was a continual struggle to get enough to eat. He did not spare the rod. He was earnest in prayer and had a gift in that direction. Despite his poverty and his failures, he was intensely proud and was able to assert and even to maintain a certain sense of superiority in the rural neighborhood in which he lived. It is manifest that he had a power of will which was not to be over-ridden by conventions or to be suppressed by adverse circumstances. He was about five feet eight inches in height, his hair inclined to curl, he had a red birthmark upon one cheek and a readiness of speech. Strange as it seems, his barren and unfruitful life was the ground from which were raised the fortunes of a family. His wife, Sarah, a worthy woman with a tender heart, was the daughter of Jacob, granddaughter of Isaac and great-granddaughter of Abraham Op den Graeff, who came to Germantown in 1683. He signed the protest against slavery in 1688 and is immortahzed by Whittier in his poem, The Pennsylvania Pilgrim. He was burgess of Germantown and a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly. His grandfather, Herman Op den Graeff, was a delegate to the Mennonite Convention which met in Dordrecht in 1632 and there signed the Confession of Faith which 28