Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/40

 out of the reach of me as a child, and always a subject of mystery. The kitchen had a large stone sink and from it ran, the whole length of the yard, a drain of carved stone which, covered over with the detritus of time and bad housekeeping, had, like an archæological discovery, been found a few years before. On the second story over the dining-room was the large room in which I was born, and to the eastward was “the spare-room” and five others. The garret contained six chambers. From one small room a flight of open steps ran up to a loft and a wooden railing enclosed a flat roof. Running the whole front of the house was a porch of hewn and huge stones, perhaps eight feet long, three feet wide and eight inches thick. The ground from the crest down to the creek was terraced after the manner of the vineyards along the Rhine by a succession of five walls. From a point across the drive in front of the house a long flight of stone steps ran all of the way down to the creek. I never saw anywhere else so much wall and stone work. It had been the intention of Wernwag to run an iron railing along the tops of these walls, but his resources were exhausted before this was accomplished and the walls remained unprotected. One of the amusements of the children was to banter each other to jump from one wall to the other above the flight of descending steps, where to have fallen would have meant destruction, and every once in a while one of them fell from a wall into the garden below, perhaps twenty feet. Before Wernwag was able to complete his designs the War of 1812 threw the business of the country into confusion and his efforts in connection with the making of iron ended in failure. He went to Harper's Ferry in Virginia where the Duke of Saxe-Weimar found him about 1830, and where he died in poverty. There are still some traces of him around Phœnixville. At Moore Hall my brother, Henry C., has his clock. At Pennypacker's Mills I have his hickory chair. The stone bridge built by him over 32