Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/42

 the room with the paper cap for the “fool” who failed in his lesson, and the roof of the spring-house down which we slid at recess. A stream of water then ran, from “Frog Hollow,” by the spring-house, through a green meadow to the French Creek. All are long gone and Starr Street is filled in over them. At this time my head was covered with light curls twisted into shape over her finger each morning by “Aunt Sallie,” an invalid sister of my mother. When they were cut away two were preserved. My earliest playmate was a boy of my age named Loved Hathaway, a son of the tenant in the house where the accident to my brother, John, occurred. Ere long the Hathaways moved to the far West. At their sale my playmate's grandmother, “Granny Blake,” gave me a large hammer which I have used through my whole life and remains my oldest possession.

One of my very early recollections pictures to me Bayard Taylor. To me he was not a poet, but a companion. My father owned a flat-bottomed boat on the French Creek, and often Taylor, taking me with him, would row in it up the creek for perhaps a mile beneath the willows which grew along the banks. From these willows I soon learned to make whistles, when the sap was running. Taylor had just returned from Europe and wanting something to do thought of starting a newspaper. My father had another and much larger stone tenant house at the extreme east end of his tract near Main Street and almost upon the site where Moses Coates, the first settler in the town, had lived in his time. In it were a family named Allen, fallen scions of the family of the Colonial Chief Justice William Allen, powerful in their day but who lost their hold at the time of the Revolution. With them was a very aged relative, Elizabeth Oakman, a young woman at the period of that war, who gave to my father the key of the trunk Nathaniel Allen brought from Europe, and made for him with finest needlework a shirt which remains to represent the art of the women of the colonies. My father persuaded Taylor 34