Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/43

 to come to Phœnixville and open a printing office in this house and loaned him money to assist. The first outcome of the office was an advertisement of the millinery establishment of a Mrs. Strembeck. He published a weekly newspaper called The Phœnixville Pioneer, far above the heads of the community, in which appeared many of his effusions and comments upon local events. Young, vigorous and full of vitality, he climbed out along the dam-breast in the midst of a freshet and plunged into the waters surging below. Somebody had discovered the uses of ether as an anæsthetic, and the subject was much discussed by my father and other physicians. Taylor determined to inhale the drug as an experiment. I well remember the excited way in which he flung himself around the sitting-room. He told a tale of adventure, very wonderful to me, of having been once robbed, tied to a tree with his hands behind him and abandoned, in California, and how he managed to twist through the cords, getting them in front where he could use his teeth. Here was a hero come to the very hearthstone, and the awe of the listening boy may be easily imagined. The earliest portrait of him extant, a drawing in black and white, in 1847, by P. Thramer, with a poem in autograph underneath, he gave to my father, as well as a daguerreotype taken by “the Buckeye Blacksmith.” I have likewise the only complete file of the Phœnixville Pioneer, a number of autograph poems and a series of his letters.

More vivid by far than that of Taylor is the mental image of the dog “Jerry,” a household pet of more than ordinary intelligence. He regularly went to the post-office for the mail. He carried a basket to the market and brought home the things bought. He would hunt a glove hidden in a closet in the house and never cease from his efforts until it was secured. When he died he was buried below a great rock in the field, and for long afterward there was many a pilgrimage to Jerry's grave. In the same field, Rh