Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/44

 but on the crest of the hill near the present depot of the Schuylkill Valley Railroad Company stood a tall, narrow stone which marked the site of the wigwam of “Old Skye,” the last of the Delaware Indians to live in the neighborhood.

The home discipline established by my father, a wise and kindly man, whom I revered, was most excellent. He never whipped me. When I stripped the bark from a cherry tree, very like George Washington of old, he gave me some tools and sent me out to restore it to its place. When I broke one of the stones of a wall with my hammer, I was kept busy for an hour or two trying to put it together. When my brother John and I disobediently remained away at our play until after night had fallen, and in great trepidation sought the house, we found the doors locked and the lights out. In other words, the treatment was of a kind to teach a child the law of cause and effect, and there was a continual effort to reach the processes of childish thought. When a circus or Signor Blitz, a noted conjurer and ventriloquist, with his manikin “Bobby,” came to the town, or a lecture was delivered by some long-haired wanderer from New England, in the squat brick building called the “Temperance Hall,” we were always taken. The former were delights, but many a time I was in misery trying to keep awake over the lecture. When Signor Blitz appeared, all around the low building gathered the town urchins trying to get a peep through the crevices of the wooden shutters, and the scene generally ended in my father, who was ever generous, making a bargain with the manager to let them in at wholesale rates. On one occasion we went to Ullman's Hotel and paid ten cents a piece to see a Chinaman, then on exhibition, as a rara avis.

There was not a novel in the house. The nearest thing to it was a copy of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which I devoured for the story, utterly regardless of the allegory. The Fables of Æsop I learned by heart. When I was about eight years of age a young woman, dressy and bright, whose 36