Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/45

 name perhaps I never knew, came to the house. She was a granddaughter of Henry Rhoades, an old Mennonite, who had a farm adjoining. He was a stern man; he had the reputation of being a hard man. When his child died, he said in grief that he would rather have lost the best cow on his place. My recollections of him are all kindly. When I caught a partridge once he gave me a peck of oats to feed it and refused my money. The first time that I ate preserved quinces, they came from him as a present. His granddaughter ran away and became a circus actress. There was no sense that such conduct was disgraceful but a feeling that it was wicked. She did not dare to go home, and she left a box of things which was put into our garret to be kept for her. Rummaging in the box, I found a paper covered copy of Lewis Arundel. The book opened out vistas before me, and today I could repeat the story of the proud young man who went as a tutor, fought the poachers and remained to marry. In a Geography of the World I found detailed an adventure of Audubon in the wilds of the West; in a Universal History there was a description of the Haschischins (assassins) of India; in Sartain's Magazine I found an Indian story called “Hard Scrabble;” in the Whig Review, beside the biographies of the politicians of the day and the poems of Poe, there was told of “Jack Long, or Lynch Law and Vengeance,” and along with these I satisfied my craving for romantic narrative by reading of John Smith, Hernan Cortes, Henry Hudson, Putnam's Ride at Horseneck, Marion and Sergeant Champ. Somewhere I found a copy of Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods which I still regard as the most meritorious of the tales of Indian warfare. Nothing in the shape of literature came amiss and before I was eleven I had read an elaborate Natural History, Whitaker on Arianism, Dick's Sidereal Heavens and Guizot's Washington.

The games I played were tag, hop-scotch, ball, marbles—in “fun,” in “earnest” which meant “for keeps,” and Rh