Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/49

 Flat white mint sticks, flat white cream sticks, rock candy or crystallized sugar around a thread, and round sticks of lemon and of sassafras in red and white, and sour balls could be bought and were called candy, but chocolate had not yet appeared. Occasionally, in summer, a man named Kirchner who lived miles away in Vincent, would come in a wagon ringing a bell, and offering a luxury called ice cream, always flavored with vanilla. On the crest of Tunnel Hill, so called because through it the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company had constructed a long tunnel, in an adapted barn, lived an old woman named “Granny Stevens,” who beguiled the children inside by displaying, in the window, glass jars, half a dozen in number, containing attractively colored sticks of candy. It was she who gave us our first knowledge of cocoanut, cut into small strips and sweetened with molasses, an amazing delicacy. When we strayed into the shop of another woman named Holt, she fiercely denounced our ingratitude. The money ordinarily circulated consisted of copper pennies, “fips” (five-penny bits), “levies” (eleven-penny bits), quarters and dollars, the last four being Spanish or Mexican currency, generally worn to a smooth surface.

Very early in life I began to wander. In Rhoades' woods along the French Creek could be found in the spring the hepatica, the anemone, the spring beauty, the saxifrage, the American spice wood, the sassafras and the slippery elm. At Black Rock, a bluff along the Schuylkill, more than a mile away, grew the columbine. Alone I strayed through the woods, getting a quiet and unanalyzed enjoyment from the beauties of form and color, while learning to seek the taste of the spice and the sassafras and to avoid that of the smartweed and the Indian turnip. In the fall, rising at daybreak, I always gathered, hulled, dried and put away in the loft a store of walnuts and such butternuts and shellbarks as could be secured. When my younger brother, Henry C., was three years old and I was seven, he had a dangerous attack of fever and I did harm by dropping Rh