Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/50

 a bag of walnuts which I was lugging up the steps from the garret to the loft. I learned to skate on a pair of skates which cost fifty cents at Samuel Moses' store, and made great progress forward and backward and in cutting rings on the ice by throwing one foot across the other. Thereupon a generous uncle, Joseph R. Whitaker, gave me a handsome and expensive pair of skates bought in Philadelphia, but the metal was soft. I could not discard them, and I never skated so well afterward. We made sleds with the staves of rejected barrels, and when a painted sled came from the city with iron on the runners, it was a wonder and I was envied by all of the boys. In the summer we went to the “Gut,” which ran between an island in the French Creek and the main land, to swim. It was the fashion to go barefoot, and the boy who did not was rather despised as a weakling. I hid my shoes and stockings behind an oak tree and followed the flock. Along the bank of the creek it went well enough with a little care, but when we crossed a field of wheat stubble, there was a boy in trouble. On an occasion when playing “tickly benders” on the thin ice of the canal, the ice gave way and I fell into the water and was wetted from head to foot. Scrambling out, I went to the furnaces of the Chester County Iron Works, stripped off my clothes and danced about naked in front of a furnace until they were dried. At home the mishap was not reported.

When very young I was frequently ill and had sores around my mouth. I was dosed with flowers of sulphur mixed in molasses, with Husband's sulphate of magnesia, recommended as tasteless, with jalap mixed in currant jelly to make it palatable, and occasionally with castor oil. With the measles I had a high fever and in one night was bled three times, the cicatrices remaining upon my arms.

Common sense is as important a quality in nursing as in all the other affairs of life. If some one of my attendants had been wise enough to remove the parti-colored 42