Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/51

 from the bed, it would have meant much. These colors coiled up into serpents. How important is the soothing voice of a motherly woman! Aunt Ann, the wife of my uncle, James Pennypacker, herself a Pennypacker, and one of the sweetest-souled women who ever lived, gathered me into her arms, crooned over me with soft song, succeeded in putting me to sleep and perhaps saved me. When I was eight years of age my brother, John, died at the age of eleven. He was an intelligent boy who had read much and was doing mensuration and bookkeeping. The event had one permanent effect upon me. I had been in the habit of using profanity and then determined to cease. I grew accustomed to expressing feeling without expletives and have never since upon any occasion given utterance to them. About the same time, during a time of excitement over the temperance question, I signed perhaps twenty pledges, carried around by the children, never to use any intoxicating liquor. This, too, became a habit unbroken until I was thirty-five years of age, but which finally yielded to the dinner customs of the city.

While not robust, I must have been endowed with vitality, because energy was always exhibited, and the obstacles to which many children yielded were not sufficient to deter me from doing what I had undertaken. I planted the peas in the garden and my mother depended upon me to gather the pods. My father brought to me from my Grandfather Pennypacker a cabbage plant and I watered it every night. He brought me later four chickens and at the end of the second summer I had over two hundred, let no nest escape me, and gathered the eggs. I found my way to a seemingly inaccessible tree, which bore black cherries, by getting on to the rail of a pale fence, clambering into another tree, one of whose limbs crossed over from the tree I wanted to reach and then by following this natural bridge. Rh