Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/532

 James at his plain stone farm-house, two miles from Schwenksville, a stout, well-kept Pennsylvania Dutchman, with keen eyes and bunches of rough side-whiskers, jovial and hospitable, he for an hour poured forth his store of genealogy and local lore. All that he could remember from the tales of the elders about the occupation by the army he gave me with the piquancy of the vernacular phrase and tone. When the fount was exhausted, I said to him: “Have you any old papers of any kind?” We sat on opposite sides of an ancient walnut table without cover. For full a minute he looked me shrewdly in the eyes, and then, going to a cherry corner cupboard which stood in the room, he took from it a home-made linen bag filled with old deeds. Without a word he laid it on the table. I shook out the papers, about thirty in number, and proceeded to examine them. They were the title papers of Pennypacker's Mills from the very beginning, and few of them had ever been recorded. There was the deed from William Penn with a good autograph and a fine impression of his seal on wax. Generally such seals are broken, but this was perfect. There were the deeds to and from Hans Joest Heijt, who built the house and the mill and later founded the settlements in the Shenandoah Valley and became, in Virginia annals, not only famous but a baron. There was a deed all in the handwriting of Francis Daniel Pastorius, the founder of Germantown, and three impressions of the seal he devised containing a representation of a sheep with the letters F. D. P. There was a deed from Hendrick Pannebecker with his autograph, and I then had nothing in his handwriting. The situation had become dramatic. Finally I slowly said: “Would you care to part with these papers?”

“Vat vould you gif for dem?”

“I will give you five dollars for them.”

“Very vell, you can chust take 'em along.”

I put the deeds back into the linen bag made a century and a half ago by Elizabeth Keyser, the wife of Peter 512