Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/54

 and could not be overcome by Cape Severo Vostochnoi or the Yang-tse-Kiang River. On one occasion, when there was an examination and none of the boys except myself appeared, I gave, before an audience, the bounds of each of the United States, named its capital, two principal towns and two principal rivers. I learned to cipher in Vogdes' Arithmetic as far as cube root. Among the brightest boys in the school were John H. Mullen, who afterward studied medicine, and Andrew J. Sullivan, a hunchback. Among the pupils about this period were some Indian boys and girls. A tribe came from Canada and encamped along the Pickering Creek in Schuylkill township, and there the boys, who were very skilful, shot with bows and arrows at a dime fixed in a pole, and the girls made very neat baskets. When the weather grew too cold for tent life they rented a house on Tunnel Hill, and both boys and girls came to school.

At ten years of age I went to school in the Presbyterian church, on the south side of the creek, to a Miss Agnes McClure, who afterward married a clerk named Hughes in the office of the iron company, and became the mother of Dr. William E. Hughes of Philadelphia, and to a Mrs. Wallace, and there made a beginning in the study of French.

When I was about four years of age the “Buckeye Blacksmith” came to the town. It had just been discovered that the sun could be made to paint portraits, and the common people, who could not afford to employ an artist with brush and canvas, might yet hope to have their features preserved for the enlightenment of posterity. Daguerre had added a new complication to life, if not a terror, and out of it has arisen the modern photograph and the possibility of all of the ugly pictures with which the newspaper destroys our ideas of art. The “Buckeye Blacksmith” was one of the most effective of stump orators. In a rough and homely fashion he blended wit and pathos. 46