Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/55

 Any crowd would desert Webster or Seward to hear him, and he took part in all of the political campaigns upon the side of the Whigs. Between times he made daguerreotypes. My brother, John, and myself had “our likenesses taken” by him and the picture was reproduced over the country in 1903. His name was J. W. Baer and his memoirs have been printed. On the north side of a street, running from the Fountain Inn, the furthest inland point reached by the British army during the Revolution, to Gordon's Ford, where Cornwallis crossed the Schuylkill on the way to Philadelphia in 1777, stood and stands the Mansion House, a village tavern. The hostler was “Nigger Hen,” a mulatto, with whom, as boys, we played as with the rest. The tavern was owned by a man of Irish descent named Major McVeagh. He was illiterate but shrewd, and as a Democrat took his part in the affairs of the town. One of his near relatives, Peter Henry, drove a cart. His wife was a most worthy woman, named Lincoln, one of the family from which Abraham Lincoln was descended. He had three sons, all of whom were gifted with native intelligence, and he sought to give them names which would reflect importance—Nathan T., Isaac Wayne, named for the son of the General when he was running for the governorship, and Benjamin Franklin. The villagers always upheld that Nathan was the ablest of the family, but being the oldest he inherited the tavern and wasted his energies over and inside the bar. Wayne later became Attorney General of the United States in the Cabinet of Garfield, and Franklin, Secretary of the Treasury of the United States in the Cabinet of Taft. Wayne never was a favorite. He had the reputation as a boy of getting others into scrapes and keeping out of them himself. He had a certain volatility and instability of character, combined with acuteness which qualified the value of an otherwise important career. He inherited with his Irish blood not the gifts of logic or constructive capacity, but a caustic quickness and oratorical Rh