Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/66

 terms. A few doors away, on our side of the street, lived a widow named Thomson, who had a parrot and to whom William B. Reed was then paying devoted attention. Edwin Greble had a marble yard to the eastward of Eighteenth Street and much of that square was without buildings. On the north side a baker named Wernwag, a nephew of the famous bridge builder, had his shop.

Madame Rush, the leader of Philadelphia society, distantly related to us through the Richardsons, old, large and gross in appearance, daily waddled down Chestnut Street in the afternoon for a walk. She was ever the subject of gossip, of attention and of envy.

I was sent to the Northwest Grammar School, then under charge of Aaron B. Ivins, as principal, who, later, for many years was at the head of the Friends' Central School at Fifteenth and Race streets, and every morning Snyder B. Simes, a boy whose father had a drug store at Eighteenth and Market streets, and who for many late years has been rector of Gloria Dei or Old Swedes' Church, and myself trudged together to school with our leather satchels swung over our backs. Aaron Ivins—nobody ever thought of calling him Mr., as he was a Quaker—was a stout man with a twist to his mouth on one side who enforced a rigid discipline with an “Hour Line” of delinquents compelled to stand in a row for that length of time after school, and sometimes also with a window bar. He had an abnormal command of figures. He would set down on the blackboard, say, 9347698 and multiply it mentally by 6987 without apparently the least effort, much to the wonderment of all who saw him. It was his pride that he sent more boys to the high school every year than any other principal in the city and that no one of them had ever been rejected. The school was divided into five divisions of two classes each. Every three months there were written examinations. I was admitted into the first class of the fifth or lowest division, but was almost at once advanced to the second 58