Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/69

 poems written and editorial regrets. Dr. Clark preached a sermon in the Baptist Church, called The Tabernacle, on Chestnut Street west of Eighteenth, and Dr. Roach another in St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church, upon the untoward event. Dr. Hartshorne delivered a memorial address to the classes, in which he said: “To this school especially he gave all his great mental energies with the pride of a founder, which, in a certain sense, as it now stands, he was; it seems to us now like an edifice whose foremost column has fallen down or a tree whose topmost bough is broken off.” There were sales of his interest in the college, which soon afterward became blended with the Pennsylvania College of Medicine and later with the Jefferson Medical College; of his house in Phœnixville to John Vanderslice for one-half of its value; of the house on Chestnut Street and of my mother's farm in Chester County, and when they were all over, she had just seven thousand dollars upon which to depend. She had four children, of whom I was the oldest, and my brother, James, had been born only in December. She had character, met the situation with courage and fortitude, took her family to the home of her father at Mont Clare and there kept house for him.

The house, capacious and impressive, built of stone, plastered outside, with a porch in front, approached by a flight of marble steps and another in the rear, with massive doors and high ceilings, a large and unusual parlor, partly separated by Doric columns, and a wide hall running from porch to porch, stood on a crest sloping toward the Schuylkill. It had, however, a basement kitchen and dining-room, and perhaps from this cause my mother became a prey to rheumatism, suffering with it for thirty years. With the death of my father came to me an abrupt change not only in the manner of life but in those influences which affect the currents of thought. Up to that time my life had been that of a Pennypacker and the career which had been proposed for me, and Rh