Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/73

 enabled her to reach the bell. She had various devices to produce the rappings. She had a supply of tinder under the carpet of the stairway ready to set the mansion on fire, if successful with the outer structure. She was hurried away in order to have her escape the severe thrashing which grandfather would surely have given her had he been at home, and the house thereafter had no more communications from the spirits. She was such a dull, thick-witted, stupid little creature that a consensus of opinion, based upon knowledge of her and recollection of occurrences which apparently she could not possibly have produced, attributed outside assistance to her.

One morning my Uncle Joseph, a bachelor, masterful, brusque, generous and rich, upon whom had devolved much of the direction of our future, came to me and said:

“Sam, you are now old enough to get to work; what do you want to do?”

I knew well enough what I wanted to do, but it seemed to be beyond the range of possibility and of what was within that range I had not the slightest idea, and so I rather feebly answered:

“I should like to do as you do.”

“Humph!” he said. “My fortune is made and yours is yet to be found.”

Dr. Benjamin S. Anderson, a first cousin of my father, with whom he had read medicine, and with whose father mine had read medicine, had recently purchased a drug store at the southwest corner of Frankford Road and Wood Street, in Kensington, Philadelphia. He wanted a boy. I went to him upon an agreement that I should receive my board with thirty dollars for the first year and fifty dollars for the second year. My services began in the summer of 1857. His wife, also somewhat related to me, though more distantly, never approved of his leaving his practice to start a drug store, and she displayed her disapproval by refusing to fit up the house. In my room a basin and 5