Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/76

 my old home, the house built by Wernwag in Phœnixville now called the Grovemont Seminary. A man of extensive acquirements, he aided in the translation of a revised version of the Scriptures from the Hebrew and Greek, and he had had long experience in teaching. It was a good school in the sense that those pupils who wanted to learn had the opportunity presented to them. On the other hand, he had a very kindly disposition and exercised little impelling force or restraint over those who were idle or indifferent. Under the tuition of Mr. Bradley I began preparation for the Sophomore class at Yale college and continued in the school for about two years. He told my mother that I was the most apt pupil he had ever known in his long experience. The ablest boy in the school was Samuel Sower, a descendant of the famous Germantown printer. He had the power to reason analytically and constructively and moreover had an unusual gift of speech. I expected for him a brilliant future. We worked together, and together solved rebuses and enigmas and were very intimate, but one day we had a personal combat ending in ill feeling, and never renewed our relations. His life was without result and closed in failure. Every man, I take it, has certain sensations which verge upon the superstitious, and in fact we none of us know to what extent traces yet remain in our mental processes of what, with our ancestors in the dark ages, were fixed beliefs. So many men who have stood in my way in life have perished from before me, three of them having committed suicide, that I am at least able to understand why generations ago there was faith in and dread of the “evil eye.” When, years afterward, a friend of both quietly said to me in commenting upon the career of Sower: “He never seemed to do any good after his quarrel with you,” it made me solemn and sad. Another boy, Singleton M. Ashenfelter, a little in the rough, but with vital energies and good-hearted, afterwards the United States District Attorney for New Mexico, became my 68