Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/77

 closest associate. The principal had two sons in the school. Joel, whom everybody liked, was killed in the Wilderness. A wounded comrade cried aloud for water and Joel went back and was shot while standing over him holding a canteen as he drank. The other son, William H. Bradley, studied medicine, became the editor of a paper in Wilkes-Barre and influential and then for some years was employed in the business department of the Weekly Press in Philadelphia. Quarreling with Cooke, the general manager, he was charged with embezzlement and convicted. I always doubted the justice of the result. Two of my first cousins, Benjamin R. and Andrew R. Whitaker, were also among the pupils. Benjamin, now dead, served throughout the war in the 104th Pennsylvania Regiment, and then, studying medicine, was surgeon to the ill-fated Collins expedition to Brazil. Andrew has ever been not only a relative but a staunch friend, and is now, by my appointment, a member of the Pennsylvania Fish Commission. Among the girls a sly little dark-eyed minx named Annie M. Taylor, pretty to look upon, caught the fancy of all of the boys, and another girl with dark eyes and red blood to color her lips and cheeks, more sedate but with a piece cut away from the top of her dress, as was then a fashion, caught mine. Her name was Virginia Earl Broomall. The games of the boys consisted of hand ball, corner ball, duck on davy and shindy; those of the girls jackstones and mumble-the-peg. We had occasional public exercises in the Temperance Hall, at which I usually delivered an address in French which indicated the erudition of the school but did very little good to the audience. I continued my French at Grovemont and so far progressed that I not only read the facile Telemaque of Fenelon but also a French translation of Cooper's Pioneers, a much more difficult matter. In Latin I read a reader made up of Æsop's Fables and other materials, Caesar's De Bello Gallico, The Aeneid, Vergil's Georgics and Bucolics, Sallust, Horace and Livy. The classes were required to read, scan Rh