Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/80

 with my mother to the railroad station to take a train, some ill-defined sensation compelled a return home. I could not lift a spoon or hold a pen to write or do many little things in the presence of other persons. All of the while I felt the necessity of getting started in some occupation in which I could earn enough to take care of myself and perhaps be helpful to the rest; but to find the opening was the problem. I knew that finally I should reach the law and in the meantime was ready to do whatever happened to be within reach. I made an application for a clerkship in the office of the Phœnix Iron Company. I asked for a place in the general store of Reeves & Cornett, a close-fisted firm doing business in Phœnixville. I tried to get my uncle, George W. Whitaker, to give me a place at the Durham Iron Works, but he pursued the cautious and safe policy of not having any of the family around him.

In the early days of the war, there was a great gathering of mules, about thirty thousand of them, in a camp of the Commissary Department at Perryville, Maryland, and having reason to believe that I could exert some influence upon Colonel Charles G. Sawtelle, in command there, I asked for some sort of a position in connection with the handling of those mules. Happily for me, all of these efforts ended in failure. So often the disappointments of life turn out for our benefit. Twice during each week I arose at daylight and trudged across the long bridge to the town market, and returning carried back in a large basket perhaps twenty-five pounds of beef to my mother. Connected with the house was a large garden in which grapes grew over an arbor and therein my good old grandmother had rows of gooseberry bushes and currant bushes—red, black and white—and planted hollyhocks and dahlias, to her delight. I dug the garden, all with a spade, and cultivated it, raising radishes, peas, beans, asparagus, cabbage, turnips, beets, com and potatoes.

In Phœnixville the Young Men's Literary Union had 72