Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/81

 a room over the store of Reeves & Cornett, at the corner of Bridge and Main streets, and there subscribed not only for the daily newspapers of Philadelphia and New York, and the magazines, but even for the London Punch and Times and the London Art Journal and Harper's Weekly, Vanity Fair and the Scientific Monthly. It likewise had a fair library of romance, history and science. On certain evenings topics of the day were discussed in formal debate. The debating societies of my youth certainly helped me very much to gain self-possession and to develop the capacity for public speech which I have been called upon to exercise all through life. Among the members were the two lawyers then in the town—William H. Peck, who had studied both medicine and law, subsequently becoming a surgeon in one of the regiments during the war, a fluent man of some attainments, and perhaps, for this reason, looked upon with disfavor, and Charles Armitage, slouchy, ill-trained, ignorant and good-natured, who was always a favorite and was later killed while fighting the battles of his country. Among the other members were Ashenfelter, before referred to, Horace Lloyd, an upright, narrow and methodical clerk in the bank, and Josiah White. White had force of character. Ashenfelter annoyed him, and White emptied a bottle of ink over the light coat of his tormentor. Lloyd occupied two chairs, one with his heels, absorbing the Tribune, which he had held on to during the greater part of the evening. White interrupted this serenity by setting fire to the paper. A lieutenant in Company G of the First Pennsylvania Reserves, he was wounded at Antietam and killed in the Wilderness. I became president of the Literary Union.

In the year 1859 I suggested to my cousin, Benjamin R. Whitaker, that we two, he being then fifteen and I sixteen, take a walk across country down into the State of Maryland. At that time it was not the habit to walk. Rh