Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/82

 Soon afterward the war made walking a necessity to many and disclosed to the rest their capacity for this kind of exercise, and in recent years fashion has made it a conventional thing to do. But then every countryman who had half a mile to traverse hitched his horse to a buggy and drove. Our proposition had no precedent among the people we knew and was regarded as bold and venturesome. Whitaker's father overcame the fears of his mother by telling her we would probably go as far as West Chester, fifteen miles away, but that he fully expected to see us at home the next evening. We started in the early morning, with staff and satchel, and in an outing of about two weeks made a trip of one hundred and seventy-five miles, walking at the rate of from twenty-five to thirty miles a day. We crossed the Chester Valley to West Chester, thence to Unionville and Oxford and the rough section of Lancaster County towards Peach Bottom, over the Susquehanna River at Conowingo bridge, through Harford County, Maryland, by the dilapidated old village of Dublin, to the Deer Creek, where my uncle, Washington Pennypacker, then owned a farm. His oldest son, Matthias, about my own age, lost his life in the war, and he with his family, insisting upon flying the flag of the country from the top of his house, was soon afterward driven from the state. Here we remained for a few days, Benjamin for the first time making the acquaintance of a hornet, visited the granite rocks of Deer Creek, and then walked to Havre de Grace, encountering a severe thunder shower on the way. There, a mile and a half from the town, my uncle, William P. C. Whitaker, owned the beautiful place called Mount Pleasant. The mansion of brick, plastered, with an elaborately carved walnut stairway running from the main hall to the second story, and taking flight by a bridge across the hall from one side of a gallery to the other, occupied at the time of the War of 1812 by Colonel Hughes, one of the proprietors of the Principio Iron Works, overlooked the Chesapeake 74