Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/84

 into the hands of the sheriff. Thereupon Sir John Henry Puleston, M. P.—it was he—hunted up his old debts and paid them. To all of his American acquaintances he was kind and attentive when they sought him, and his neglect of his obligations of the past was probably as much due to inertia as to any other cause.

The winter of 1861-62 I spent at the store of Whitaker & Coudon, a firm consisting of my grandfather, my great-uncle, George P. Whitaker, of Principio, and the son-in-law of the latter, Joseph Coudon, who then lived in Camden. Their store ran from Water Street to Delaware Avenue in Philadelphia and there they sold the iron made at Durham and Principio furnaces, and likewise represented the Schalls of Norristown; White, Ferguson & Co. of Robesonia; and other iron firms, and were the sole agents for the Burdens of Troy, New York, in the sale of their horseshoes. I assisted Oliver C. Lund, a gouty, white-haired old retainer, perched upon a high stool, to keep the books and also rolled out kegs of nails and horseshoes, when they were to be shipped, and did whatever else was to be done. I boarded at a hotel on the east side of Third Street and there added somewhat to my reputation as a checker player. An irascible Irishman named Felix O'Barr had come to be recognized as the champion among the merchants and their clerks who found a temporary home at the hotel. One evening he met an opponent to whom he was compelled to succumb. After the match had been lost he said to his foe, “You can't play checkers. There is a boy here who can beat you.” And the boy did.

In the summer of 1862, at Mont Clare, I one day read an announcement that Mr. Cruikshank, the county superintendent of public schools in Montgomery County, would hold an examination to determine the selection of teachers for the following winter. Without a word to any one, I put a saddle on the bay horse, rode over to the Trappe, in company with numerous other applicants took the 76