Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/93

 sounds of the drum and fife were heard everywhere in the streets. Instead of hammers and tacks, weapons were displayed in the windows of the hardware stores. From the pulpits preachers told the stories of Joshua and of Judith. The women organized themselves into societies, the object of which was to make uniforms and to pick lint and to prepare for nursing.

At this time my uncle, Joseph R. Whitaker, lived at Mount Pleasant, in Maryland, about a mile and a half from Havre de Grace, and my uncle, William P. C. Whitaker, with a family of five daughters, lived in Havre de Grace. It looked for a time as though Maryland would follow the other states of the South into the maelstrom of secession, and the clouds gathered darkly up to the very borders of Pennsylvania. My grandfather, anxious to communicate with his sons and grandchildren there, and to make some provision for them, on the 22d of April went to Philadelphia, intending to go by train to Havre de Grace, and he took me with him. At the depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad in Philadelphia, we learned that the bridges over the Gunpowder and Bush rivers emptying into the Chesapeake Bay, had been burned in an uprising of secessionists, and that the train could go no farther than Wilmington, Delaware. Returning home with additional cause for excitement and uncertainty, we held a council. It was determined that Michael Weldon, the hired man, with Bridget, his wife, should drive with the two-horse carriage across Chester and Lancaster counties to the Conowingo bridge over the Susquehanna, and thence across Harford County in Maryland to Havre de Grace. I was to be the agent of communication. The journey down occupied two days. On our way in Lancaster County, Mike and I dropped the reins, chased a raccoon across two fields, captured him and put him in the carriage box and brought him safely back to Mont Clare, where he was finally killed by the dogs. The secessionists of Maryland had Rh