CHAPTER V
The Philadelphia Bar
WHEN a stranger for the first time met Peter
McCall, the strongest impression made upon
him was that he confronted a man instinctively
a gentleman, and this impression grew with
each succeeding interview. A descendant of George McCall,
a merchant in Philadelphia in the early colonial period who
owned McCall's Manor at Manatawny, he had a thin,
Celtic face, refined by long time and, perhaps, cross-breeding,
with pronounced lips and chin. Slim, perhaps five feet eight
inches in height, he possessed a certain power of oratorial
speech and much latent combativeness. He had been
mayor of the city. He had been a professor of law in the
University of Pennsylvania. Often nominated for a judgeship
in the court of common pleas by the minority party,
he each time failed of election, but no man could have been
better fitted for the office. When clients were about to
leave his inner room after a closed interview, with the
sweetest courtesy of manner he escorted them to the outer
door. With timid visitors at his home, he broached one
topic of conversation after another until he discovered the
subject in which they were interested or informed, and then
he sat and silently listened. Coming of a family of social
importance, whose members had participated in the dancing
assemblies from their beginning, having inherited what he
once described to me as “a little patrimony,” holding a
position at the bar, everywhere recognized as close to the
top, he had nevertheless encountered some of the adverse
currents of life. He married a Southern woman, a descendant
of General Hugh Mercer who was killed at Princeton. She
