AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
my somewhat extensive collection is preserved at Pennypacker's Mills. Once, on the high ground on the opposite side of the Schuylkill from Phœnixville, I found a cache of fifty-six stone blades, six inches long and two and a half inches in width, made of argillite, blue within, oxydized and green without. At Green Hill, a romantic spot a mile below Phœnixville, overlooking the river, now being torn to pieces and ruined by a brickyard, was the site of an Indian village where the implements were numerous. I found there on one occasion a hammer, neatly fashioned, of quartz, which gave evidence that in their work the Indians were not without the artistic sense.
When I went to the city to live, where there were no such opportunities, I naturally enough turned to the gathering of books, with the result that when I went to Harrisburg in 1903 I left locked up in my house, 1540 North Fifteenth Street, in Philadelphia, over ten thousand volumes. In the main they were books relating to Pennsylvania and early imprints of the province and the state. It was the most complete collection of material of that kind which any individual had ever possessed, and in some respects was unequaled by any public library. The Boston Public Library has made it a policy to collect the books printed by Franklin and had succeeded in securing about eighty, while I had about two hundred and fifty. There were also the most complete collections of the publications of Ephrata, of the Sowers in Germantown, and of Robert Bell in Philadelphia, to whom must be accorded the credit of introducing literature into America. Sower printed the Testament in German seven times, at Germantown, before it appeared anywhere in America in English, and I still possess the only complete set of these Testaments. My library contained a full representation of the imprints of the inland towns of Pennsylvania, a copy of the Nuremburg Chronicle of 1493, a fair set of the Sessions Laws of Pennsylvania, the early magazines and newspapers, the finest known
