CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
River. When the village was small, a butcher from near Kimberton, named John Vanderslice, bought it as a farm. He was hard, coarse and selfish. On it he built little houses and sold them to the laborers for such cash as they could pay, taking mortgages for the balance. Every few years the iron trade became dull and the mills closed. Then he foreclosed the mortgages. When trade revived, he sold the houses to another set of Irishmen. By repeating the process he grew rich. His boys went barefoot and worked at day labor. His wife and daughters did the washing. He made a trip around the world and left them at home. He paid the expense of printing a book of his travels, mainly the names of the towns and the dates when he reached them. Before he died, not trusting the regard of those around him, he bought a monument and had it properly inscribed and erected in the cemetery. It was among the sons of the tenants and purchasers from John Vanderslice that I was now thrown into daily companionship. It did me no harm, but on the contrary was beneficial. Every child is helped by playing for a part of the day in the mud. Every man ought to increase his experiences and grow to the extent of his capabilities, but he ought ever to have his feet upon the ground. Those people on Tunnel Hill had great regard for my father, and they have always been staunch friends of mine. When I was a candidate for the governorship. Tunnel Hill, for the first time in its history, voted with the Republicans, and an old Irish woman living there still keeps the cradle in which I was rocked.
At this school I learned all of the rules of Smith's Grammar, and I find firmly imbedded in my mind the propositions that “a noun is the name of a person, place or thing,” “a pronoun is a word used instead of a noun,” “prepositions govern the objective case,” “active transitive verbs govern the objective case,” and the like. I committed to memory the geography of the world from Mitchell's Atlas
