F 
 
 \D\xe Quaker Boy 
 on the Farm 
 
 at School 
 
 Isaac SKarpless 
 
Class 
 Book 
 
 ^ 
 
 lonyii^htN^. 
 
 COF.'RIGIIT DEPOSIT. 
 
THE QUAKER BOY 
 
THE QUAKER BOY 
 ON THE FARM 
 AND AT SCHOOL 
 
 BY 
 ISAAC SHARPLESS 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
 
 JANE ALLEN BOYER 
 AND AMY C. SHARPLESS 
 
 THE BIDDLE PRESS 
 
 loio CHERRY STREET 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 HEADLEY BROS. 
 
 LONDON 
 
<S3 
 
 COPYRIGHT 1908 
 
 BY 
 
 THK BIDULE PRESS 
 
vania 
 
Pennsyl vant a 
 vaker l3( 
 
 WAS a beautiful corner of Penn- 
 sylvania in which the Quaker settlers 
 of 1682 and the following years found 
 a home. The great river fronted it, and streams, some of them 
 navigable, paralleled each other up into the country. The gently 
 
8 A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 
 
 rolling upland was covered with a great forest of hard wood 
 which, when cleared, uncovered a soil of unusual fertility and 
 freedom from surface rocks. Within it wandered immense 
 numbers of deer and not a few elk. The only animals of 
 prey were the small wolf and the black bear, neither dangerous 
 under ordinary conditions. The marshes abounded in water- 
 fowl, and at certain seasons wild pigeons and other migratory 
 birds could be captured in abundance by throwing stones into 
 the flocks. There were turkeys, pheasants, and partridges. 
 Shad and other sea-fish were plentiful in the river, and the 
 little streams were amply stocked with trout. 
 
 Nor were the settlers unworthy of their possessions. A 
 few men of rank and education began a life of trade in the 
 towns, burying their coats of arms as unworthy a Christian 
 democracy. But the greater part were British yeomen, some 
 landowners in their native country, the most of them renters 
 who had loaded all their furniture, plate, clothing, and in some 
 cases framed houses, into the little sailing vessels, and set out 
 on the two or three months' voyage to the free land which 
 the foresight and generosity of William Penn had secured. 
 They had shown their capacity to suffer by lying months and 
 years in British dungeons for a point of conscience, small per- 
 haps, but which, because it was conscience, they had per- 
 sisted in thinking was worth more to them than property or 
 liberty or life.. They had shown their fraternity by offering 
 themselves — man for man and woman for woman — for their 
 unfortunate brethren who were about to die for conscience' 
 sake in the horrible pest-holes of England. They were to 
 find the free air of the woods, a soil as good as the best they 
 had left, a life of conquest over nature to draw out their best 
 energies, and, better than all, an ideal commonwealth where 
 
A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 9 
 
 persecution should never come, and where fraternity would 
 know no bounds of rank or sect or race. 
 
 It was a venture, as all emigration is; but the results 
 were happy. There was none of the suffering of Massachu- 
 setts and Virginia. Flesh and fish and fowl were to be had 
 for the capture. ''We could buy deer for two shillings and 
 a turkey for one. shilling" of the Indians, one of them has re- 
 corded. The wise arrangement of Penn had made the red- 
 men more than friends. They were glad to have the Quakers, 
 who paid for everything, who never cheated them, whose guns 
 were used only against the beasts of the wood, and who tried 
 their best to restrain them from fire-water. Little troubles 
 occurred. The Council listened to a complaint of the Welsh 
 settlers of Haverford against the Indians "for the rapine and 
 destruction of their hogs," but the Indian "kings" were sent 
 for, and the matter quickly settled. The Quaker home and 
 children were left in perfect security, while the adult attended 
 the quarterly meeting, or the market-place at Philadelphia or 
 Chester, and so far as the Friends were concerned these kindly 
 relations never ceased. 
 
 A cave in the bank, a brush lean-to against a rock, or a 
 log hut sufficed for the first winter; but better houses soon 
 arose. Each settler had made his purchase in England from 
 rude maps, and quickly found it in the woods. The sales were 
 liberal, five hundred to five thousand acres to a family, for a 
 trifling sum and a quit-rent. The woods fell before their axes, 
 and with a plough drawn by oxen the soil was quickly pre- 
 pared for wheat, barley, and Indian corn. In one year every 
 farmer had a sufficiency of everything but money, and im- 
 provements began. The old houses were discarded and stone 
 buildings arose. Barns for crops and cattle kept pace with the 
 
lo ' A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 
 
 clearing land and increasing produce. As the first settlers 
 died the great farms were divided among the boys, or the 
 younger ones plunged farther into the woods and repeated the 
 process. 
 
 They were practically all Friends. If you lay a straight- 
 edged ruler from a point on the Delaware River midway be- 
 tween Trenton and Easton to the point where the Susquehanna 
 crosses Mason and Dixon's line, you will cut off a corner 
 which for one hundred and fifty years was largely Quaker 
 land. Up to the Civil War not a few townships knew no land- 
 owners outside the fold, and in many cases the farms had 
 come down without a deed except the one from William 
 Penn. As time progressed the farms grew smaller by 
 subdivisions, till one hundred and twenty-five acres or 
 thereabouts became the normal size, and the productiv- 
 ity always increased. The young man who could not 
 buy a fann with borrowed money and stock it, and by 
 middle life have it clear of debt, was seriously lacking 
 in business management or economy, or both. Expenses 
 of living were trifling. The boys did the work outside and 
 the girls within, and there were usually plenty of both. The 
 fields and the garden gave the vegetables, and the barn, the 
 pig-pen, and the poultry-yard the meat. The housewife spun 
 the flax, wove the cloth, cut out and sewed the garments. 
 She made sausage and scrapple and mince pies, carpets and 
 candles and feather-beds. Such lives developed qualities of 
 saving and hoarding, and so it happened that not a few fami- 
 lies passed from generation to generation an ever-increasing 
 stock of money at interest, and enlarged houses and barns, 
 and ideas of fine tillage and care of soil, and furniture plain 
 but solid, and shade-trees around the place, and looks that be- 
 spoke comfort, homelikeness. and family pride. 
 
A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 
 
 II 
 
 The New England farm developed strong men; but the 
 rugged soil did not invite their continuance, and the strength 
 of New England went to the cities or the West. The western 
 farm made great crops, but western farmers are nomads, and 
 in general have no ancestral homes. Perhaps nowhere else in 
 
 the United States has there been that combination of soil and 
 social conditions which created a satisfied, intelligent, perma- 
 nent yeomanry. The land itself was treated almost as a sen- 
 tient being. It must not be abused any more than a horse or 
 an ox. It must be fed. and not cropped into sterility, and so. 
 unlike the south land, it grew in fertility with each generation, 
 clearer of weeds and stones, more mellow and rich and kindly. 
 The great stone houses, of plain but harmonious outline, the 
 whitewashed outbuildings and fences, the evergreen and de- 
 ciduous trees, all bespoke the comfortable and prosperous 
 
12 
 
 A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 
 
 home, to which the wandering children would return as long 
 as they lived, as the family gathering called them from dis- 
 tant business or residence, and to which their thoughts would 
 revert with ever-increasing fervency as they reviewed their 
 boyhood days. 
 
 For truly the Pennsylvania Quaker farm and homestead 
 was a great place for a boy to grow into a man. The old 
 conditions lasted till the Civil War. Since then there has been 
 a gradual scattering of the old families, and their places have 
 been taken by immigrants and renters of another type. The 
 
 old race will be largely extinct in another generation ; but 
 many a man now in middle life or beyond who has made his 
 mark in Philadelphia or elsewhere, in business or professional 
 life, blesses the fate that gave him the physical and moral basis 
 of such a boyhood. 
 
 The boy's life was not a vagabond life, though streams 
 and woods were well known, and wild animals and birds and 
 flowers were sources of unfailing pleasure and instruction. 
 As soon as he was old enough there was work to be done, 
 wood to carry in from the woodpile, cows and horses to bring 
 
A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 13 
 
 in from the field, apples to gather, and fruits and vegetables 
 to pick. The work was done, if not willingly yet faithfully, 
 and a great lesson learned. 
 
 The father was an autocrat, a kindly and wise one whose 
 commands were never questioned. "John," said he to his boy 
 at the table, "John, hold thy plate." 
 
 "1 don't want that, father," faltered the boy. 
 
 "I did not ask thee what thee wanted; I told thee to hold 
 thy plate;" and John took what was offered and ate it with- 
 out a word. If too wet to go to the field, father and John 
 could pull weeds in the garden. John did not understand why 
 this was not as wet as the field, but father said not, and John 
 accepted it as true. When too cold for other work, you 
 could pick stones in the field. Again John could not under- 
 stand why prying up stones frozen into the ground, with glove- 
 less fingers, was not as cold as anything else ; but father said it 
 was cold-weather work, and when John got homesick at board- 
 ing school he sadly reflected that if only he could go home he 
 would gladly even pick stones with the thermometer at freez- 
 ing. As the boy grew up, the duties and responsibilities in- 
 creased, and the labor was the more continuous. Driving 
 horses to plough or harrow, the more strenuous work of the 
 harvest time, the family consultation as to which field to work 
 out of grass for the regular routine of corn, oats, and wheat, 
 and two years of mowing, to be followed by pasture, became 
 his larger functions. 
 
 But there was always plenty of time for the boyish re- 
 creation which the country afforded. He was never a slave 
 to work or to authority. There was the stream to fish, d!nd 
 the charms of fishing grew upon him, till a busy life after- 
 wards only made it more enticing, as memory brought back 
 
14 
 
 A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 
 
 the great sucker in the mill-dam or trout in the clear stream. 
 There were muskrats to be trapped in winter and the raccoon 
 that stole the chickens and turkeys. There were the games in 
 which the boys on the neighboring farms would join, or the 
 ride on the big horse sled in winter. All of these and many 
 more were constant sources of pleasure and education which 
 the older people were too wise to curb. 
 
 Nor were intellectual opportunities lacking. Every 
 house had some books — often Friends' books, Scivel's 
 History and Piety Promoted ; the first stirred the boy's denom- 
 inational patriotism as he heard of the brave deeds of his an- 
 cestors, but for the latter, to tell the truth, he did not care 
 much, though he had to take a share of it on First Day. There 
 was, too, the neighborhood library sustained by the farmers for 
 a few miles around. The key was kept in a neighboring store 
 or meeting-house and any one could get it, select his book, 
 
A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 15 
 
 register it himself, lock up, and go home. As practically all 
 the subscribers were Friends, fiction was disallowed; but the 
 healthy boy found in history and biography and travel a sub- 
 stitute which charmed him through many a wintry evening 
 and slack hour through the day. Macaulay was too critical 
 of the Friends, and was outlawed; but Rollin and Ranke and 
 Motley and Prescott became a part of the boy's permanent 
 stock in trade, and he learned to read to good purpose. The 
 wilds of Africa were explored with Livingstone, and the 
 wastes of Greenland with Franklin and Kane; and if an oc- 
 casional volume by Mayne Reid crept in through an unsus- 
 picious committee, on the ground that it was a record of 
 travel, probably no one was the worse. The different families 
 read the same books, and a comparison of views kept the mem- 
 ory fresh. 
 
 But above all else these old farmers retained something 
 of the conscience of their ancestors. To go to meeting twice 
 a week was the most inevitable part of the weekly programme. 
 It was always the "previous engagement." 
 
 "It will rain to-day and that hay just ready to come in 
 will be spoiled," John would urge on a Fourth Day morning. 
 
 "Harness the horse and we will all go to meeting," was 
 the uncompromising answer. 
 
 The meeting was mostly silent, just a gathering of men, 
 women, and children sitting on unpainted and straight-backed 
 benches for an hour. The boys did not always enter pro- 
 foundly into the spiritual exercise of the occasion, and some- 
 times perhaps even the older ones had not such sustained 
 niystical communion as their faces then seemed to indicate. 
 But after all, the lesson of the supremacy of religious duty 
 over all business affairs was well taught, and the quiet in- 
 
A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 17 
 
 fluence of the Spirit was not always a delusion ; while the 
 cramped physical powers of the healthy boy found relief after- 
 wards in an unrestrained and joyous exercise. The habit of 
 at least formal attention to religious obligations was seldom 
 lost. 
 
 It was in the "monthly meetings" that the moral stan- 
 dards were set and maintained. These business sessions were 
 as imperative upon old and young as the purely religious 
 gatherings. The "queries" were to be answered in open meet- 
 ing, not individually but as a body, and the answer inscribed 
 in a book. 
 
 Do you go to meeting regularly, and behave yourself when 
 there ? 
 
 Do you have "love and unity" with other members? 
 
 Do you live a simple life, avoid complicity with warlike 
 operations or judicial oaths? 
 
 Do you look after the poor Friends, and do you pay your 
 debts? — and other questions relating to conduct and habits. 
 
 The boy, perhaps, could not define Quakerism ; but he 
 got an idea very firmly that a quiet, kindly, moral life was 
 required of him, an idea which often survived the vastly lower 
 standards among which he had to work out his adult conduct. 
 
 The home confirmed the meeting, — or the reverse might 
 be a more true way of writing it. The little silence before 
 each meal, the Bible-reading at the breakfast-table and on 
 First Day evening by one whose life was a manifest effort to 
 live by its precepts; even the absence of formal teaching and 
 the general reticence as to religious subjects, along with the 
 seriousness at rare intervals when the rebuke or the com- 
 mendation was evidently needed, — all these were daily build- 
 ing character, whether any one was conscious of it or not. 
 
i8 
 
 A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 
 
 In 1827 Qiiakerdom was rent by the great "Separation." 
 Hicksite and Orthodox, as they were popularly called, lived 
 side by side as neighbors and relatives ; but a great gap opened 
 between them. The Orthodox were influential in Philadel- 
 phia, but the Hicksites controlled the country. They kept the 
 old stone meeting-houses. For a time the two worshiped 
 in the two ends of the same house, or in the same room at 
 different hours ; but these arrangements in the excited state of 
 feeling were too close for peace. All through these Quaker 
 counties one sees meeting-houses in duplicate, the old one 
 almost always Hicksite. The feeling during the first genera- 
 
 tion was intense. Social intercourse ceased. Min- 
 isters of the two bodies meeting in the road gave each other the 
 least possible recognition, and mutual individual "disown- 
 ments" cleared the skirts of each of responsibility for the other. 
 The two had the same moral standards and the same methods 
 of worship. In the main they looked at life from the same point 
 of view; but the Plicksite was supposed to have beliefs with 
 Unitarian tendency, the Orthodox to be unbearably dogmatic; 
 
A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 19 
 
 and so they parted, except that the boys and girls might safely 
 go to the same little school by the meeting-house. 
 
 They were not potent factors in party politics. They 
 had forgotten the great colonial days when the Holy Experi- 
 ment was building the most prosperous, free, and progressive 
 commonwealth along the Atlantic, under Quaker legislation 
 unintermitted for seventy years ; when David Lloyd, John 
 Kinsey and Isaac Norris led the Quaker hosts in a well- 
 defined but strictly moral political machine. They had rather 
 accepted the mediaeval doctrine that introversion and not out- 
 ward activity was the badge and safeguard of the Friend. In 
 township matters, as school director, or road supervisor, they 
 performed their duty, and the Quaker vote could be counted 
 on, on election day. But the noisy convention and political 
 meeting did not know them, and the candidate for an ofiice 
 higher than township was an object of concern. They were 
 conservative in most matters, but on a moral question to which 
 their society was committed, they could be the leaders of the 
 radicals. Every Quaker was an anti-slavery man, and many 
 of them were uncompromising abolitionists of the Garrison 
 type. The Underground Railway had an unfailing route 
 through the Quaker counties, and the runaway once over the 
 line found plenty of sympathy and active aid. The boy at the 
 table or during the winter evening drank in, in respectful 
 silence, the iniquities of slavery till a negro became a hero, 
 and he would warmly resent any appellation less respectful 
 than coldred man. 
 
 Then came on the war. It seemed to present a conflict 
 of duties. The elders saw clearly that the long history of 
 opposition to slavery was fairly matched by an equally long 
 testimony against war; yet to a man they fervently desired 
 
20 
 
 A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 
 
 the success of the Union arms. If the tradition of John Wool- 
 man and Anthony Benezet and the example of John G. Whit- 
 tier kept them true to the cause of freedom, the history of their 
 own ancestors during the Revolutionary War kept them true 
 to the cause of peace. For it was known that every little 
 complicity with war had been conscientiously avoided. When 
 the American army had taken blankets and left the money 
 
 with the boy, the father had ridden miles to find the purchaser 
 and return the price, though, of course, he never recovered the 
 blankets. When a boy had thrown down a bar in response 
 to the demand of a British trooper, enforced with a drawn 
 sword, the conviction that he might be a party to taking 
 human life so seized him that he refused to lower the oth- 
 ers. These traditions and convictions held the soberer ones 
 
22 
 
 A Pennsylvania Quaker Boy 
 
 steadily to non-participation. The boys and young men were 
 more influenced by the excitement, and some of them re- 
 sponded to the call. Such usually lost their Quaker connec- 
 tion, but never the influences of their earlv training. 
 
 What better boyhood could there be for a man who is to 
 do great work? A body hardened by years of pure air and 
 active but not excessive exercise; a mind braced by a school 
 life which required things to be done by himself and not by 
 the teacher, and broadened by a careful reading of a limited 
 number of improving books; a character formed by regular 
 duties, the example of conscientious living, the ever-present 
 sacredness of moral responsibility, abhorrence of evil, and 
 sympathy with suffering; and a hearty respect for a religion 
 of the simplest character and absolutely without hypocrisy. 
 
 In some respects, to be sure, it was a narrow and circum- 
 scribed life; but these qualities may not be the worst evils Uir 
 the bov. There was to be plenty of breadth and liberty later, 
 and he approached manhood without the feeling that life was 
 a sucked orange; rather it was to him a glorious opportunity 
 of unknown possibilities in which his untried powers of strong 
 resolve and sustained effort, kept well in hand, might do their 
 best. 
 
HEN the Pennsylvania Quaker boy from 
 the farm reached the age of twelve or four- 
 teen years, he was sent to boarding school. 
 There was only one possibility in the choice of a school, the 
 school which had educated all his ancestors, and the ancestors 
 of all his playmates since 1799. 
 
 It was in the days following the Revolutionary War that 
 this school was conceived. The Friends had withdrawn from 
 politics. A time of war and revolution was no time for them. 
 
28 The Quaker Boy at School 
 
 It was assumed that they had been sympathizers with the Brit- 
 ish, an assumption in the case of the wealthy merchants of 
 Philadelphia, probably true; but, for most of the others, true 
 only in the negative sense that they did not approve the means 
 taken to establish independence. They would have preferred 
 further protest, commercial opposition and passive resistance. 
 Their whole history revolted at the idea of war, and hence 
 there was no place for them in the government which they 
 had organized under William Penn, and in which, till 1756, 
 they had been the pervading force. Many of their young men 
 could not be controlled, however, and preferred the active serv- 
 ice of their country to their church connection. 
 
 The defection of the aggressive element was a serious loss 
 to Quakerism and left the mystical, introversive tendencies, 
 always strong, in control of the development of the Society. 
 
 Yet they felt that they had steered their organization 
 through the difficult days of confusion on the straight line of 
 principle. During these days they had, without faltering, an- 
 nounced their consistent opposition to warfare, and had 
 cleared their ranks o±* slavery. If they had lost a certain 
 leadership, which, as founders of the state they had inherited, 
 they had advertised their principles by suffering, and large 
 accessions came to their ranks from sympathetic neighbors. 
 Those who understood them, like President Washington, could 
 join with him in appreciating the value of their citizenship 
 "except their declining to share with others the burdens of 
 common defense." 
 
 There was, however, one danger for the future. The 
 farmers were prospering as never before. Great families of 
 children were growing up, and as they reached majority were 
 building new homes on the adjacent lands. But many of these 
 
The Quaker Boy at School 
 
 29 
 
 children had no education except such as the primary school 
 at the meeting house afforded, and some, hardly that. The 
 well educated Friends of the city were the first to see the 
 danger. 
 
 Whether John Dickinson was a member of the Society of 
 Friends at any time of his life, is an enigma of history. His 
 
30 The Quaker Boy at School 
 
 ancestors were, as were also his wife and children. There is 
 much in the conservative and legal arguments of the "Farmers' 
 Letters" and his appeals to the crown, and in his unwillingness 
 to take the critical plunge into independence, to suggest Quaker 
 influence. But he was a Brigadier General during the war, 
 and an ardent though cautious advocate of American ideas. 
 
 His sympathies were all with Friends and his own well- 
 trained youth and broad intelligence saw the danger of a com- 
 munity without educated lay leaders, and whose principles did 
 not demand ex-en of their ministers any extensive mental train- 
 ing. He wrote many urgent letters to waken the Friends to 
 a sense of the danger, and when a plan for a boarding school 
 was finally evolved, gave a large contribution to its establish- 
 ment. 
 
 Associated with him was Owen Biddle. He had been a 
 fiery patriot in war times, a member of the Board of War 
 of Pennsylvania, a man of means and education, and, withal, 
 something of an astronomer. But, as one of his friends wrote : 
 "The age of miracles was not yet passed," and when the ex- 
 citement was over, he wTut through a period of serious re- 
 pentance, and made his peace with Friends. 
 
 He drafted the plans which made the school possible. As- 
 sociated with these, were the Pembertons, the Drinkers, the 
 Churchmans, and others who had always kept in the straight 
 and narrow way. The school was launched. Six hundred 
 acres of beautiful land in Chester County, twenty miles from 
 Philadelphia, were purchased, sufficiently inaccessible to suit 
 the monastic idea of the time, as to a proper location. 
 
 When, in the early days of railroads, one was proposed 
 through the tract, the influence of the school was great enough 
 to divert it to an adjacent valley a mile away. A great brick 
 
The Quaker Boy at School 31 
 
 building of harmonious proportions was erected. No musical 
 sounds should profane its halls, nor an_y art lead away from 
 simplicity ; but the birds sang in the great trees and enticing 
 vistas were opened to the cultivated fields around. The denial 
 of the beauty of art seemed to make them more responsive to 
 the beauty of nature. 
 
 But what could be taught in a school managed by a great 
 committee which would inevitably be governed by its most 
 conservative members, for the Quaker habit of waiting for 
 practical unanimity gave, in effect, the control to the least pro- 
 gressive. Above the primary branches, there was not much 
 place for the staple of the day. the ancient classics. They had 
 too many heathen allusions and influences to be safe reading 
 for young Friends. While not entirely excluded, the boys did 
 not think in the ideas and language of Greece and Rome. No 
 one thought of teaching modern languages and the days of 
 laboratory science and te.xt-books of history had hardly 
 dawned. It was not the Quaker idea to teach theology. The 
 spirit of it was supposed to be drawai in with the religious serv- 
 ices and customs of the place. No thought of making min- 
 isters introduced itself into the school, though some of the 
 Friends occasionally admitted that if a Divine power did 
 create a minister, a good education might add to his usefulness 
 outside of meeting, if not within. 
 
 There was no danger, theological or intellectual, in reading, 
 or spelling, or penmanship, and these were taught with a suc- 
 cess the present might envy, if not emulate. Besides this, two 
 other branches were safe and edifying. The backbone of the 
 school w^as mathematics. Enoch Lewis, Benjamin Hallovvell 
 and Samuel Alsop, all authors of mathematical treatises of 
 merit, kept up the spirit to a high water mark. The grading 
 of the school was based on proficiency in this one subject. 
 
z^ 
 
 The Quaker Boy at School 
 
 The first mathematical teacher was a Premier in the school, 
 not a principal, for that, the school did not have for about a 
 century, but a sort of a glorified first among equals. In this 
 subject every boy went at his own pace, no rigid classification 
 restrained the genius, or unduly hurried the plodder. The 
 neatly written blank books of the first score of years of last 
 century, in which eclipses were deduced from the elements 
 
 with the mathematical 
 processes in detail, and 
 the problems of terrestrial 
 mechanics based on geom- 
 try, were worked with 
 difificult simplicity by boys 
 in their teens, are lessons 
 for their weaker brethren of to-day. 
 
 Another subject which might prop- 
 erly exist in unrestrained proportions 
 in such a school was English Grammar. 
 Lindley Murray and Gould Brown 
 and other Quaker grammarians had 
 blazed the way, and John Comly, John 
 Forsythe, and other lesser lights could 
 follow. It was much learning of 
 formal rules and notes and exceptions, and parsing of involved 
 sentences, and correcting of imperfect ones. Some fine speci- 
 mens of literature were memorized, and the classic etymologies 
 of many common words were drilled into boys with a thor- 
 oughness which made them very unpopular. 
 
 This was the regimen which confronted our boy at any 
 time within three-quarters of a century of the founding — and 
 
The Quaker Boy at School 33 
 
 girl too, for in the other end of the great building with neutral 
 territory between them, his own sister and the sisters of his 
 mates lived a mysterious life in an unknown territory. 
 
 The rules given him were largely hortatory : "On awaken- 
 ing in the morning, endeavor to turn your thoughts towards 
 your great Creator, the Author of all our blessings," or relate 
 to common decorum or politeness: "When strangers speak 
 to you, give a modest, audible answer with your faces turned 
 towards them." 
 
 He had had no chance at home against the overpowering 
 will of his father, and the imposing Governor seemed a still 
 more formidable controller of events. Numbers, however, 
 gave courage, and paying little attention to the excellent gen- 
 eralities of the Committee, he soon found himself engaged in 
 a game of courage and skill against that dreaded official. He 
 had, perchance, been somewhat schooled in the game by an 
 oiuer brother, whose defeats and victories had been many 
 times exuitingly recounted in his hearing. Rules were the 
 instruments of authority, and penalties paid the price of de- 
 feat. These were the Governor's weapons, but the boy had 
 the audacity of youth and the sympathy and aid of a hundred 
 friends. To go to a town three miles away out of bounds, and 
 spend three cents (all he had) in cakes, was an heroic achieve- 
 ment, if successfully accomplished. But if, alas, he was late to 
 dinner, and hence had to give an account of himself, it meant 
 a week couped in a little yard, where he could only play mar- 
 bles with his fellow victims, while the other boys were at ball. 
 This was fair enough, for he knew the risk, and would have 
 borne it patiently except for the thought of home, whither the 
 story was sure to go. 
 
 Stolen apples, too, were wonderfully sweet, when he hero- 
 
34 
 
 The Quaker Boy at School 
 
 ically made the great venture into the old orchard and re- 
 turned with a pocketful of unripe and gnarled fruit, to be dis- 
 tributed as proof of his prowess among admiring friends. If 
 he could purloin a piece of pie from the table and carry it un- 
 der his jacket, again he was a hero, for he not only risked de- 
 tection by his master, but also the chance of a "jam" on the 
 stairway if his fellows knew that the contraband could be 
 squeezed into an undistinguishable mass against his shirt. 
 
 His best chance, however, was at night. 
 The whole great upper story of the house 
 was full of beds and to these at 8.30 o'clock, after Bible 
 reading and a time of silence, wended the still unsub- 
 dued boys. Hie lights were turned out and the Governor 
 in felt slippers was an unseen snd unheard agent of the 
 
The Quaker Boy at School 35 
 
 society for law and order. But when all was quiet and every- 
 one was asleep, this official w^ould betake himself noiselessly 
 to more congenial society downstairs. Here was the oppor- 
 tunity for which the boy near the door had been waiting. He 
 had noted the retreating form brush past him as he hid in 
 ambush, and after due time had elapsed to make sure of his 
 ground, had given the signal. A rain of pillows descended on 
 the heads of the sleepers, beds were overturned, and a delight- 
 ful and exciting anarchy ruled supreme. The best must be 
 made of it, for, in the nature of things, it could not last. The 
 wise boy found his bed before a crisis was reached, but the 
 luckless youth of imprudent tendencies wandered far from 
 home, and when, in the midst of the unsuspecting rioters, the 
 light was suddenly struck, and the Governor's all-seeing eye 
 penetrated every corner, empty beds told the tale. There was 
 a great clearing up the next day. 
 
 Such conflicts varied with the opportunities of the different 
 generations. There was too much repression for modern 
 ideas, too great a dependence on authority and too little on 
 sympathy and influence. Whenever a teacher caught the boy 
 spirit, helped in the games, took long botanical and minero- 
 logical walks in a locality unusually rich in objects of interest, 
 or got down to the intellectual difficulties or aspirations ot the 
 boys, disorder vanished and loyalty prevailed. There was a 
 goodly number of such men and their influence was profound 
 and lasting over responsive spirits. 
 
 The keynote of the school was "a guarded religious educa- 
 tion." The fir^t adjective was supposed to refer to the exclu- 
 sion of un-Friendly, as well as immoral, influences. Only 
 members were adniitted, and the Quaker peculiarities of dress 
 and language were enforced with undeviating rigidity. The 
 
The Quaker Boy at School 37 
 
 moral standards, save at times, when some unrighteous boys 
 got in by accident, were also uncompromising and started the 
 boy in life with a predisposition to truthfulness and honesty 
 and sobriety of thought and conduct. 
 
 But every one of the Committee of Sixty chosen by the 
 Yearly Meeting from among its most "weighty" members, 
 would assert that if the school failed religiously, it was a com- 
 plete failure, even though the mental influences were bracing, 
 and the conduct of the boys was exemplary. Truly, when 
 those sixty men and women visited the school, it was an im- 
 pressive occasion. The broad-brimmed hats of the men sur- 
 mounting the smooth-shaven face and long, straight-collared 
 coat, the ponderous bonnets of the women, including a quiet 
 face encased in an immaculate cap, with a "handkerchief" 
 around the shoulders of the same ephemeral material, made an 
 impression of saintliness not soon forgotten. And when 
 the hour for "meeting" came as it did twice on First- 
 day and once on Fifth-day, and the two hundred boys 
 and girls seated themselves on the uncompromising benches 
 (for then only could the sexes be in the same room) with these 
 celestial figures in the minister's gallery in front and a silence 
 that could be felt gathered about the assemblage, then if ever 
 on earth, heaven seemed present. 
 
 The spirit of youth was awed and he heard, as from an 
 oracle, the prayer or the preaching which presently was 
 sounded, as if it were the voice of God, as indeed it sometimes 
 was. The sentences might or might not be grammatical, the 
 delivery might be natural or a chant, the subject-matter might 
 be logical and practical, or a succession of Bible phrases sug- 
 gested by each other, and tending no whither, but the effect 
 of the whole was solemn. It was seldom emotional. Its bur- 
 
38 
 
 The Quaker Boy at School 
 
 den was to induce the hearers to yield the heart to the oper- 
 ations of the Heavenly Guide, and thereby grow in grace. 
 These Divine visitations would become more frequent and defi- 
 nite and potential as the result of obedience. The impulses to 
 good were to be found within, rather than without, and would 
 become rules of life, as well as spiritual influences. 
 
 This from the committe. The teachers were more apprecia- 
 tive of the terrestrial factors which moved the lives of boys 
 and dealt in more practical problems. But however far from 
 the standard of his school life the man would stray, he would 
 
 never be able, if at all spiritual, to separate himself from the 
 profound influences of those simple and sincere religious meet- 
 ings. 
 
 The men from the old school have not been prominent in 
 any large measure in literature or statesmanship, but when a 
 moral question is involved, they are. almost to a man, right. 
 Under untoward circumstances, they stand for righteousness 
 in politics and the ranks of the working reformers in and 
 around Philadelphia are largely recruited from them. Their 
 lives are testimonials to the efficacy of "a guarded religious 
 education." 
 
HBRARY OF CONGRESS