d before ripened into lasting
friendship. One of my pleasures is that Mr. Stewart subsequently
embarked in business with us and became a partner, as "Vandy" did
also. Greatest of all the benefits of our new home, however, was
making the acquaintance of the leading family of Western Pennsylvania,
that of the Honorable Judge Wilkins. The Judge was then approaching
his eightieth year, tall, slender, and handsome, in full possession of
all his faculties, with a courtly grace of manner, and the most
wonderful store of knowledge and reminiscence of any man I had yet
been privileged to meet. His wife, the daughter of George W. Dallas,
Vice-President of the United States, has ever been my type of gracious
womanhood in age--the most beautiful, most charming venerable old lady
I ever knew or saw. Her daughter, Miss Wilkins, with her sister, Mrs.
Saunders, and her children resided in the stately mansion at Homewood,
which was to the surrounding district what the baronial hall in
Britain is or should be to its district--the center of all that was
cultured, refined, and elevating.

To me it was especially pleasing that I seemed to be a welcome guest
there. Musical parties, charades, and theatricals in which Miss
Wilkins took the leading parts furnished me with another means of
self-improvement. The Judge himself was the first man of historical
note whom I had ever known. I shall never forget the impression it
made upon me when in the course of conversation, wishing to illustrate
a remark, he said: "President Jackson once said to me," or, "I told
the Duke of Wellington so and so." The Judge in his earlier life
(1834) had been Minister to Russia under Jackson, and in the same easy
way spoke of his interview with the Czar. It seemed to me that I was
touching history itself. The house was a new atmosphere, and my
intercourse with the family was a powerful stimulant to the desire for
improvement of my own mind and manners.

The only subject upon which there was always a decided, though silent,
antagonism between the Wilkins family and myself was politics. I was
an ardent Free-Soiler in days when to be an abolitionist was somewhat
akin to being a republican in Britain. The Wilkinses were strong
Democrats with leanings toward the South, being closely connected with
leading Southern families. On one occasion at Homewood, on entering
the drawing-room, I found the family excitedly conversing about a
terrible incident that had recently occur