Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/118

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN

dents were expected to run errands and to respond when called upon for any sort of manual assistance. Instead of mailing his letters, Mr. McCall would say in his blandest manner: “Mr. ———, I wish that on your way home this evening you will be good enough to deliver these letters.” Once O'Brien said to him by way of protest: “Mr. McCall, is it the custom for students in a lawyer's office to carry letters?” “I think it is, Mr. O'Brien,” and thereafter whenever a letter was deliverable at any unusual distance, this particular student was pretty sure to get it. Sometimes he stayed away for days to avoid the letters, but these tactics were met by accumulation. Once O'Brien, who was not altogether refined, stood before Mr. McCall, who was the expression of delicate and perfect culture, being instructed upon some subject. In his pocket was a box of matches ready for the after-lunch cigar. In his pocket was also his hand fumbling the matches. Suddenly they were ignited. “Damn it to hell!” ejaculated O'Brien. He afterward went out to New Mexico, where I believe he achieved considerable success.

With Edward S. Harlan, student of a different type, I established a warm and lasting friendship. Lame in one foot, nature more than made up for the defect by giving him a handsome, strong face adorned with a graceful mustache. He had a good heart and a nimble wit. Once some one was endeavoring to twit me with being a countryman and inquired: “Do the people live in houses in that section of the state?” “The chiefs do,” interjected Harlan. He died only too early of angina pectoris, which he bore with the utmost patience, and left an attractive daughter, who married Samuel Wagner. Charles M. Walton, a scion of one of the Quaker families of the state, fond of literature and appreciating its beauties with correct taste, a friend of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who often visited him, was also reading law at the time. Entirely too gentle and possessing too much sensibility to meet the buffets which he encounters

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