AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
away. I found if I wanted a carriage from a liveryman the only safe course was to give an order the day before. In something of a hurry I went to a man at Coventry as I would have done at home and told him I wanted his carriage and driver. He began by feeding the horses, then he had them groomed, presently he brought out the carriage and had it washed and greased. After all of these preliminaries were completed and the horses stood there harnessed, I supposed we were ready to start. By no means. He then had to dress himself and put on that ugly long hat without which no man with a proper sense of his dignity would think of driving a team. My object was to go to Bosworth. It was fifteen miles away. No traveler had ever before asked to be driven to Bosworth, and he did not know the roads. I suggested that we might inquire as we went along and find them, adding that it was time for him to learn the way to a place so famous. Three or four miles from Coventry we turned a sharp corner, approaching the little village of Fenny Drayton. On the corner was a lot overgrown with weeds, in the center of which stood a stone. “What does that stone mark?” I asked. “I do not know,” he replied. “Stop the coach and let me see.” The inscription told me that on that spot stood the house in which George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, had been born. I had stumbled upon an interesting site, replete with associations of interest to a Pennsylvanian, and I felt repaid for the trip. We reached Bosworth after the noon meal, but learned that we were in Bosworth market town and still not at the battlefield. The driver objected to going any further. Among other incentives, one of my forefathers had been killed at Bosworth and I did not propose to get that near to the field without seeing it, so I insisted and told him to rest his horses for an hour and feed them. All that the tavern people could give us to eat was the remnant of a cold leg of lamb, and nothing could have been more palatable. While in England I cultivated an admiration for sheep from which I have never recovered.
