AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
have later found myself doubting whether, after all, I was not mistaken. His sympathies were quickly aroused and there never was a man more of whose actions were determined by altruistic sentiment. One secret of his success was no doubt the fact that he felt and manifested a genuine interest in the welfare of others. He helped the Indians and became a chief among them, not for what they could do, but because he felt an interest in them. On this evening he talked to me about the matter, as an interesting fact, that we two descendants of Major Patrick Anderson, of the Revolutionary Army, were at the same time senator and governor. He told me at length of his plans to remove the bones of his grandmother from Ohio, where she had been buried, to the Anderson family yard in Chester County. It seems the old woman had expressed the desire to be buried among her kindred, but at the time of her death those around her were too poor to comply, and he carried out the wish of this long-dead woman. He talked to me of his son “Dick,” with apparent regret that he was nothing of a politician and only a maker of money, in which pursuit he was fortunate. What seemed to me remarkable, I found in him a strong vein of superstition, that kind of fatalism which gave Napoleon faith in his star and which made Jacob Boehm, the shoemaker of Goerlitz, so sure of his inspiration. We even talked of ghosts, and I was astonished to hear him say in all soberness:
“Lately I was sitting in my library and out of the darkness a woman in white loomed up before me. I knew right well who she was and what she wanted.”
I should have been glad to have pursued the subject further, but it was too delicate and I waited, but he said no more.
Then we talked over the vacancy in the Supreme Court. I had thought over the matter seriously and had prepared a list of six men whom I regarded as the most eligible professionally. At its head was Charles E. Rice, President
