AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
buried at his home in Uniontown. Penrose and I were among the honorary pall-bearers. The after-occurrences at the funeral were astonishing. The services at the grave were scarcely concluded when we were hurried away in automobiles to a luxurious dinner with cocktails and wines, at the home of Jonah V. Thompson, a plain and quiet old gentleman, who had made a fortune of $30,000,000 in coal and coal lands. The home was a castle up on a hill-top with stables and other buildings in the rear in which a sybarite might be willing to live. In front was a paved courtyard, enclosed by a wall about two feet high, filled with flowering plants, native and exotic. It was entered, as the visitor came up the hill, by an approach of two or three steps. When we arrived it was perhaps half-past two o'clock in the afternoon. At the top of the steps, at this time in the day, in full dress considerably emphasized, stood the mistress of the household, who had perhaps experienced life through thirty summers. A fan hung at her feet. It was suspended from her neck by a chain of large diamonds which almost reached the pave. Taking our hands, she led the Senator and me inside to the dining table. I sat on her right and the Senator on her left. The conversation here was continuous and, to say the least, lively. At the other end of the table sat Jonah, grum and silent. The situation was too manifest to be misunderstood. The exuberant specimen of young womanhood was describing to me her manner of swimming. Much to the amusement of Penrose and in absolute innocence, I inquired:
“Can you swim on your back, too?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied.
In the exhilaration of the moment she set up a game on us. She had a French chauffeur and she instructed him that he was to take the Senator and me into the town and, on the way, show us how he could run a car. I unwittingly took another car and saw the Senator shoot by clinging to his seat, pale and distraught.
