I had been brought up in the austere quiet of a small New England town,
where life was sad and manners grave, and when about eighteen served for
a while in the portion of our army then acting in the North. The life of
adventure dissatisfied me with my too quiet home, and when the war ended
I was glad to accept the offer of an uncle in China to enter his
business house. To prepare for this it was decided that I should spend
six months with one of the great East India firms. For this purpose I
came to Philadelphia, and by and by found myself a boarder in an up-town
street, in a curious household ruled over by a lady of the better class
of the people called Friends.
For many days I was a lonely man among the eight or ten people who came
down one by one at early hours to our breakfast-table and ate somewhat
silently and went their several ways. Mostly, we were clerks in the
India houses which founded so many Philadelphia fortunes, but there were
also two or three of whom we knew little, and who went and came as they
liked.
It was a quiet lodging-house, where, because of being on the outskirts
and away from the fashion and stir of the better streets, chiefly those
came who could pay but little, and among them some of the luckless ones
who are always to be found in such groups--stranded folks, who for the
most part have lost hope in life. The quiet, pretty woman who kept the
house was of an ancient Quaker stock which had come over long ago in a
sombre Quaker Mayflower, and had by and by gone to decay, as the best of
families will.
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