“We’re going to have one ourselves some day,” declared Elizabeth.
“You’re going to stay, are you?”
“I shan’t be driven away. I’ve really had a peaceful time for three weeks. We sold our goods anonymously in Chambersburg.” Elizabeth smiled wearily. “Please come and sit down. You are our first unarmed caller.”
“They haven’t bothered you again?”
“No.”
“Perhaps they are really frightened,” said Colonel Thomas. “I came up partly to see you and partly to have a look at the ruins of the old furnace.”
“Do you mean the ruins near the park?”
“Yes; that was Thad Stevens’s furnace and the Confederates burned it. Great man, Thaddeus Stevens, young lady, as great as the hatred felt for him and that’s saying a good deal. He had a vision—the equality of men before their Creator and nothing else mattered, personal safety least of all. He lived here in this county from 1818 till 1842, and this county sent him to the legislature, as its representative. When he first came South, he saw in Maryland a slave girl being sold. He had three hundred dollars in the world to buy his law library, and instead he bought the girl and set her free. He was a representative from this district when he said, ‘Hereditary distinctions of rank are sufficiently odious; but that which is founded upon poverty is infinitely more so.’
“I tell you—” suddenly the old gentleman thrust out his arms, as though to free his elbows from restraint. Then he leaned back and began to rock. His daughter, if she had been present, would have laid down her book and taken up her sewing and would have begun a long seam.
“I tell you that this is the most interesting State in the United States and this the most interesting county in the State. We had squatter troubles, whites pushing into the country which had not yet been bought from the Indians, and thereby endangering the safety of the whole border, men who refused to move back, pioneers of the finest water, but law-breakers in fact. It’s interesting to think where the world would have been by this time if laws hadn’t been broken, if squatters hadn’t pushed on and buccaneers hadn’t sailed the main.”