“I am glad he was well beaten. Thou shouldst never fight, my son; but if thou must, let it be so that thy adversary repent of it. Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! j’en ai peur; the wild Welsh blood of these Wynnes! And thy poor little nose—how ‘t is swelled!”
Not understanding her exclamations, Jack said as much, but she answered:
“Oh, it is a fashion of speech we French have. I shall never be cured of it, I fear. This wild blood—what will come of it?” And she seemed—as Jack writes long after, being more observing than I—as if she were looking away into the distance of time, thinking of what might come to pass. She had, indeed, strange insight, and even then, as I knew later, had her fears and unspoken anxieties. And so, with a plentiful supper, ended a matter which was, I may say, a critical point in my life.
IV
After this my days went by more peacefully. The help and example of Jack assisted me greatly in my lessons, which I did little relish. I was more fond of reading, and devoured many books as I sat under our orchard trees in the spring, or nestled up to the fire on the long winter evenings, coiled on the settle, that its high back might keep off drafts. My aunt lent me an abundance of books after that famous “Travels” of Mr. Gulliver. Now and then my father looked at what she gave me, but he soon tired of this, and fell asleep in the great oak chair which Governor Penn gave my grandfather.
Many volumes, and some queer ones, I fell upon in my aunt’s house, but, save once, against the naughtiness of Mrs. Aphra Behn, she never interfered. We liked greatly a book called “Peter Wilkins,” by one Paltock, full of a queer folk, who had winged “graundees,” a sort of crimson robe made of folds of their own skin. None read it now. My dear Jack fancied it much more than I.
I was nigh to fifteen before we read “Robinson Crusoe,” but even earlier I devoured at my aunt’s “Captain Jack” and “The History of the Devil.” The former book filled us with delight. Jack and I used to row over to Windmill Island, on the great Delaware, and there at the south end we built a hut, and slew bullfrogs, and found steps on the sand, I being thereafter Friday, and Jack my master. We made, too, a sail and mast for my boat, and, thus aided, sailed of Saturdays up and down the noble river, which I have always loved.
A still greater joy was to go in our chaise with my mother to the governor’s woods, which extended from Broad street to the Schuylkill, and from Callowhill to South street. There we tied the horse, and under the great trees we found in spring arbutus, even beneath the snow, and later fetched thence turkey-foot ferns, and wild honeysuckle, and quaker-ladies, with jack-in-the-pulpits and fearful gray corpse-lights hid away in the darker woods. In the forest my mother seemed even younger than at home, and played with us, and told us quaint tales of her French people, or fairy stories of Giant Jack and others, which were by no means such as Friends approved.