a meeting house, and a school, when a master {19} can be got, which is not always the case, the place having now been some months vacant, to whom the trustees ensure twenty-five scholars, at two dollars each per quarter, which being only two hundred dollars per annum, I would have supposed insufficient for his support, if at the same time I had not been informed that his board and lodging in the most respectable manner, will not cost him above eighty dollars a year, in this cheap and plentiful country.[1]
After resting about an hour, and not feeling at all fatigued, at half past four, I proceeded for Middleton, eight miles further, first loading one of the barrels of my gun with a running ball, as I had to pass near where one Eshelman was robbed and murdered last fall.
The road over Connewago hills was bad, and by the time I arrived at the bridge over Connewago creek, three miles from Elizabethtown, my left foot began to pain me, so that I was forced to slacken my pace, which made it dark before I arrived at Swatara creek, when the pain had much increased, which was occasioned by my stepping through the ice up to my knees in a run which crossed the road, which the darkness prevented my seeing.
The boat was at the other side of the creek, and the German family at the ferry house let me kick my heels at the door until I was quite chilled, before they invited me in, which old Mrs. Smith did at last with a very bad grace, and she almost scolded me for risking the dropping on her very dirty floor, the spirits of turpentine, with which I was wetting the feet of my stockings to prevent my catching cold, a phial of which I carried in my pocket for that purpose.
- ↑ Cuming here describes one of the neighborhood or voluntary schools, organized chiefly in the frontier districts, which afterwards (1834) became the basis of the common school system of Pennsylvania. See Wickersham, History of Education in Pennsylvania (Lancaster, 1886), pp. 178-182.—Ed.
