AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
convention: “He is learned. He is patient. He is firm when firmness is required. He is lenient when justice can properly be tempered by mercy. He is always a gentleman.”
During the month before the election the Clover Club gave a dinner at which I was one of the invited guests. As it happened, a French fleet under the command of Admiral de Coulston was lying in the Delaware River, and the officers, including the Admiral, were present at the dinner. In the midst of the festivities Moses P. Handy, a newspaper editor, who was presiding, arose and said: “We have a member of the judiciary present who will now address you in his native vernacular, the Pennsylvania Dutch,” and he called upon me. I could not have uttered ten words in Pennsylvania Dutch, with which I had not the slightest familiarity, but in French I presented greetings to the Admiral and told how Lafayette had come to us in the Revolutionary War, and how we had won our independence through the assistance of France. It was not much of a speech, but these roysterers were unable to guy it and it furnished a text for the campaign orators who were able to say “So there!”
About the same time Mary Pennypacker Colket made me, together with John R. Read, who, under Cleveland, was the United States District Attorney, her executor. She was the widow of Coffin Colket, who had been president of the Philadelphia and Norristown Railroad and had left an estate of about two million of dollars. He was swarthy, homely to ugliness, plain in all of his ways and very much of a man. In his youth he and John O. Stearns were employed in some minor capacity in the construction of the Chester Valley Railroad and for a time boarded with William Walker—“Uncle Billy” as we called him—whose wife was a sister of my Grandfather Pennypacker. Each of them married a daughter of the household. My grandfather, with the stability and associations of a prosperous Chester County farmer, commented: “I do not under-
