AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
tion of the testimony, he filed a thorough-going report recommending that the charter be granted. Then there was a court in trouble. When I returned in the fall, I found the case just where it had been left, Sulzberger protesting that, since he was a Jew, if he had written the opinion it would have been commented upon unfavorably, and Wiltbank, since he was known as a strict churchman, urging similar reasons. The matter ended in my writing an opinion overruling Budd and refusing the charter, and by such a series of mischance I secured a place in Christian Science literature. With the great growth in numbers of these people and with the respectability which comes in two or three generations after the accumulation of such fortunes as that of Mrs. Eddy, there promises to be a future in which I shall be regarded as a sort of nineteenth century Herod.
It was also my fortune to decide one of the very early cases determining the rights of riders of the bicycle. The law is fixed that one approaching a railroad crossing must stop, look and listen. A man riding a bicycle came to a railroad where a train was passing. He did not get off, but rode around in a circle until the train had passed and then crossed behind it. A train coming the other way killed him. His widow brought a suit against the railroad for damages, which was tried before me. I entered a non-suit and was sustained by the Supreme Court. The newspaper organ of the bicyclers, published in Boston, said there was great need of new blood on the bench, and that the judges were a lot of old short-sighted and bandy-legged fellows who could not ride a bicycle if they tried, and who had no conception of the principles which ought to be applied to its use.
In March, 1898, Albert, who was the prospective heir to the throne of Belgium, made a tour incognito through the United States. He was a young man, neither tall nor short, neither slender nor stout, of no distinctive color or manner, and he made upon the beholder no very decided impression of any kind. I have already referred to the dinner which
