He took me to a refreshment stand and ordered a glass of sarsaparilla for me, which I drank with as much relish as if it were the nectar of the gods.  To this day nothing that I have ever seen of the kind rivals the image which remains in my mind of the gorgeousness of the highly ornamented brass vessel out of which that nectar came foaming.  Often as I have passed the identical spot I see standing there the old woman’s sarsaparilla stand, and I marvel what became of the dear old sailor.  I have tried to trace him, but in vain, hoping that if found he might be enjoying a ripe old age, and that it might be in my power to add to the pleasure of his declining years.  He was my ideal Tom Bowling, and when that fine old song is sung I always see as the “form of manly beauty” my dear old friend Barryman.  Alas! ere this he’s gone aloft.  Well; by his kindness on the voyage he made one boy his devoted friend and admirer.

We knew only Mr. and Mrs. Sloane in New York—­parents of the well-known John, Willie, and Henry Sloane.  Mrs. Sloane (Euphemia Douglas) was my mother’s companion in childhood in Dunfermline.  Mr. Sloane and my father had been fellow weavers.  We called upon them and were warmly welcomed.  It was a genuine pleasure when Willie, his son, bought ground from me in 1900 opposite our New York residence for his two married daughters so that our children of the third generation became playmates as our mothers were in Scotland.

My father was induced by emigration agents in New York to take the Erie Canal by way of Buffalo and Lake Erie to Cleveland, and thence down the canal to Beaver—­a journey which then lasted three weeks, and is made to-day by rail in ten hours.  There was no railway communication then with Pittsburgh, nor indeed with any western town.  The Erie Railway was under construction and we saw gangs of men at work upon it as we traveled.  Nothing comes amiss to youth, and I look back upon my three weeks as a passenger upon the canal-boat with unalloyed pleasure.  All that was disagreeable in my experience has long since faded from recollection, excepting the night we were compelled to remain upon the wharf-boat at Beaver waiting for the steamboat to take us up the Ohio to Pittsburgh.  This was our first introduction to the mosquito in all its ferocity.  My mother suffered so severely that in the morning she could hardly see.  We were all frightful sights, but I do not remember that even the stinging misery of that night kept me from sleeping soundly.  I could always sleep, never knowing “horrid night, the child of hell.”

Our friends in Pittsburgh had been anxiously waiting to hear from us, and in their warm and affectionate greeting all our troubles were forgotten.  We took up our residence with them in Allegheny City.  A brother of my Uncle Hogan had built a small weaver’s shop at the back end of a lot in Rebecca Street.  This had a second story in which there were two rooms, and it was in these (free of rent, for my Aunt Aitken owned them) that my parents began housekeeping.  My uncle soon gave up weaving and my father took his place and began making tablecloths, which he had not only to weave, but afterwards, acting as his own merchant, to travel and sell, as no dealers could be found to take them in quantity.  He was compelled to market them himself, selling from door to door.  The returns were meager in the extreme.