Up to this time my circle of acquaintances had not enlarged much.  Mrs. Franciscus, wife of our freight agent, was very kind and on several occasions asked me to her house in Pittsburgh.  She often spoke of the first time I rang the bell of the house in Third Street to deliver a message from Mr. Scott.  She asked me to come in; I bashfully declined and it required coaxing upon her part to overcome my shyness.  She was never able for years to induce me to partake of a meal in her house.  I had great timidity about going into other people’s houses, until late in life; but Mr. Scott would occasionally insist upon my going to his hotel and taking a meal with him, and these were great occasions for me.  Mr. Franciscus’s was the first considerable house, with the exception of Mr. Lombaert’s at Altoona, I had ever entered, as far as I recollect.  Every house was fashionable in my eyes that was upon any one of the principal streets, provided it had a hall entrance.

I had never spent a night in a strange house in my life until Mr. Stokes of Greensburg, chief counsel of the Pennsylvania Railroad, invited me to his beautiful home in the country to pass a Sunday.  It was an odd thing for Mr. Stokes to do, for I could little interest a brilliant and educated man like him.  The reason for my receiving such an honor was a communication I had written for the “Pittsburgh Journal.”  Even in my teens I was a scribbler for the press.  To be an editor was one of my ambitions.  Horace Greeley and the “Tribune” was my ideal of human triumph.  Strange that there should have come a day when I could have bought the “Tribune”; but by that time the pearl had lost its luster.  Our air castles are often within our grasp late in life, but then they charm not.

The subject of my article was upon the attitude of the city toward the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.  It was signed anonymously and I was surprised to find it got a prominent place in the columns of the “Journal,” then owned and edited by Robert M. Riddle.  I, as operator, received a telegram addressed to Mr. Scott and signed by Mr. Stokes, asking him to ascertain from Mr. Riddle who the author of that communication was.  I knew that Mr. Riddle could not tell the author, because he did not know him; but at the same time I was afraid that if Mr. Scott called upon him he would hand him the manuscript, which Mr. Scott would certainly recognize at a glance.  I therefore made a clean breast of it to Mr. Scott and told him I was the author.  He seemed incredulous.  He said he had read it that morning and wondered who had written it.  His incredulous look did not pass me unnoticed.  The pen was getting to be a weapon with me.  Mr. Stokes’s invitation to spend Sunday with him followed soon after, and the visit is one of the bright spots in my life.  Henceforth we were great friends.

The grandeur of Mr. Stokes’s home impressed me, but the one feature of it that eclipsed all else was a marble mantel in his library.  In the center of the arch, carved in the marble, was an open book with this inscription: