It was here that I first met the Vandevort brothers, Benjamin and John.  The latter was my traveling-companion on various trips which I took later in life.  “Dear Vandy” appears as my chum in “Round the World.”  Our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, became more and more dear to us, and the acquaintance we had before ripened into lasting friendship.  One of my pleasures is that Mr. Stewart subsequently embarked in business with us and became a partner, as “Vandy” did also.  Greatest of all the benefits of our new home, however, was making the acquaintance of the leading family of Western Pennsylvania, that of the Honorable Judge Wilkins.  The Judge was then approaching his eightieth year, tall, slender, and handsome, in full possession of all his faculties, with a courtly grace of manner, and the most wonderful store of knowledge and reminiscence of any man I had yet been privileged to meet.  His wife, the daughter of George W. Dallas, Vice-President of the United States, has ever been my type of gracious womanhood in age—­the most beautiful, most charming venerable old lady I ever knew or saw.  Her daughter, Miss Wilkins, with her sister, Mrs. Saunders, and her children resided in the stately mansion at Homewood, which was to the surrounding district what the baronial hall in Britain is or should be to its district—­the center of all that was cultured, refined, and elevating.

To me it was especially pleasing that I seemed to be a welcome guest there.  Musical parties, charades, and theatricals in which Miss Wilkins took the leading parts furnished me with another means of self-improvement.  The Judge himself was the first man of historical note whom I had ever known.  I shall never forget the impression it made upon me when in the course of conversation, wishing to illustrate a remark, he said:  “President Jackson once said to me,” or, “I told the Duke of Wellington so and so.”  The Judge in his earlier life (1834) had been Minister to Russia under Jackson, and in the same easy way spoke of his interview with the Czar.  It seemed to me that I was touching history itself.  The house was a new atmosphere, and my intercourse with the family was a powerful stimulant to the desire for improvement of my own mind and manners.

The only subject upon which there was always a decided, though silent, antagonism between the Wilkins family and myself was politics.  I was an ardent Free-Soiler in days when to be an abolitionist was somewhat akin to being a republican in Britain.  The Wilkinses were strong Democrats with leanings toward the South, being closely connected with leading Southern families.  On one occasion at Homewood, on entering the drawing-room, I found the family excitedly conversing about a terrible incident that had recently occurred.

“What do you think!” said Mrs. Wilkins to me; “Dallas” (her grandson) “writes me that he has been compelled by the commandant of West Point to sit next a negro!  Did you ever hear the like of that?  Is it not disgraceful?  Negroes admitted to West Point!”