LIFE AT "MILL GROVE" 103 



bon was sailing the seas (see Chapter II, p. 32) . Equal- 

 ly fanciful also was the idea that his mother had once 

 lived there, which he expressed in a letter ( quoted in full 

 in Chapter XXXIII) written from New York on Feb- 

 ruary 10, 1842, to young Spencer F. Baird, at Carlisle, 

 Pennsylvania. The naturalist was assuring his young 

 friend that the slow but beautiful "Little Carlisle" was 

 to be preferred to "Great New York, with all its hum- 

 bug, rascality, and immorality," and added: "It is now a 

 good long time since I was young, and resided near Nor- 

 ristown in Pennsylvania. It was then and is now a very 

 indifferent place as compared with New York ; but still 

 my heart and my mind oftentime dwell in the pleasure 

 that I felt there, and it always reminds me that within 

 a few miles of that village, my Mother did live." 



The soil of this farm region is of a dark red color, 

 owing to a friable shale 1 which logtcrpps everywhere. 

 The high, wooded bank of the Perkioming abounds in 

 caves, scooped out by the hand" of nature or man, as 

 well as in great pits and shafts; for deep down under its 

 shale, "Mill Grove" was rich in minerals, particularly 

 the sulphide of lead, associated with copper and zinc, to 

 reach which many excavations have been made. The 

 lead mines of this farm are said to have been famous 

 in Revolutionary times, and have been worked sporad- 

 ically for a hundred years ; if traditions are trustworthy, 

 many a winged bullet that laid a Red-coat low in the 

 War of Independence was a messenger from "Mill 

 Grove." In some of the old conveyances, which go 

 back to the time of Penn, the place was commonly desig- 

 nated as the "Mill Grove Mines Farm." It is recorded 

 that the original tract of two thousand acres, extending 

 from the Schuylkill to the Perkioming as far as the 

 mouth of Skippack Creek, was sold to Tobias Collett by 



