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 XX XIIT) 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 which outcrops 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 
