There
were stores where they spoke no English, and others where they made a
specialty of it; and I suppose when we sallied out that bright Sunday
morning, with the baby holding onto a hand of each of us between us, and
the twins going in front with their brother and sister, we were almost
as foreign as we should have been in a village on the Rhine or the Elbe.
"We got a little acquainted with the people, after awhile, and I heard
some stories of the country folks that I thought were pretty good. One
was about an old German farmer on whose land a prospecting metallurgist
found zinc ore; the scientific man brought him the bright yellow button
by which the zinc proved its existence in its union with copper, and the
old fellow asked in an awestricken whisper: 'Is it a gold-mine?' 'No,
no. Guess again.' 'Then it's a _brass-mine_!' But before they began to
find zinc there in the lovely Lehigh Valley--you can stand by an open
zinc-mine and look down into it where the rock and earth are left
standing, and you seem to be looking down into a range of sharp mountain
peaks and pinnacles--it was the richest farming region in the whole fat
State of Pennsylvania; and there was a young farmer who owned a vast
tract of it, and who went to fetch home a young wife from Philadelphia
way, somewhere.
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