Ethics -- Fiction; Religion and sociology -- Fiction; Upper class families -- Fiction
He was well educated, and from his portrait a shrewd observer might
divine in him a genteel taste for literature. The fine features bear
witness to the influence of an American environment, yet suggest
the intellectual Englishman of Matthew Arnold's time. The face is
distinguished, ascetic, the chestnut hair lighter and thinner than my
own; the side whiskers are not too obtrusive, the eyes blue-grey. There
is a large black cravat crossed and held by a cameo pin, and the coat
has odd, narrow lapels. His habits of mind were English, although he
harmonized well enough with the manners and traditions of a city whose
inheritance was Scotch-Irish; and he invariably drank tea for breakfast.
One of my earliest recollections is of the silver breakfast service and
egg-cups which my great-grandfather brought with him from Sheffield to
Philadelphia shortly after the Revolution. His son, Dr. Hugh Moreton
Paret, after whom I was named, was the best known physician of the city
in the decorous, Second Bank days.
My mother was Sarah Breck. Hers was my Scotch-Irish side. Old Benjamin
Breck, her grandfather, undaunted by sea or wilderness, had come
straight from Belfast to the little log settlement by the great river
that mirrored then the mantle of primeval forest on the hills. So much
for chance. He kept a store with a side porch and square-paned windows,
where hams and sides of bacon and sugar loaves in blue glazed paper hung
beside ploughs and calico prints, barrels of flour, of molasses and rum,
all of which had been somehow marvellously transported over the passes
of those forbidding mountains,--passes we blithely thread to-day in
dining cars and compartment sleepers. Behind the store were moored the
barges that floated down on the swift current to the Ohio, carrying
goods to even remoter settlements in the western wilderness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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