In 1876 two Niagara County farmers, Norman Pomeroy and Matthew O'Connor, neighbors, decided to go to the Centennial. They packed one carpet-bag in common for their baggage and boarded the train for Philadelphia. Although well to do farmers, their economic instincts warned them to beware the profiteering hotel keepers. So they sought a humble boarding house in the suburbs of the city. Returning one evening from sight-seeing at the exposition, the travelers were so weary that they retired immediately after supper. During the night Pomeroy was awakened by a tapping on the window. Assuring himself that the wallet under his pillow was still there, he investigated the cause of the disturbance of his slumbers. The noise had ceased and he decided that the overstrain of the day had worked an hallucination. Pomeroy dropped off to sleep, but presently was aroused by sounds which were unmistakably caused by a gentle tapping on the window pane. Exasperated, the man arose, picked up a boot, slipped to the window and raised it gently ready to give the joker or would-be burglar a rousing whack on the head if within reach. He stuck his head out of the window for a better view of the exterior world, and his curiosity was rewarded with a stinging blow on the cheek. The pain aroused all the Pomeroy French Huguenot fighting blood in his veins. Viciously he swung the boot at the unseen foe, only to hear it crash through tree branches. Laughing softly, in his enlightenment, he reached out into the night, grasped a branch, broke it off and turned on the gas and lit it. On the twig were two curious nuts. Pomeroy was a lover of nature, as I learned by many an interesting talk with him. He found time in his regular farming pursuits to study native trees and shrubs, and had forbidden his hired men to cut down any of the native nut trees on his 500 acre farm. But the nuts on the branch retrieved from darkness were specimens new to him and he could hardly wait for daylight to come to enable him to get acquainted with the tree which had invited his attention so rudely. Next morning Pomeroy learned that his new found arboreal friend was a Persian walnut. It was loaded and the wind storm of the night had covered the ground with shucked and unshucked nuts. By permission of the landlord, he gathered a peck of the Persian walnuts, wrapped O'Connor's and his own belongings in a newspaper and filled the carpet-bag with the nut treasures. Arriving home, the tourists stopped first at O'Connor's house. There they had to relate the experience of their great trip to an assemblage of the two families. The recounting of the Centennial wonders took until midnight. When Pomeroy picked up his carpet-bag to go home, it was empty! The children had made a discrete retirement after having consumed the entire peck of English walnuts, as the shells in the kitchen disclosed. Luckily for the youngsters, they were safe in bed and asleep.