But
even here there was for them no permanent place of rest. A traveller
passing through Norristown, on his way from the capital to the Blue
Mountains, recognised Sparks, and told somebody he knew that he
wished the community joy of having added to the number of its
inhabitants the notorious locksmith of Philadelphia. The news soon
spread. The family found that they were shunned as they had formerly
been by those who had known them longer than the good people of
Norristown, and had a fair prospect of starvation opening before
them. They removed again. This time there was no inducement to
linger, for they had no local attachments to detain them. They
crossed the mountains, and, descending into the vale of the
Susquehanna, pitched their tent at Sunbury. Here the same temporary
success excited the same hopes, only to be blighted in the bud by the
breath of slander, which seemed so widely circulated as to leave them
hardly any asylum within the limits of the State. We need not
enumerate the different towns and villages in which they essayed to
gain a livelihood, and failed.
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