The Earle family : Ralph Earle and his descendants

Gen.] GENEALOGY. 349
With the exception of one year at a private institution in Massa-
chusetts, he was educated in the schools of Philadelphia. In accord-
ance with the desire of his father that he should learn some handicraft,
he selected that of a mechanic, and, at the age of fifteen years, entered
the large locomotive works of M. W. Baldwin & Co., in Philadel-
phia. He worked at machine making several years, and then began
the study of law. Prior to entrance upon its practice, he passed a
year in Europe, following the then recent example of Bayard Taylor
by making the tour upon the continent mostly on foot and with
knapsack and staff. This Bohemian life is full of the charm of
an unchecked freedom. To him it proved to be unwontedly fraught
with adventure, as his tour covered the period of the political upheav-
ings and revolutions in the continental States, in the memorable year
1848.
At Munich he witnessed the struggles and riots which culminated
in the expulsion from the Bavarian capital of the notorious Spanish
adventuress, Lola Montez, whose beauty and diplomacy had capti-
vated the King and won from him not only the title of Countess, but
an estate commensurate to the support of the dignity of that title. He
entered Vienna on foot, late in the afternoon of the day upon which
Prince Metternich, the great diplomat and the head and front of
Austrian absolutism, fled from it in a carriage. He reached Venice
on the day the Austrians were driven from the city of the Lagoons,
and all was still confusion and uproar. He was at Rome when Pius
the Ninth attempted to flee from that city ; at Naples he was a wit-
ness to the conflicts between the insurgents and the royal troops, in
the unsuccessful attempt to depose the tyrannical Bourbon King
and finally, some months later, he was a spectator of the street fights
and the terrible carnage in Paris, consequent upon the closing, by
the National Assembly, of the National workshops which were the
pet device of Louis Blanc for the relief of the laboring classes, but
which were rapidly pushing France to the verge of bankruptcy. In
these bloody encounters it was estimated that no less than fifteen
thousand persons were killed or wounded.
In Venice, in the piazza di San Marco, and near the Ducal Palace,
he asked a man unpacking muskets where they were made,
and was thereupon seized and thrown into prison, with a dirty tin
cup two-thirds full of water wherewith to quench his thirst, and some
boards placed at an angle of about twenty-five degrees, whereupon,
;