tous third year of life, I had
learned to read the New Testament readily, and was deeply grieved that
our pastor played "patty cake" with my hands, instead of hearing me
recite my catechism, and talking of original sin. During that winter I
went regularly to school, where I was kept at the head of a
spelling-class, in which were young men and women. One of these, Wilkins
McNair, used to carry me home, much amused, no doubt, by my supremacy.
His father, Col. Dunning McNair, was proprietor of the village, and had
been ridiculed for predicting that, in the course of human events, there
would be a graded, McAdamized road, all the way from Philadelphia to
Pittsburg, and that if he did not live to see it his children would. He
was a neighbor and friend of Wm. Wilkins, afterwards Judge, Secretary
of War, and Minister to Russia, and had named his son for him. When his
prediction was fulfilled and the road made, it ran through his land, and
on it he laid out the village and called it Wilkinsburg. Mr. McNair
lived south of it in a rough stone house--the manor of the
neighborhood--with half a dozen slave huts ranged before the kitchen
door, and the gateway between his grounds and the village, as seen from
the upper windows of our house, was, to me, the boundary between the
known and the unknown, the dread portal through which came Adam, the
poor old ragged slave, with whom my nurse threatened me when I did not
do as she wished. He was a wretched creature, who made and sold hickory
brooms, as he dragged his rheumatic limbs on the down grade of life,
until he found rest by freezing to death in the woods, where he had gone
for saplings.

I was born on the 6th of December, 1815, in Pittsburg, on the bank of
the Monongahela, near its confluence with the Allegheny. My father was
Thomas Cannon, and my mother Mary Scott. They were both Scotch-Irish
and descended from the Scotch Reformers. On my mother's side were
several men and women who signed the "Solemn League and Covenant," and
defended it to the loss of livings, lauds and life. Her mother, Jane
Grey, was of that family which was allied to royalty, and gave to
England her nine day's queen.

This grandmother I remember as a stately old lady, quaintly and plainly
dressed, reading a large Bible or answering questions by quotations from
its pages. She was unsuspicious as an infant, always doubtful about
"actual transgressions" of any, while believing in the total depravity
of all. Educ