Half a Century | Page 3

of which they had any knowledge.
Before the completion of that momentous 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. Educated in Ireland as an heiress, she had not been
taught to write, lest she should marry without the consent of her elder
brother guardian. She felt that we owed her undying gratitude for
bestowing her hand and fortune on our grandfather, who was but a
yoeman, even if "he did have a good leasehold, ride a high horse, wear
spurs, and have Hamilton blood in his veins." She made us familiar
with the battle of the Boyne and the sufferings in Londonderry, in both
of which her great-grandfather had shared, but was incapable of that
sectarian rancor, which marks so many descendents of the men who
met on those fields of blood and fought for their convictions.
In April, 1816, father moved from Pittsburg out to the new village of
Wilkinsburg; took with him a large stock of goods, bought property,
built the house in which I first remember him, and planted the apple
tree which imprinted the first picture on my memory. But the crash
which followed the last war with England brought general bankruptcy;
the mortgages on Col. McNair's estate made the titles valueless, and
this, with the fall of his real estate in Pittsburg, reduced father to
poverty, from which he never recovered.


CHAPTER II
.
PROGRESS IN CALVINISM--HUNT GHOSTS--SEE LA
FAYETTE.--AGE, 6-9.
My parents were members of the Covenanter Congregation, of which
Dr. John Black was pastor for forty-five years. He was a man of power,
a profound logician, with great facility in conveying ideas. To his
pulpit ministrations I am largely indebted for whatever ability I have to
discriminate between truth and falsehood; but the church was in
Pittsburg, and our home seven miles away, so we seldom went to
meeting. The rules of the denomination forbade "occasional hearing."

Father and mother had once been "sessioned" for stopping on their way
home to hear the conclusion of a communion service in Dr. Brace's
church, which was Seceder. So our Sabbaths were usually spent in
religious services at home. These I enjoyed, as it aided my life-work of
loving and thinking about God, who seemed,