Horner's kitchen, and I went home full of solemn resolves and sad
forebodings.

This is probably what evangelists would call my conversion, and it came
in my third summer. There was a fire in the grate when mother showed Dr.
Robt. Wilson, our family physician, a pair of wristbands and collar I
had stitched for father, and when they spoke of me as not being three
years old--but then I had in my mind the marks of that "great
awakening."

To me, no childhood was possible under the training this indicates, yet
in giving that training, my parents were loving and gentle as they were
faithful. Believing in the danger of eternal death, they could but guard
me from it, by the only means 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