attention to our common education, manners, religious instruction and
wants, renders it a fact in my mind, that they were ornaments to the
married state, and examples of connubial love, worthy of imitation. After
my remembrance they were strict observers of religious duties; for it was
the daily practice of my father, morning and evening, to attend, in his
family, to the worship of God.

Resolved to leave the land of their nativity they removed from their
residence to a port in Ireland, where they lived but a short time before
they set sail for this country, in the year 1742 or 3 on board the ship
Mary William, bound to Philadelphia, in the state of Pennsylvania.

The intestine divisions, civil wars, and ecclesiastical rigidity and
domination that prevailed those days, were the causes of their leaving
their mother country and a home in the American wilderness, under the mild
and temperate government of the descendants of William Penn; where without
fear they might worship God, and perform their usual avocations.

In Europe my parents had two sons and one daughter, whose names were John,
Thomas and Betsey; with whom, after having put their effects on board,
they embarked, leaving a large connexion of relatives and friends, under
all those painful sensations, which are only felt when kindred souls give
the parting hand and last farewell to those to whom they are endeared by
every friendly tie.

In the course of their voyage I was born, to be the sport of fortune and
almost an outcast to civil society; to stem the current of adversity
through a long chain of vicissitudes, unsupported by the advice of tender
parents, or the hand of an affectionate friend; and even without the
enjoyment from others, of any of those tender sympathies that are adapted