Before my grandfather left Wales he had married a distant cousin, Ellin
Owen, and on her death, childless, he took to wife, many years later, her
younger sister, Gainor [Footnote: Thus early we shed the English prejudice
against marriage with a deceased wife's sister.] for these Owens, our
kinsmen, had also become Friends, and had followed my grandfather's example
in leaving their home in Merionethshire. To this second marriage, which
occurred in 1713, were born my aunt, Gainor Wynne, and, two years later, my
father, John Wynne. I have no remembrance of either grandparent. Both lie
in the ground at Merion Meeting-house, under nameless, unmarked graves,
after the manner of Friends. I like it not.

My father, being a stern and silent man, must needs be caught by his very
opposite, and, according to this law of our nature, fell in love with Marie
Beauvais, the orphan of a French gentleman who had become a Quaker, and was
of that part of France called the Midi. Of this marriage I was the only
surviving offspring, my sister Ellin dying when I was an infant. I was born
in the city of Penn, on January 9, 1753, at 9 P.M.




II


I have but to close my eyes to see the house in which I lived in my youth.
It stood in the city of Penn, back from the low bluff of Dock Creek, near
to Walnut street. The garden stretched down to the water, and before the
door were still left on either side two great hemlock-spruces, which must
have been part of the noble woods under which the first settlers found