very
service you stand in need of, soothe your pains and comfort you under
the infirmities of old age.

"My dear, my worthy brother--how has that tender letter, and the
noble resolution he has taken, endeared him to me. It is certainly his
indispensable duty to stay with you in your present solitary
situation; such a dutiful, affectionate son must be a great comfort to
you, and he will not lose his reward.

"I am anxious, my dearest father, to know the particulars of my
mother's death: who attended her in her illness? was the nurse who was
with her a good woman? was she sensible? did she expect death? and did
she mention me, and leave me her blessing? My dear, dear father, tell
me all.

"Farewell, my beloved father; may your God and Redeemer be your
support and final portion, is the prayer of your affectionate
daughter,

"I. GRAHAM."

In her grief for the loss of her inestimable mother, Dr. Graham
had said to her that "God might perhaps call her to a severer trial by
taking her husband also," and the warning appeared prophetic; but her
own words best describe the emotions of her bleeding heart.

To Miss Margaret Graham, Glasgow.

"MY DEAR SISTER--Prepare yourself for a severe shock from an
event that has robbed me of every earthly joy. Your amiable brother is
no longer an inhabitant of this lower world. On the seventeenth of
November he was seized with a putrid fever, which, on the
twenty-second, numbered him with the dead, and left me a thing not to
be envied by the most abject beggar that crawls from door to door.
Expect not consolation from me: I neither can give nor take it. But
why say I so? _Yes, I can._ He died as a Christian, sensible to
the last, and in full expectation of his approaching end. O, you knew
not your brother's worth; you knew him not as a husband: he was not
the same as when you knew him in his giddy years: he was to me all
love, all affection, and partial to my every fault; prudent too in
providing for his family. I had gained such an entire ascendency over
his heart as I would not have given for the crown of Britain.

"On Wednesday, at one o'clock, the seventeenth day of November,
1773, my dear doctor was seized with a violent fever. I sent for his
assistant, Dr. Bowie: he not being at home, Dr. Muir came, who
prescribed an emetic in the evening, and his fever having greatly
abated,