she spent in it a portion almost of every day,-a secluded oratory, well fitted for meditation and prayer; more especially, as the dashing of the waters along their precipitous and rocky channel sheltered its privacy from the invasion of the ear, while its position concealed it from the eye of man.

Their intercourse, so very pleasing, was soon to come to a close; for Dugald had contracted a cold, which fixing upon his lungs, it became obvious to all, that a viru. lent consumption was carrying him down to the grave. Her conduct and feeling, during his illness, it was deeply affecting to witness. She almost never left his room; and exhausted all her ingenuity in devising whatever seemed likely to promote his comfort. When I visited him, I uniformly found her by his bedside; and remember very well, how carefully she seemed to avoid whatever might tend to distress or alarm him. When near him, or looking in the direction where he lay, she appeared always to smile; but when out of his sight, to be filled with deep and solemn anxiety; and although silent, she seemed like one engaged in earnest prayer. I have understood, that whenever she ceased to sustain the assumed cheerfulness of which I have spoken, she would rush from his room, and give vent to her feelings in sobs and tears; and then, as if disburdened of the accumulations of her heart's bitter grief, again resume, with a cheerful countenance, her little labours of love by the pillow of her dying brother. Upon one occasion only, according to her mother, when in his presence, her fortitude failed her.

He had requested her to look in his trunk for something he needed, and seeing there different objects which had interested him, such a conflict of feeling occurred in her mind, from joyful remembrances and dismal forebodings, that she could no longer conceal her grief; and she wept bitterly. When he asked the occasion of her sorrow, “Oh, I cannot think of our being parted; I cannot endure

it," she unguardedly exclaimed: but, by some kindly and soothing expressions of her brother, such as, if they were parted they would meet again, (for he was piously disposed,) she regained, and never afterward lost her tranquillity.

But her anxious love was not merely manifested in watching by his pillow; it vented itself also in frequent and importunate intercessions for his life, before the throne of the great Disposer and Numberer of our days. Not to mention her brief ejaculations, prompted continually by her vehement anxieties; she set apart various seasons in the day, for retiring to some secret place, chiefly to her little garden; where she might pour out the burden of her soul's anguish into the sympathizing bosom of God. Often she would fast, even for a whole day, that her mind, as she conceived, might be fitter for devotion; and the devotion itself, as she fondly hoped, more acceptable to the witness of his children's necessities. In all this, as she has sometimes told me, she persisted, from an idea that God would not continue neglectful or insensible, but would at last yield to such earnest and incessant prayers.

As her brother's malady increased, and her hopes were diminishing, still these exercises, with strong cryings and tears, were not intermitted, but rather multiplied, even to the close of his life; the spirit which prompted them, gathering strength and fervour as it were, from the very despair that threatened to extinguish all prospect of recovery.

In the retrospect of this period of her life, she failed not to see the sin of her devotions; unmarked, as they were, by any resignation to the will of God, or any know. ledge of his character as a being more willing to grant, than his creatures are to ask what is needful to their true happiness. The importunate widow in the Parable, she took for her example; and her recorded success stimulated Isabella's exertions: but when the result in her own case was different, she was led to form harsh judgments of him

to whom she had presented so many entreaties. This was sufficiently apparent from the effect which her brother's death had, for some time, upon her mind. She had loved him very tenderly, and she now felt, that her heart was indeed laid waste and desolate; and the more so, because she could not pray for resignation: the fact of his death seeming decisive of God's indifference to her desires and necessities; and therefore precluding the privilege and freedom of entreating from him any comfort or consolation. The prolongation of Dugald's life was all she had desired, or hoped for; and now, that a deaf ear had been turned to her prayers, her abstinence, her fasting, to which she had attached such importance and efficacy, she could discover nothing in his love or tenderness which seemed to justify such a blasting of her past hopes; and therefore, was not prepared to see in his character, or feelings towards her, any thing to relieve the desolateness of her bereavement. At this period she certainly had no plea. sure in living; for this she used to say was the habitual language of her feelings after Dugald's death, "Well, I'll lie down and die too;" thinking with painful sympathy of Jonah, when murmuring, "it is better to die than to live." She now very seldom prayed, although for months she had so intensely engaged in exercises of devotion. Indeed the necessity which urged them had ceased; for it argues a singular state of mind, that while praying so repeatedly for her brother, so far as she remembered, she never at that time prayed for herself.

Defeated in her struggles for an object so deeply interesting, such apathy and indifference succeeded, that, according to her own expression, all idea of God, as the hearer of prayer, seemed for some time to have faded from her mind. This state, however, was not likely to last very Such feelings of loneliness, when she mourned the departure of her beloved brother, constrained her, at last,

long.

to look to God for comfort and relief. Her thoughts of that eternity, the unseen, mysterious, unchanging condi-tion upon which he had entered, involved considerations of his relationship to God, and naturally excited anxieties about her own. Frequently, she now pondered upon the probable safety of her soul, beseeching light and comfort from God, while engaged in devotional exercises, and in reading the Scripture. Her health had been considerably injured by her attendance on her brother, so that, for some time, she had been unable for the exertion of walking to church; but now she resumed her regular appearance there, and manifested an increasing depth of interest in the exercises of the Sunday-school. Such were her feelings and employments, when her father, previously in delicate health, became very ill, exhibiting symptoms of a disease resembling that which had terminated the life of her brother, whose death she had not yet ceased deeply to mourn. She was called upon to repeat the performance of those duties which, in the preceding year, had so engrossed her; and the same incessant watchfulness, so tender and unwearied, I witnessed by the pillow of her dying father, as was manifested during the sufferings of her departed brother. The prospect of his death filled her with great apprehen. sion and grief of spirit; but she did not attempt those exercises, and intercessions, and fasting, with which, formerly, she had hoped to subdue the divine sovereignty to a compliance with her wishes: for these having totally failed to draw forth in any degree, as she conceived, the compassion of God, she was induced to regard them as utterly vain; while she recoiled from their repetition as a presumptuous interference with the irrevocable decrees of the Giver of life and death.

Her father died, and there does not appear to have been in her feelings and views, at such a crisis, any thing pecu liar, but such as a girl of strong and tender affections expe.

riences when bereaved of a kind-hearted and indulgent parent. As she had not recovered entirely the exhaustion induced by her anxiety during the illness of her brother, what she had again experienced seems to have seriously injured her health. Her frame, indeed, naturally feeble and delicate, was thus so weakened as to prepare the way for that malady, which, at an early period, was appointed to dissolve it. This new bereavement, although it produced no decided effect upon her mind, was not fitted to diminish her serious thoughts regarding God and eternal things. She appears indeed to have commenced gradually the searching of the Scriptures more diligently, in the hope of light; and various passages would excite temporary interest and anxiety. The state of her health, the absolute poverty in which the death of her father had left the family, and other circumstances, combined to teach, in an especial manner, that this world had only broken cisterns for her; and that there was only one fountain which could contri. bute to her happiness. This she was constrained from time to time to think of and seek after; but, as yet, her spirit was not truly awakened to see clearly her necessity or its remedy, or what station she was occupying in the universe of God.

In "dim uncertainty" she remained, ignorant of her relationship to him who is the prince of life, the first-born and head of a living family-that "peculiar people," that "chosen generation," who, amid a perverse and polluted world, are predestinated to be conformed to the image of his own living piety and virtue. Yet in what did she dif fer from the great majority of Christian professors, both old and young, who, through this dark ignorance of what alone can give to all they do, a holy life and vigour, manifest merely a form of godliness, while performing their round of duties in listless servility of spirit; or attending, with scrupulous exactness, to some ritual of a prescribed devotion.