"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,
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.
"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, it was accordingly given. In the morning Dr. Bowie thought him so well I did not ask for any other assistance. At ten o'clock his fever greatly increased, though not so violent as it had been the day before. He was advised to lose a little blood, which he did; and towards evening it again abated.