last moments said to her daughter, who sat weeping at her bedside, "Leave me, my child; I cannot die while you are in the room." Many instances of similar conflicts between religion and nature have occurred in domestic history which have escaped general observation.

Mrs. Græme died, according to her expectations and wishes, during her daughter's absence, leaving behind her two farewell letters to be delivered to her upon her return; one, upon the choice of a husband, and the other upon the management of a family. These letters contain many original ideas, and the most ardent expressions of maternal affection. The tenor of these expressions may easily be conceived by the following sentence extracted from the introduction to one of them. "I have rested for some time with my pen in my hand, from being at a loss to find out an epithet to address you with, that shall fully express my affection for you. After a good deal of deliberation, I can find nothing that pleases me better than my own dear Betsy'. ”*

Miss Græme spent a year in England, where she was accompanied by the Rev. Dr. Richard Peters of Philadelphia, a gentleman of highly polished manners, and whose rank enabled him to introduce her to the most respectable circles of company. She sought, and was sought for, by the most celebrated literary gentlemen who flourished in England at the time of the accession of George the third to the throne. She was introduced to this monarch, and particularly noticed by him. The celebrated Dr. Fothergill, whom she consulted as a physician, became her friend and correspondent as long as he lived. An accident attached the sentimental and then popular author of Tristram Shandy to her. She took a seat upon the same stage with him at the York races. While bes were making upon different horses, she selected a small horse that was in the rear of the coursers as the subject of a trifling wager. Upon being

Mrs. Græme left letters to several of her friends, to be delivered to them after her death. The following is an extract from one of them to Mrs. Redman, the wife of the late Dr. John Redman:

"I have been waiting with a pleasing expectation of my dissolution a great while, and I believe the same portion of grace which has been afforded me hitherto, will not be withdrawn at that trying hour. My trust is in my heavenly Father's mercies, procured and promised for the all-sufficient merits of my blessed Saviour, so that whatever time it may be before you see this, or whatever weakness I may be under on my deathbed, be assured this is my faith; this is my hope from my youth up until now. And thus, my dear, I take my final leave of you. Adieu, forever.

Sept. 22, 1762

·ANNE GRÆME."

asked the reason for doing so, she said that the “race was not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong." Mr. Sterne, who stood near to her, was struck with this reply, and, turning hastily towards her, begged for the honour of her acquaintance. They soon became sociable, and a good deal of pleasant conversation took place between them, to the great entertainment of the surrounding company.

Upon her return to Philadelphia, she was visited by a numerous circle of friends, as well to condole with her upon the death of her mother, as to welcome her arrival to her native shores. She soon discovered by the streams of information she poured upon her friends, that she had been "all eye, all ear, and all grasp," during her visit to Great-Britain. The Journal she kept of her travels, was a feast to all who read it. Manners and characters in an old and highly civilized country, contrasted with those to which she had been accustomed in our own, accompanied with many curious facts and anecdotes, were the component parts of this interesting manuscript. Her modesty alone prevented its being made public, and thereby affording a specimen to the world, and to posterity, of her happy talents for observation, reflection, and composition.

In her father's family she now occupied the place of her mother. She kept his house, and presided at his table and fire-side in entertaining all his company. Such was the character of Dr. Græme's family for hospitality and refinement of manners, that all strangers of note who visited Philadelphia were introduced to it. Saturday evenings were appropriated for many years during Miss Græme's winter residence in the city, for the entertainment not only of strangers, but of such of her friends of both sexes as were considered the most suitable company for them. These evenings were, properly speaking, of the attic, kind. The genius of Miss Græme evolved the heat and light that animated them. One while she instructed by the stores of knowledge contained in the historians, philosophers, and poets of ancient and modern nations, which she called forth at her pleasure; and again she charmed by a profusion of original ideas, collected by her vivid and widely expanded imagination, and combined with exquisite taste and judgment into an endless variety of elegant and delightful forms. Upon these occasions her body seemed to evanish, and she appeared to be all mind. The writer of this memoir would have hesitated in giving this description of the luminous displays of Miss Græme's knowledge and eloquence at these intellectual banquets, did he not know there are several ladies and gentlemen now living in Philadelphia, who can testify that it is not exaggerated.

It was at one of these evening parties she first saw Mr. Hugh Henry Ferguson, a handsome and accomplished young gentleman who had

lately arrived in this country from Scotland. They were suddenly pleased with each other. Private interviews soon took place between them, and in the course of a few months they were married. The inequality of their ages, (for he was ten years younger than Miss Græme) was opposed, in a calculation of their conjugal happiness, by the sameness of their attachment to books, retirement, and literary society. They settled upon the estate in Montgomery County, which Mrs. Ferguson's father (who died at an advanced age soon after her marriage) bequeathed to her. But before the question of their happiness could be decided by the test of experiment, the dispute between Great-Britain and America took place, in which it became necessary for Mr. Ferguson to take part. He joined the former in the year 1775, and from that time a perpetual separation took place between him and Mrs. Ferguson. Other causes contributed to prevent their reunion after the peace of 1782; but the recital of them would be uninteresting as well asf oreign to the design of this publication. Mrs. Ferguson passed the interval between the year 1775 and the time of her death, chiefly in the country upon her farm, in reading, and in the different branches of domestic industry. A female friend who had been the companion of her youth, and whose mind was congenial to her own, united her destiny with hers, and soothed her various distresses by all the kind and affectionate offices which friendship and sympathy could dictate. In her retirement she was eminently useful. The doors of the cottages that were in her neighbourhood bore the marks of her footsteps, which were always accompanied or followed with cloathing, provisions, or medicines, to relieve the nakedness, hunger, or sickness of their inhabitants. During the time general Howe had possession of Philadelphia, she sent a quantity of linen into the city, spun with her own hands, and directed it to be made into shirts for the benefit of the American prisoners that were taken at the battle of Germantown.

Upon hearing, in one of her visits to Philadelphia, that a merchant once affluent in his circumstances, was suddenly thrown into gaol by his creditors, and was suffering from the want of many of the usual comforts of his life, she sent him a bed, and afterwards procured admission into his apartment, and put twenty dollars into his hands. He asked for the name of his benefactor. She refused to make herself This humane and charitable

known to him, and suddenly left him. act would not have been made known, had not the gentleman's description of her person and dress discovered it. At this time her annual income was reduced to the small sum of one hundred and sixty dollars a year, which had been saved by the friendship of the late Mr. George Meade, out of the wreck of her estate. Many such secret acts of charity, exercised at the expense of her personal and habitual com

forts, might be mentioned. They will all be made known elsewhere. In these acts she obeyed the gospel commandment of loving her neighbours better than herself. Her sympathy was not only active, but passive in a high degree. In the extent of this species of sensibility, she seemed to be all nerve. She partook of the minutest sorrows of her friends, and even a newspaper that contained a detail of public or private wo, did not pass through her hands without being bedewed with a tear. Nor did her sympathy with misery end here. The sufferings of the brute creation often drew sighs from her bosom, and led her to express a hope that reparation would be made to them for those sufferings in a future state of existence.

I have said that Mrs. Ferguson possessed a talent for poetry. Some of her verses have been published, and many of them are in the hands of her friends. They discover a vigorous poetical imagination, but the want of a poetical ear. This will not surprise those who know there may be poetry without metre, and metre without poetry.

The prose writings of Mrs. Ferguson indicate strong marks of genius, taste, and knowledge. Nothing that came from her pen was common. Even her hasty notes to her friends placed the most trivial subjects in such a new and agreeable light, as not only secured them from destruction, but gave them a durable place among the most precious fragments of fancy and sentiment.

Some of her letters will appear in future numbers of The Port Folio.

Mrs. Ferguson was a stranger to the feelings of a mother, for she had no children, but she knew, and faithfully performed all the duties of that relation to the son and daughter of one of her sisters, who committed them to her care upon her death bed. They both possessed hereditary talents and virtues. Her nephew, John Young, became under her direction, an accomplished scholar and gentleman. He died a lieutenant in the British army, leaving behind him a record of his industry and knowledge, in an elegant translation of d'Argent's Ancient Geography, into the English language. A copy of this valuable work is to be seen in the Philadelphia Library, with a tribute to the memory of the translator by Mrs. Ferguson.* The mind of her niece,

A singular incident laid the foundation for the literary acquirements of this young gentleman. Before his 12th year, he was an idle boy; about that time, his aunt locked him in her father's library, for four and twenty hours, as a punishment for some offence. In this situation, he picked up a book to relieve himself, from the uneasiness of his solitude. This book arrested and fixed his attention. He read it through, and from that time he became devoted to books and study.

Ann Young, was an elegant impression of her own: she married Dr. William Smith, of Philadelphia, and lived but a few years afterwards. She left a son and daughter; the latter followed her mother prematurely to the grave, in the year 1808, in the 30th year of her age; after exhibiting to a numerous and affectionate circle of acquaintances, a rare instance of splendid talents and virtues, descending unimpaired through four successive generations.

The virtues which have been ascribed to Mrs. Ferguson, were not altogether the effects of education, nor of a happy moral texture of mind. They were improved, invigorated, and directed in their exercises by the doctrines and precepts of Christianity. To impress the contents of the Bible more deeply upon her mind, she transcribed every chapter and verse in it, and hence arose the facility and success with which she frequently selected its finest historical and moral passages to illustrate or adorn the subjects of her writings and conversation.

She was well read in polemical divinity, and a firm believer in what are considered the mysteries of revelation. Although educated in the forms, and devoted to the doctrines of the church of England, she worshipped devoutly with other sects, when she resided among them, by all of whom she was with a singular unanimity believed to be a sincere and pious Christian.

There was a peculiarity in her disposition, which would seem, at first sight, to cast a shade over the religious part of her character. After the reduction of her income, she constantly refused to accept of the least pecuniary assistance, and even of a present, from any of her friends. Let such persons who are disposed to ascribe this conduct to unchristian pride, recollect, there is a great difference between that sense of poverty, which is induced by adverse dispensations of Providence, and that which is brought on by voluntary charities. Mrs. Ferguson conformed, in the place, and manner of her living, to the narrowness of her resources. She knew no want that could make a wise or good woman unhappy, and she was a stranger to the “real evil" of debt. Her charities, moreover, would not have been her own, had they been replaced by the charities of her friends.

The afflictions of this excellent woman from all the causes that have been mentioned, did not fill up the measure of her sufferings. Her passage out of life was accompanied with great and protracted pain. This welcome event took place on the 23rd of February, in the year 1801, in the 62d year of her age, at the house of Seneca Lukins, a member of the Society of Friends, near Græme Park. Her body was interred, agreeably to her request by the side of her parents in the enclosure of Christ Church, in Philadelphia.