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, 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.

"I found he was not quite satisfied with what had been done for