"To train her betimes for the future dispensations of his providence, the Lord touched the heart of this chosen vessel in her early youth. The spirit of prayer sanctified her infant lips, and taught her, as far back as her memory could go, to pour out her heart before God. She had not reached her eleventh year when she selected a bush in the retirement of the field, and there devoted herself to her God by faith in the Redeemer. The incidents of her education, thoughtless companions, the love of dress, and the dancing-school, as she has herself recorded, chilled for a while the warmth of her piety, and robbed her bosom of its peace. But her gracious Lord revisited her with his mercy, and bound her to himself in an everlasting covenant, which she sealed at his own table about the seventeenth year of her age.
"Having married, a few years after, Dr. John Graham, surgeon to the 60th British regiment, she accompanied him first to Montreal, and shortly after to Fort Niagara. Here, during four years of temporal prosperity, she had no opportunity, even for once, of entering the habitation of God's house, or hearing the sound of his gospel. Secluded from the waters of the sanctuary and all the public means of growth in grace, her religion began to languish and its leaf to droop. But the root was perennial--it was of the seed of God, which liveth and abideth for ever. The Sabbath was still to her the sign of his covenant. On that day of rest, with her Bible in her hand, she used to wander through the woods, renew her self-dedication, and pour out her prayer for the salvation of her husband and her children. He who 'dwelleth not in temples made with hands,' heard her cry from the wilds of Niagara, and strengthened her with strength in her soul.
"By one of those vicissitudes which checker military life, the regiment was ordered to the island of Antigua in the West Indies. Here she met with that exquisite enjoyment to which she had been long a stranger--the communion of kindred spirits in the love of Christ: and soon did she need all the soothing and support which it is fitted to administer; for in a very short time the husband of her youth, the object of her most devoted affection, her sole earthly stay, was taken from her by death. The stroke was, indeed, mitigated by the sweet assurance that he slept in Jesus. But a heart like hers, convulsed by a review of the past and anticipation of the future, would have burst with agony, had she not known how to pour its sorrows into the bosom of her heavenly Father. Trials which beat sense and reason to the ground, raise up the faith of the Christian, and draw her closer to her God. O, how divine to have him as the rock of our rest when every earthly reliance is a broken reed.