the household, and in their old age one
daughter only was left to these parents. Mr. Prince's contemporaries
speak of his wonderful resignation at these repeated afflictions. His
sermon on the death of his daughter Deborah gives the religious
experience of a young girl who, in those rigorous Calvinistic days, had
her sweet young life overshadowed by the terror of God's wrath for what
she considered her unbelief. A few extracts will give a good idea of Mr.
Prince's impassioned, pathetic, and even dramatic style, and his
apparently "trifling details" add vividness to the picture. His son
besought him to dispense with the custom of a funeral oration in his
case; but the feelings of the father were sacrificed to what he
considered his duty to the youth of his congregation on the occasion of
his daughter's death.

He said: "You have known her character; I need not give it to this
assembly, and I am more especially restrained, not only by my near
relation, but by what she said to me, with all the emotions of a grieved
heart, three or four days before her death. 'Dear father, I have been
told you speak to people in my commendation. I beg you would not. I am
a poor, miserable sinner; you cannot think how it grieves me.' On these
accounts I must forbear her character; but because God's dealings with
her, both before and in her sickness, have been remarkable, I cannot but
think it will be for his glory and your advantage to present some of
them to you. As she grew up, God was pleased to refrain her from
vanities, move her to study her Bible and best of authors, both of
history and divinity. Dr. Watts and Mrs. Rowe's writings were familiar
to her. The spirit of God worked upon her at fourteen, but she did not
join the church until two years later, when she narrowly escaped
drowning, in her father's bosom. For, as I had just received her in my
arms, in a boat, in order to go on board a vessel in the harbor, bound
to her Uncle Denny's, at Georgetown, on the Kennebec river, the boat
steered off, and I fell back with her into the salt water, ten feet
deep, with which she was almost filled, and we both continued under it,
out of sight of her brother and sister looking on, for about a minute.
If a couple of strangers from Connecticut had not been near at hand to
reach her quickly, in a minute or more she had been past recovery....

"In all weathers she sought the house of God, and she was afraid of
being deceived. Though her jealousie