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 jealousies and fears were troublesome, I think they were useful. Sometimes she had light and comfort; oftener otherwise. In her twentieth year she had a fever, and from the first she thought she should not live, complained of her stupidity of mind, impenitence and unbelief. I came home from afternoon exercise, found her so ill that her mother thought herself obliged to tell her, upon which she thanked her for her kindness, but quickly fell into great distress on being unprepared for eternity. It would break a heart of stone to hear her: 'Oh! dear sir, what shall I do?' ... Oh! the horrors of that night. It was one of the most distressing I ever knew. She wouldn't close her eyes for fear of dying. In the morning was a little more resigned, fell asleep, awoke refreshed, but still in darkness. 'Oh! dear father,' she would say, 'I have dreadfully apostatized from Christ.' Mr. Sewall and I labored with her for days, but we found nobody but the Almighty could do it. "Dr. Sewall said, 'If she died in darkness, we should have good ground to hope that she would awake in glory.' To everything he would say she would reply, 'I cannot believe.' You must be sensible of a distressed father's heart, putting his soul in her soul's place for many weeks.