She pored over the Shorter Catechism, and acquainted herself with her Bible. But for years together, at this period, she suffered much distress of mind. Her imagination possessed a wild activity, and the scenes and shapes which it was continually calling up before her were all of horror and dismay--the place of the lost, the appalling forms with which fancy invests the fallen spirits, the terrors of the last day, and the dread throne of judgment. But a time of peace and comfort came; and she was enabled to lay hold on God in faith and hope as _her_ God, through the all-sufficient blood of the atonement. And this hold she never after relinquished. There was no pause in her humble toils. From her early occupations in the fields, she passed in riper youth to the labours of the farm-house; and at the age of twenty-five experienced yet another change, in becoming the wife of a farm-servant, a quiet man of solid character, and whose religious views and feelings coincided with her own. Her humble home was a solitary hut on the uplands, far from even her nearest neighbours; but it was her home, and she was happy. With the consent of her husband, she took her aged mother under her care, and succeeded in repaying more than the obligations incurred in infancy; for her instructions, through the blessing of God, were rendered apparently the means of the old woman's conversion. There were sorrows that came to her even at the happiest, but they were mingled with comfort. She lost one of her children by small-pox at a very early age; and yet, very early as the age was, evidence was not wanting in its death that the Psalmist spoke with full meaning when he said that God can perfect praise out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. But there was a deeper grief awaiting her. After a happy union of twelve years, her husband was seized in the night in their lonely shieling by a mortal distemper, at a time when only herself and her young children were present, and ere assistance could be procured he expired. There is something extremely touching in the details of this event, as given by the poet, her grandson. They strongly show how real an evil poverty is, in even the most favourable circumstances, when the hour of distress comes. Cowper ceased to envy the "'_peasant's nest_" when he thought how its solitude made scant the means of life.' We would almost covet the hut of Annie M'Donald as described by her grandson. 'It appeared,' he says, 'as if separated and raised above the world by the cultureless and elevated solitude on which it stood. Around it on every side were grey rocks, peering out from among tufted grass, heath furze, and many-coloured mosses; forming what had been, till more recently--when the whole was converted into a plantation--a rather extensive sheep-walk. For an extent equal to more than half the horizon, the eye might stretch away to the distant mountains, or repose on the intervening valleys; and from the highest part of