in her innocence, simplicity, playfulness, and modesty, she was a perfect child. Her conscientiousness and dutifulness were remarkably prominent; as they were also with Margaret. Her health, always very feeble, began to decline in 1823, when she was taken from school, and accompanied her mother on a visit to some relatives in Canada. While there she finished Amir Khan, her longest poem, and began a prose tale, called The Recluse of the Saranac. It was about this time that the Hon. Moss Kent, an early friend of her mother, became acquainted with Lucretia, and so deeply interested in her genius, that he resolved, if he could persuade her parents to resign her to his care, to afford her every advantage for improvement that the country could afford. At his suggestion, in November, 1824, she was placed under the care of Mrs. Willard; in whose seminary at Troy she remained during the winter. The following spring, she was transferred to a boarding school at Albany; but while there her health gave way, and she was obliged to return home to Plattsburg. The strength of affection, and the skill of physicians, failed, however, to restore her. The hand of Death alone gave her ease; and she gently fell asleep one morning in August 1825; exactly one month before her seventeenth birthday. President Morse, of the American Society of Arts, first published her biography; and soon after, a delightful memoir from the able pen of Miss Sedgwick spread the name of Lucretia Davidson far and wide.
Margaret Miller was born on the 26th of March, 1823. She was therefore but two years and a half old when Lucretia died; an event which made a deep impression on her. Although so young, she seemed not only to feel her loss, but to understand and appreciate her sister's character and talents; and from the first dawning of intellect gave evidence that she possessed the same. "By the time she was six years old," says her mother, "her language assumed an elevated tone; and her mind seemed filled with poetic imagery, blended with veins of religious thought." The sacred writings were her daily study. Devotional feelings seemed interwoven with her very existence. A longing after heaven, that her spirit might be free from the thraldom of earth, was as natural to her, as a longing for a holiday to be let loose from school is to other children. Yet she enjoyed most fully the quiet pleasures that surrounded her, and her heart was always swelling with love and gratitude. Sometimes, too, the consciousness of genius,— the inward assurance that she was a poet, — would make her think on what might be, were she to live; but the restless thoughts of