It came upon them like a stroke of lightning out of a clear sky. All were gathered together for their noon meal when Mary leaped to her feet and ran wildly about the room, shrieking in the terrifying tones of the insane. She caught the forks and spoons from the table, threw them about the room, and then, seizing a case knife, plunged it into the heart of her mother. Although one of the flying forks had struck her aged father in the head and wounded him severely, Mary sprang upon him and would certainly have killed the feeble old man then and there had not Charles caught her and in a terrible struggle overpowered her and wrested the knife from her grasp. Friends and neighbors came in, and the poor woman was taken to an asylum, where in a short time she recovered her reason and learned of the awful consequences of her madness. In those days hospitals for the insane were much more poorly managed than they are at present, and Charles could not be contented to think of his sister confined within their walls. Accordingly he went to the authorities, and after much persuasion they released her, under the condition that she should be constantly under care. Then began the long career of brotherly devotion which can scarcely be matched, and which never fails to excite our sympathy and admiration. We may well think it a terrible penance, for Mary's attacks recurred again and again, and more than once Charles had to take her back to the hospital for a brief time while her violence remained too great for him to control. There were long lucid intervals, however, and after a while both learned to recognize the symptoms which preceded an attack, and the two would wend their way to the asylum, where she could take refuge. They carried a straight-jacket with them for use in case she should suddenly become violent, for never could either escape from the nightmare of that first awful catastrophe. For forty years this companionship, this sublime devotion continued, even to the time of Charles Lamb's death in 1834. Both made many friends, and when the brother was laid away these friends came forward and took up the burden of Mary's care until she, too, died, nearly thirteen years later. The last years of Lamb's life were full of further trouble, that, combined with his crushing anxiety for Mary, broke his genial spirit and left him sad and melancholy. One of the greatest blows he suffered in his later life was the death of his life-long friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. See how fondly he wrote of this friend: "Since I feel how great a part he was of me his great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books without an ineffectual turning and reference to him.... He was my fifty-years-old friend without a dissension. I seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he lived.... What was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel."