On the passage home, in August, Mrs. Ware had another severe trial of her physical and mental energies,--a trial that is supposed to have essentially impaired the vigor of a remarkably strong and enduring frame. Mr. Ware, who had gained little if any strength during their whole absence, became severely ill from a painful and alarming attack of acute disease. His wife was his only nurse, and, if we recollect right, the only physician. And there, amid all the deprivations and discomforts of the _sea_, confined to the narrow range of a small state-room, carrying in her arms a restless infant, of which those most willing could but seldom relieve her, and with the whole weight of the responsibility upon her saddened heart, that wife and mother performed offices and made exertions, which, by some acquainted with all the circumstances, have been called "almost superhuman." One fearful night especially, the night which was to determine the result, she watched over the flickering and apparently expiring light of the life most dear to her, in anxious and most arduous services, until the crisis had passed. Her husband recovered from this attack almost entirely, before the end of the voyage; but the effect upon herself, of all she had done and endured in the last seventeen months, was a prostrating and protracted sickness soon after her return. Up to this time, we suppose Mrs. Ware to have possessed a power of action and endurance seldom equalled in her own sex or in the same walk of life. Yet she used to say that her natural temperament was sluggish rather than active, and that her activity was an exertion. Recurring, some years later, to this same season, she writes: "You do not know me as well as you might, or you would not talk of my _activity_. Naturally I am essentially indolent; and to this day no one knows the effort it often costs me to rouse myself from my lethargy. Still I have had a pride in my physical ability, which has sometimes impelled me when better motives ought to have operated. But that pride had a fall, when I went to Europe with Mr. Ware, from which, it seems to me, it can never rise again. Yet it may influence me when I do not suspect it, and I shall look out sharp for it." It was in this connection also that Mrs. Ware repelled the idea of "sacrifice" in such relations. "The phrase 'sacrifice for those we love,' I do not quite understand. I should think the thing intended was more nearly allied to the germ of selfish gratification, and therefore as little entitled to the appellation of a virtue as any other selfish propensity." Just before leaving America for this European tour, when not strong herself, she had written to her husband, "I am very much afraid of becoming too thoughtful of this poor body of mine." And now, on her return, she was compelled to think of it more than ever before. X. LIFE IN CAMBRIDGE.