To a being ambitious and imaginative as Myra, this interview with her mother was calculated to make a painful and solemn impression. The one great idea of her life became a firm resolve; to that she was ready to sacrifice domestic peace and all those feminine aims which spring from highly cultivated tastes. Still womanly in all her acts, she took upon herself the research and duties of a man, not alone, but hand in hand with the husband whose happiness and aggrandizement would be secured by these exertions. But the vast property of Daniel Clark had been scattered far and wide by the men who had taken it in trust. The personal property had melted away first, then tract after tract of land, block upon block of real estate had followed, till the claimants, most of them innocent purchasers, might be counted by hundreds. But the greater the obstacles that presented themselves, the more resolute became this young creature in the advocacy of her own just cause. All necessary evidence of the existence of a last will and of its destruction was secured; witnesses of Zulima’s marriage with Daniel Clark in Philadelphia still existed. The mother herself, though shrinking from the cruel publicity of her wrongs, gave such aid as her naturally shrinking nature, now rendered almost timid by suffering, would permit. Men of influence, struck by the sublime spectacle of a fair young creature, with scarcely the physical strength of a child, entering courageously on a battle where such fearful odds prevailed against her, came generously to her support. The great fight of her life opened hopefully; victory might be distant, but she would not doubt that it would come at last. But in the midst of her first struggle she had forgotten to be prudent, indeed precaution was scarcely natural to that early period of her life. By adoption she had become a child of the North, but the warm genial glow of her blood still sympathized with the sunny climate to which she had moved, fearlessly, with her little children at the most dangerous season of the year. But her husband was a northern man by birth, and he did not assimilate readily to the hot, moist climate of New Orleans. The excitement into which he was thrown doubtless added to the causes which oppressed him; in the midst of his struggles, in the full bloom and force of his manly youth, Whitney was stricken down among the first victims that the yellow fever seized upon that year.