Like one flying from some terrific enemy, she ran with all her speed towards the shore. The sea was now breaking over the rocks with tremendous force, and sending vast clouds of spray high into the air, while whole sheets of foam were wildly tossed about by the wind. Through these she struggled on; now stumbling or falling, as her tender feet yielded to the sharp rocks, till she reached a little promontory over the sea, on which the waves struck with all their force; and there, with streaming hair and dripping garments, she sat braving the hurricane, and, in a wild paroxysm of imagined heroism, daring fortune to her worst. Physical ills are as nothing to those that make the heart their dwelling-place; and to her there seemed an unspeakable relief in the thundering crash of the storm, as compared with the desolate silence of her lonely house. [Illustration: Self-same spot] The whole of that day saw her on the self-same spot; and there was she discovered at nightfall by some fishermen, propped up in a crevice of the rock, but cold, and scarcely conscious. They all knew her well, and with the tenderest care they carried her to her cottage. Even before they reached it, her mind began to wander, and wild and incoherent words dropped from her. That same night she was seized with fever; the benevolent but simple people about her knew not what to do; the nearest medical aid was many miles off; and when it did arrive, on the following morning, the malady had already attacked the brain. The same sad, short series of events so many have witnessed, so many have stood by, with breaking hearts, now occurred. To wild delirium, with all its terrible excesses, succeeded the almost more dreadful stupor; and to that again the brief lucid moment of fast-ebbing life; and then came the sleep that knows no waking--and my mother was at rest! CHAPTER XXII. THE VILLAGE OF REICHENAU. I must now ask of my reader to clear at a bound both time and space, and stand beside me some years later, and in a foreign land. The scene is at the foot of the Splugen Alps, in a little village begirt with mountains, every crag and eminence of which is surmounted by a ruined castle. There is a grandeur and solemnity in the whole landscape, not alone from its vast proportions, but from the character of impregnability suggested by those fastnesses and the gray, sad-colored tint of hill and verdure around. There is barely space for the# village in the narrow glen, which is traversed by two streams,--the one, yellow, turbid, and sluggish; the other, sparkling, bright, and impetuous. These are the Rhines, which, uniting below the village of Reichenau, form that noble river whose vine-clad cliffs and castled crags are lyrical in every land of Europe.