In such a mood of mind, many men and women have gone mad; but Barbara Brande’s brain was too strong and healthy to permit her to lose her consciousness of suffering in madness. In such a mood many have committed suicide—but Barbara Brande, untutored child of the sea as she was, and driven to despair as she had been, possessed too deep a reverence for the laws of God and his holy gift of life, to cast that life away and rush unbidden into the awful presence of the Giver! So she struggled bravely to free her spirit from the writhing, binding, fettering serpents of anguish and despair! Her heart panted to lose its dreadful sense of loss in action! Oh, action! action! action! Such action as that into which despairing man hurls himself, and forgets his despair; struggling, laborious, dangerous action! Strife, battle, war!—war with circumstance, with man, with the elements! With such irresistible impulses, women have sometimes enlisted as soldiers—aye, and won laurels, too, in the fields of victory; but Barbara Brande, with all her strength, and fire, and courage, and her passionate desire to stun the maddening consciousness of anguish in some stormy conflict and career—could not have done any thing like this. Her maiden modesty would not have permitted her to change her woman’s dress for that of man, any more than her native truthfulness would have allowed her to practice a deception in regard to her sex. And her free, wild, ungovernable spirit could no more have submitted to the control of camp discipline, than her merciful heart could have taken part in the bloodshed of the battle-field. So, though the wounded, tortured, maddened young creature thought of this, she could not enter upon such a life. A stricken lioness, with the arrow quivering in her flesh, lays not down in patient suffering, but runs roaring, through the desert, until the shaft falls from the wound, or she drops dead! So Barbara! she longed to propel herself headlong into some stormy, stunning strife! Meanwhile two boy brothers of eleven and twelve looked up in her face for comfort and support,—looked up to the brave and gentle sister, who was also the only mother they had ever known. “Oh, sister, sister! do not stare so! You frighten us to death with your eyes!” they said, as they came to her where she sat, in the dreary, half-furnished old parlor, _her_ chamber of desolation! They were kneeling each side of her, with their heads upon her lap. Her arms were around each boy, her face bent over them, and her wild black hair all unbound, and streaming around them. She might have seemed a widow with her orphans. But she was even a more desolate creature—this awfully bereaved maiden with her little brothers. For a widow has generally some knowledge of life and some experience to meet its exigencies; but what does a poor, wild girl, thunder-stricken, maddened, blinded, by such overwhelming calamity, know of battling the watch with fate? Nothing!