And now began at Bruges a time of such stress and trouble for my mother as few women have ever passed through. The grief, the Rachel sorrows of mothers watching by the dying beds of those, to save whose lives they would--ah! how readily!--give their own, are, alas, common enough. But no account, no contemplation of any such scene of anguish can give an adequate conception of what my mother went through victoriously. Her literary career had hitherto been a succession of triumphs. Money was coming in with increasing abundance. But these successes had not yet lasted long enough to enable her, in the face of all she had done for the ruined household to which she had returned from America, to lay by any fund for the future. And though the proceeds of her labour were amply sufficient for all current needs, it was imperative that that labour should not be suspended. It was under these circumstances that she had to pass her days in watching by the bedside of a very irritable invalid, and her nights--when he fortunately for the most part slept--in composing fiction! It was desirable to keep the invalid’s mind from dwelling on the hopelessness of his condition. And, indeed, he was constantly occupied in planning travels and schemes of activity for the anticipated time of his recovery, which she had to enter into and discuss with a cheerful countenance and bleeding heart. It was also especially necessary that my sisters, especially the younger, already threatened by the same malady, should be kept cheerful, and prevented from dwelling on the phases of their brother’s illness. This was the task in which, with agonised mind, she never faltered from about nine o’clock every morning till eight o’clock in the evening! Then with wearied body, and mind attuned to such thoughts as one may imagine, she had to sit down to her desk to write her novel with all the _verve_ at her command, to please light-hearted readers, till two or three in the morning! This, by the help of green tea and sometimes laudanum, she did daily and nightly till the morning of the 23rd of December of that sad 1834; and lived after it to be eighty-three! But her mind was one of the most extraordinarily constituted in regard to recuperative power and the capacity of throwing off sorrow, that I ever knew or read of. Any one who did not know her, as her own son knew her, might have supposed that she was deficient in sensibility. No judgment could be more mistaken. She felt acutely, vehemently. But she seemed to throw off sorrow as, to use the vulgar phrase, a duck’s back throws off water, because the nature of the organism will not suffer it to rest there. How often have I applied to her the words of David under a similar affliction!