her memory until all were gone, "the old
familiar faces." Long after she was married to another, Lamb used to be
seen at evening pacing up and down in front of her house, hoping to
catch a glimpse of her through the windows. But after he had taken Mary
to be his charge it was impossible to think of marriage. He could not
ask another to share his sad vigils with the afflicted sister, nor hope
that another would look upon her with his eyes; so he buried his romance
out of sight, and never turned to that phase of a man's life again. At
twenty-two one does not easily give up the thoughts of love, or the
hopes of home with wife and children,--and Charles had his struggle, as
any strong man would have had; but he conquered himself once again, and
went bravely on. Day by day he toiled at the India House, never losing
time, never taking a vacation, ever at his post till he was fifty years
old, when he "came home forever."

During those thirty years of steady toil he went through many sad
experiences with Mary; but he must earn their daily bread, and he never
left his post. Many were the nights he spent in anxious watchings with
her,--for she had periodical returns of her insanity during all this
time,--when, sleepless and harassed to the point of exhaustion with her
dangerous vagaries, he must still rise in the morning and go to his
desk. Many were the days when he ran in hot haste the moment he was
released, to see that she was still safe; even many hand-to-hand
encounters he had with her in her dangerous hours,--but no murmur ever
escaped his lips at all this. When she became very bad he took her back
to the asylum, and she remained sometimes for weeks, sometimes for
months; but he always eagerly reclaimed her the moment she was better.
He took her with him on little journeys,--a strait-jacket always safely
packed in her portmanteau by herself,--and one time she went mad while
they were travelling in the diligence and far from home. Often he wrote
to their friends in the later days, when he had become somewhat famous
and friends had grown plenty, to apologize for not keeping engagements
or accepting invitations, "My sister is taken ill." As George W. Curtis
once wrote,--

"In those few words how much tragedy lies hidden! What a life of
patient heroism do they suggest!--in comparison with which the
career of Lamb's huge contemporary, Bonaparte, shrinks into the
meanest melodrama; while the misanthropic mo