ead,
she could have no hope of returning on the morrow. She had suffered too
long from hunger and privation to hope to be able to return and overtake
the relief party. It was certain life or certain death. On the side
of the former was maternal love; on the side of the latter, wifely
devotion. The whole wide range of history can not produce a parallel
example of adherence to duty, and to the dictates of conjugal fidelity.
With quick, convulsive pressure of her little ones to her heart; with a
hasty, soul-throbbing kiss upon the lips of each; with a prayer that was
stifled with a sob of agony, Tamsen Donner hurried away to her husband.
Through the gathering darkness, past the shadowy sentinels of the
forest, they watched with tearful eyes her retreating form. As if she
dared not trust another sight of the little faces--as if to escape the
pitiful wail of her darlings--she ran straight forward until out of
sight and hearing. She never once looked back.

There are mental struggles which so absorb the being and soul that
physical terrors or tortures are unnoticed. Tamsen Donner's mind was
passing through such an ordeal. The fires of Moloch, the dreadful
suttee, were sacrifices which long religious education sanctioned,
and in which the devotees perished amidst the plaudits of admiring
multitudes. This woman had chosen a death of solitude, of hunger, of
bitter cold, of pain-racked exhaustion, and was actuated by only the
pure principles of wifely love. Already the death-damp was gathering on
George Donner's brow. At the utmost, she could hope to do no more than
smooth the pillow of the dying, tenderly clasp the fast-chilling hand,
press farewell kisses upon the whitening lips, and finally close the
dear, tired eyes. For this, only this, she was yielding life, the
world, and her darling babes. Fitted by culture and refinement to be
an ornament to society, qualified by education to rear her daughters to
lives of honor and usefulness, how it must have wrung her heart to allow
her little ones to go unprotected into a wilderness of strangers. But
she could not leave her husband to die alone. Rather solitude, better
death, than desert the father of her children. O, Land of the Sunset!
let the memory of this wife's devotion be ever enshrined in the hearts
of your faithful daughters! In tablets thus pure, engrave the name of
Tamsen Donner.

When the June sunshine gladdened the Sacramento Valley, three little
barefooted girls wal