s all sublime; read
another, and, under circumstances equally desperate, it appears base,
selfish, grovelling. The difference lies simply in the influence of
a few leading spirits. Ordinarily, as is the captain, so are the
officers, so are the passengers, so are the sailors. Bonaparte said,
that at the beginning of almost every battle there was a moment when
the bravest troops were liable to sudden panic; let the personal
control of the general once lead them past that, and the field was
half won.

The courage of self-devotion, lastly, is the faculty evoked by
special exigencies, in persons who have before given no peculiar
evidence of courage. It belongs especially to the race of martyrs
and enthusiasts, whose personal terrors vanish in the greatness of
the object, so that Joan of Arc, listening to the songs of the angels,
does not feel the flames. This, indeed, is the accustomed form in
which woman's courage proclaims itself at last, unsuspected until
the crisis comes. This has given us the deeds of Flora Macdonald,
Jane Lane, and the Countess of Derby; the rescue of Lord Nithisdale
by his wife, and that planned for Montrose by Lady Margaret Durham;
the heroism of Catherine Douglas, thrusting her arm within the
stanchions of the doorway to protect James I. of Scotland, till his
murderers shattered the frail barrier; and that sublimest narrative
of woman's devotion, Gertrude Van der Wart at her husband's execution.
It is possible that all these women may have been timid and shrinking,
before the hour of trial; and every emergency, in peace or war,
brings out some such instances. At the close of the troubles of 1856,
in Kansas, a traveller chanced to be visiting a lady in Lawrence, who,
in opening her work-basket, accidentally let fall a small pistol. She
smiled and blushed, and presently acknowledged, that, when she had
first pulled the trigger experimentally, six months before, she had
shut her eyes and screamed, although there was only a percussion-cap
to explode. Yet it afterwards appeared that she was one of the few
women who remained in their houses, to protect them by their presence,
when the town was entered by the Missourians,--and also one of the
still smaller number who brought their rifles to aid their husbands
in the redoubt, when two hundred were all that could be rallied
against three thousand, in September of that eventful year. Thus
easily is the transition effected!

This is the courage, also, of Af