Mary kept about as close run of the Blue-Coat School as if she had been a Blue-Coat herself.  Still, she felt it her duty to keep one lesson in advance of her brother, just to know that he was progressing well.

He continued to go to school until he was fourteen, when he was set to work in the South Sea Company’s office, because his income was needed to keep the family.  Mary was educating the boy with the help of Mr. Salt’s library, for a boy as fine as Charles must be educated, you know.  By and by the bubble burst, and young Lamb was transferred to the East India Company’s office, and being promoted was making nearly a hundred pounds a year.

And Mary sewed and borrowed books and toiled incessantly, but was ill at times.  People said her head was not just right—­she was overworked and nervous or something!  The father had lost his place on account of too much gin and water, especially gin; the mother was almost helpless from paralysis, and in the family was an aged maiden aunt to be cared for.  The only regular income was the salary of Charles.

There they lived in their poverty and lowliness, hoping for better things!

Charles was working away over the ledgers, and used to come home fagged and weary, and Coleridge was far away, and there was no boy to educate now, and only sick and foolish and quibbling people on whom to strike fire.  The demnition grind did its work for Mary Lamb as surely as it is today doing it for countless farmers’ wives in Iowa and Illinois.

Thus ran the years away.

Mary Lamb, aged thirty-two, gentle, intelligent and wondrous kind, in sudden frenzy seized a knife from the table and with one thrust sank the blade into her mother’s heart.  Charles Lamb, in an adjoining room, hearing the commotion, entered quickly and taking the knife from his sister’s hand, put his arm about her and tenderly led her away.

Returning in a few moments, the mother was dead.

Women often make a shrill outcry at sight of a mouse; men curse roundly when large, buzzing, blue-bottle flies disturb their after-dinner nap; but let occasion come and the stuff of which heroes are made is in us all.  I think well of my kind.

Charles Lamb made no outcry, he shed no tears, he spoke no word of reproach.  He met each detail of that terrible issue as coolly, calmly and surely as if he had been making entries in his journal.  No man ever loved his mother more, but she was dead now—­she was dead.  He closed the staring eyes, composed the stiffening limbs, kept curious sightseers at bay, and all the time thought of what he could do to protect the living—­she who had wrought this ruin.

Charles was twenty-one—­a boy in feeling and temperament, a frolicsome, heedless boy.  In an hour he had become a man.

It requires a subtler pen than mine to trace the psychology of this tragedy; but let me say this much, it had its birth in love, in unrequited love; and the outcome of it was an increase in love.