GARIBALDI'S WIFE.

Colonist, Volume IV, Issue 371, 14 May 1861, Page 4

GARIBALDI'S WIFE.

During Garibaldi's five or six years of service under the petty South American State— 4'a poor republic"—as he describes it in his autobiography, " unable to pay anybody,"—he illustrated its gallant struggle with the Empire of Brazil, by performing prodigies of valour, both by sea and land. His first siege, for instance, which was in a large warehouse at Charginada, at the mouth of the Camacua, was a worthy prelude to his subsequent obstinate and heroic defences of Lages, Montevideo, Sal to, and Rome. Ou this occasion he maintained for six hours, along with only thirteen companions, a desperate fight against a hundred and fifty assailants, eighty of them skilled German soldiers, and ultimately compelled them to disperse.

It was during this part of his eventful career, that he met with that incomparable heroine, his wife. After suffering a shipwreck, in which all his Italian comrades were drowned, his desolation was complete. " The world appeared to him," to said, " like a desert;" it was like a second exile to him, and bitterer than the first. For it was an independent Italy which lie lost in these free sous of the sea, like himself. From his intolerable isolation he sought relief in marriage, and in his Anita found a mate of whom he alone was worthy. In masculine courage this true Amazon surpassed the Maid of Saragossa; whilst for tenderness, modesty, and sensibility, never was a more genuine woman. In an action during which every officer on board her husband's vessel was shot dead except himself, she seized a musket and interchanged a continual fire with the enemy, at a distance of only fifty or a hundred paces. Another time she was the seventy-fourth in her Garibaldi's little band against live hundred of the foe ; and though strictly forbidden to fight, served out the ammunition to her party. The balls wizzed round her like hail, and one of them actually cut off her beautiful tresses, yet she would not spur her horse into retreat, as she might easily have done, but waited until it was shot under her, and she was taken prisoner. But she soon broke away, and her escape is so marvellous a story, and affords such a striking parallel to that of Mrs. Stowe's Eliza, that we must give it in her husband's own words:—

••She was no less great in adversity than in danger; and at the sight of her the General's staff stood in admiration. The officers, however, were so ill-bred as to be uutible to suppress exultation at their victory ; and she met with lofty dignity every injurious expression which they uttered against the defeated Republicans. She asked and obtained permission to S9ek among the dead for the corpse of her husband, whom Bhe believed to^have been killed, that she might bury it. She long wandered over the scene of the battle, looking for what she dreaded to find ; and searching among so many victims of war for some mask of resemblance to me; but in vain. I, with my bold companions, had left the field of battle, formed a close body, and withstood every attack of the enemy, until we reached the borders of the ' cappon,' fir island of trees. The brave Captain Terceira, after doing all that he could with our cavalry, joined us with aa adjutant. From that moment Anita thought of nothing but escare. Profiting by the intemperance of the victors, she made her way into a neighboring hut, where a woman admitted her without knowing who she was. The remaining hours of that unfortunate day, though few, seemed like years; and at nightfall Anita went into the woods and disappeared. "Whoever has seen the immense forests which cover the summits of the Serra de Espinasso, and especially the pines which have stood their for centuries, the columns of that magnificent temple of nature, with the colossal tamaras (a kind of cane), may form some idea of the difficulties surmounted by that courageous American woman, on her journey from Caritabani and Lages, a distance of sixty miles. Tbe few inhabitants of that region were hostile to the Republicans; and as they had news of our defeat, they were arming and forming ambuscades in the various principal points of the route which the fugitives were expected to take. In the Cabreaco some of our unfortunate comrades were murdered.

" Anita passed that dangerous way by night; and such was her boldness, that the assassins fled at the sight of her, declaring that they had been pursued by an extraordinary being. And, indeed, they spoke the truth : for that courageous woman, mounted on a fiery horse, which a\it had asked and obtained at a house on her way, where it would have been difficult for a traveller to hire one, she galloped in a tempestuous night among broken rocky ground, by the flashes of lightning. Four of the enemy's cavalry, who were posted on guard at the river Canvas, when they saw her approaching, were overwhelmed with fear, supposing it to be an apparition, and fled. When she reached the bank of that stream, which wa3 swollen by the rain to a dangerous mountain torrent, she did not stop or attempt to cross it in a canoe, as she had done when passing it a few daya before in my company ; but dismounting, she seized fast hold of the tail of her horse, and, encouraging him with her voice, he dashed into the water, and swam struggling through the foaming waves, dragging her with him. The distance which she had thus to pass was uot less than five hundred paces, but they reached the opposite shore in safety. A glass of coffee at Lages was the only nourishment taken by the lonely traveller in five days, at the end of which she joined the corps of Aranha, in Vaccaria."

This modern Andromarche shared in all the daring, and sometiuzes hair-brained exploits of her husband as General, at sea and by land, of the Republican forces; for, unlike the Homeric

prototype, nothing but death could bring about a parting between her and her Hector. Often for weeks together she had no bed but the saddle, and she was with him during that terrible nine days in the Brazilian Antas, with her first-born infant, three months old, tied gipsyfashion to her back by a handkerchief round ber neck. In that famine-strioken scramble through the eternal pine-forest she shed not a tear, much less murmured a complaint, although mothers and children, and even many a stalwart warrior, were dying around her. It was only when they last reached the sunlight once more, and when she saw the babe she thought again reviving in the hands of a soldier, who kindly wrapped it iv his warm poncho, that the water came to her eyes, " and from that moment/ says her husband, " she was restored to her usual state of mmd —for the life of the loving woman bung on that of her child."

But it was not in South American pine-woods that this heroic woman was to perish, but in Italy's classic Pineta, hunted to death by A ustian bloodhounds, as she gave birth on the banks of a small stream, not far from Chioggio, to her only European child. Her babe died with her. Her last anguish was the mildest she passed through during that preternaturally daring dash for the more friendly sea, in the face of so many armies, in which she had insisted on accompanying her husband after the surrender of Borne. Her remains rest beneath the altar of a little chapel about a mile from the scene of her death. -—Eclectic Review.