ts worst form. The
harrowing tales and incidents that were afterwards worked up into
literary form by the gifted authoress were all matters of observation,
conversation and experience. One of the earliest incidents of the
Stowes' life in Cincinnati was an experience of Professor Stowe with one
of the Beecher boys. While travelling in Kentucky, the two young men
witnessed the flight of a negro woman, who was running away with her
little child, whom they helped across the Ohio River, to be sent on by
the Underground Railway to Oberlin, on the shore of Lake Erie. And the
similar incident, Eliza's flight across the ice, her son Charles[1]
writes in his recent story of her life, "was an actual occurrence. She
had known and had often talked with the very man who helped Eliza up the
bank of the river."

Later during their Cincinnati residence, Mrs. Stowe conducted a small
private school and made a practice of allowing a few coloured children
to attend it. One evening the mother of one of these coloured children
came to the Stowes' house in a frenzy of terror, saying that her little
girl had been seized and carried to the river, to be sold as a slave in
Kentucky. Mrs. Stowe raised the money to ransom the beautiful child.

It was during this period that the Kentucky editor, Bailey, moved across
the river and began to publish a paper in Cincinnati. One night the
editor knocked at the door of the Stowe home, seeking refuge from a mob
that had smashed in his doors and windows, looted his printing-office,
and flung his type into the river.

On another occasion a Kentuckian named Van Zandt freed his slaves and
carried them across the river into Ohio. His old friends counted him a
traitor, and charges were trumped up that he had used his new home in
Ohio as an underground station for the receiving of runaway slaves.
Professor Stowe was asked to assist in Van Zandt's defense. When other
lawyers were afraid of the mob spirit, a young attorney named Salmon P.
Chase volunteered his services without pay. As the courts were then
entirely under the influence of the Fugitive Slave law, young Chase lost
his case; but that no dramatic note might be wanting, this young
attorney later became chief justice of the United States Supreme Court
and wrote a decision that reversed the former action. All these and many
other facts and events went into Mrs. Stowe's mind as raw silk, and came
out tapestry and brocade. The fuel of events fed the flames of