ncle Tom's Cabin_, and
it is altogether needless to say that it fully accomplished my
father's prediction as to its sensational effects. Since the
appearance of the Bible in a form that brought it home to the common
people, there has been no work in the English language so extensively
read. The author's name became at once a cynosure the world over. When
Henry Ward Beecher, the writer's distinguished brother, delivered his
first lecture in England, he was introduced to the audience by the
chairman as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher Stowe.

The way in which the idea of writing the book came to the author was
significant of the will that produced it. A lady friend wrote Mrs.
Stowe a letter in which she said, "If I could use a pen as you can, I
would write something that would make the whole nation feel what an
accursed thing slavery is." When the letter reached its destination,
and Mrs. Stowe came to the passage above quoted, as the story is told
by a friend who was present, she sprang to her feet, crushed the
letter in her hand in the intensity of her feeling, and with an
expression on her face of the utmost determination, exclaimed, "If I
live, I will write something that will do that thing."

The circumstances under which she executed her great task would
ordinarily be looked upon as altogether prohibitory. She was the wife
of a poor minister and school-teacher. To eke out the family income
she took boarders. She had five children of her own, who were too
young to be of any material assistance, and, in addition, she
occasionally harbored a waif that besought her protection when fleeing
from slavery. Necessarily the most of her time was spent in the
kitchen. There, surrounded by meats and vegetables and cooking
appliances, with just enough of the common deal table cleared away to
give space for her writing materials, she composed and made ready for
the publisher by far the most remarkable work of fiction this country
has produced. Slavery is dead, but Mrs. Stowe's masterpiece lives, and
is likely to live with growing luster as long as our free institutions
survive, which it is to be hoped will be forever.

One of the most remarkable early workers in the Abolition cause was
Mrs. Lucretia Mott, a little Quaker woman of Pennsylvania. The writer
saw her for the last time shortly before her death. She was then
acting as presiding officer of an "Equal Rights"--meaning equal
suffrage--meeting. Sitting on one hand was Susan