T. May, who was one of the
most faithful and zealous of the Anti-Slavery pioneers, and belonged
to that band of devoted workers who were known as Abolition lecturers,
tells of his experience in delivering an Anti-Slavery address in the
sober New England city of Haverhill.

"It was a Sabbath evening," he says. "I had spoken about fifteen
minutes when the most hideous outcries--yells and screeches--from
a crowd of men and boys, who had surrounded the house, startled
us, and then came heavy missiles against the doors and the blinds
of the windows. I persisted in speaking for a few minutes, hoping
the doors and blinds were strong enough to withstand the attack.
But presently a heavy stone broke through one of the blinds,
scattered a pane of glass, and fell upon the head of a lady
sitting near the center of the hall. She uttered a shriek and fell
bleeding on the floor."

There was a panic, of course, and the Abolition lecturer would have
been roughly handled by the mob if a young lady, a sister of the poet
Whittier, had not taken him by the arm, and walked with him through
the astonished crowd. They did not feel like attacking a woman.

There was nothing unusual, except the part performed by the young
lady, in the affair described in the foregoing narrative. Mobs were of
constant occurrence in the period of which we are speaking. It was not
in the slave States that they were most frequent. Northern communities
that were regarded as absolutely peaceable and perfectly moral thought
nothing of an anti-Abolitionist riot now and then. They occurred "away
up North" and "away down East." Even sleepy old Nantucket, in its
sedentary repose by the sea, woke up long enough to mob a couple of
Abolition lecturers, a man and a woman.

The community in which the writer resided when a boy, was fully up to
the pacific standard of most Northern neighborhoods. Yet it was the
scene of many turmoils growing out of Anti-Slavery meetings. The
district schoolhouse, which was the only public building in the
village that was open for such gatherings, called for frequent repairs
on account of damages done by mobs. Broken windows and doors were
often in evidence, and stains from mud-balls, decayed vegetables, and
antiquated eggs, which nobody took the trouble to remove, were nearly
always visible.

On one occasion, at an evening meeting, the lecturer was a young
professor, who was "down" from Oberlin College, against which, as