ne way and then in others,
putting him again and again in jeopardy of life and limb. At Augusta,
Maine, his windows were broken, and he was warned out of the town. At
Concord, New Hampshire, his speech was punctuated with missiles. At
Lowell, Massachusetts, he narrowly escaped being struck on the head and
killed by a brickbat. Indeed it was grimly apparent that the master of
Freedom's Cottage would be obliged to revise his views as to the hazard,
which his friend ran in speaking upon the subject of slavery in New
England. To do so was weekly becoming for that friend an enterprise of
great personal peril. But it added also to the fierce hatred with which
the public now regarded Garrison. He was the author of all the mischief,
the slavery agitation, the foreign emissary. He had even dared to inject
the poison of Abolitionism into the politics of Boston and
Massachusetts. This attempt on the part of the _Liberator_ to establish
an anti-slavery test of office was only another proof of the dangerous
character of the new fanaticism and the Jacobinical designs of the
Garrisonian fanatics, ergo, the importance of suppressing the
incendiaries. Down with Thompson! Garrison must be destroyed! The
Union--it must and shall be preserved! All these the public excitement,
which had risen everywhere to a tempest, had come more and more to mean.
A tremendous crisis had come in the life of Garrison, and a great peril,
eagle-like, with the stirred-up hate of a nation, was swooping upon him.

CHAPTER XI.

MISCHIEF LET LOOSE.

A wild-cat-like creature was abroad. To it the Abolitionists were to be
thrown. It was to destroy Garrison, make an end of Thompson, and
suppress between its enormous jaws the grandest moral movement of the
century. Besides doing up this modest little programme, the beast, O
wonderful to say, was also to crown its performances by "saving" the
Union. Rejoicing in the possession of such a conservative institution,
the politicians, the press, and public opinion uncaged the monster,
while from secure seats they watched the frightful scenes of fury and
destruction enacted by it in the national arena.

These scenes began in the summer of 1834, and in the city of New York.
They were ushered in by the breaking up of an anti-slavery celebration
on the Fourth of July by the clack and roar of several hundred young
rowdies, gathered for the purpose. Their success but whetted the
appetite of the spirit of mischief