tions of members,
and holding receptions. "You cannot imagine," she writes a friend,
"the labor of conversing and convincing. Some evenings I had at once
twenty gentlemen for three hours' steady conversation." After a
campaign of two months the bill establishing the New Jersey State
Lunatic Asylum was passed, and the necessary money appropriated for
its erection. She was always partial to this first creation of her
energy and genius. She called it 'her first child,' and there,
forty-five years later, she returned to pass the last seven years of
her life, as in a home, a room having been gratefully appropriated to
her use by the trustees of the asylum.

At this date, Dr. S. G. Howe wrote her: "God grant me to look back
upon some three years of my life with a part of the self-approval you
must feel. I ask no higher fortune. No one need say to you, Go on! for
you have heard a higher than any human voice, and you will follow
whithersoever it calleth." Indeed, she already had much of her future
work prepared. While waiting for the Legislature in New Jersey to take
up her bill, she had canvassed Pennsylvania and had the happiness to
see a bill pass the Legislature of that State founding the Dixmont
Hospital, her second child, soon after the birth of her first. The
Dixmont Hospital is the only one of her many children that she would
allow to be even indirectly named for her. Meanwhile, she had
canvassed Kentucky, had been before the Legislature in Tennessee, and,
seven days after the passage of her bill in New Jersey, she writes
from a steamer near Charleston, S. C., as follows: "I designed using
the spring and summer chiefly in examining the jails and poorhouses of
Indiana and Illinois. Having successfully completed my mission in
Kentucky, I learned that traveling in those States would be
difficult, if not impossible, for some weeks to come, on account of
mud and rains. This decided me to examine the prisons and hospitals of
New Orleans, and, returning, to see the state prisons of Louisiana at
Baton Rouge, of Mississippi at Jackson, of Arkansas at Little Rock, of
Missouri at Jefferson City, and of Illinois at Alton.... I have seen
incomparably more to approve than to censure in New Orleans. I took
the resolution, being so far away, of seeing the state institutions of
Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. Though this has proved
excessively fatiguing, I rejoice that I have carried out my purpose."

Between June 1843 and Augus