The following season she wrote with her usual sense of calm from Florida:

"I am writing as a pure recreative movement of mind, to divert myself from the stormy, unrestful present. . . I am being chatelaine of a Florida farm. I have on my mind the creation of a town on the banks of the St. John. The three years since we came this side of the river have called into life and growth a thousand peach-trees, a thousand orange-trees, about five hundred lemons, and seven or eight hundred grapevines. A peach orchard, a vineyard, a lemon grove, will carry my name to posterity. I am founding a place which, thirty or forty years hence, will be called the old Stowe place. . . You can have no idea of this queer country, this sort of strange, sandy, half-tropical dreamland, unless you come to it. Here I sit with open. windows, the orange buds just opening and filling the air with sweetness, the hens drowsily cackling,

...

planting in the field, and callas and wild roses again so soon, you . doors. We keep a little fire morning notes from this quarter. Juded with birds; and by the bye, lovely little nest in Boston, where I think a uniform edition "sits brooding on the charmèd wave." good thing. Next to ing we had you here with us, and she has riter, and in many answer from you as yet in reply to the is the dear Docspoke of in your last letter to me. It seerinspire dreams must have written, and the letter somehow go chews endbecause I know, of course, you would write. 1 Has the we were both out of our senses with mingled ps, put it indignation at that dreadful stick of a Casaubon,oranges. think of poor Dorothea dashing like a warm, sunnyon our against so cold and repulsive a rock! He is a littby are dreadful for anything; there does not seem to be a. of warm blood in him, and so, as it is his misfortunewhat not his fault to be cold-blooded, one must not get a with him.

If

It is the scene in the garden, after the in my

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calm isle of Patmos, where the world is not, and I have such quiet long hours for writing. Emerson could insulate himself here and keep his electricity. Hawthorne

ought to have lived in an orange grove in Florida. You have no idea how small you all look, you folks in the world, from this distance. All your fusses and your fumings, your red hot hurrying newspapers, your clamor of rival magazines, why, we see it as we see steamboats

fifteen miles off, a mere speck and smoke."

Again she writes: "You ought to see us riding out in our mule-cart. Poor Fly!' the last of pea-time, who looks like an animated hair-trunk, and the wagon and harness to match! It is too funny, but we enjoy it hugely. There are now in our solitude five Northern families, and we manage to have quite pleasant society.

"But think of our church and school house being burned down just as we were ready to do something with it. I feel it most for the colored people, who were so anxious to have their school and now have no place to have it in. We have all been trying to raise what we can for a new building and intend to get one up by March.

"If I were North now I would try giving some readings for this and perhaps raise something."

CHAPTER XII

PUBLIC READINGS: TRIAL OF HENRY WARD BEECHER

It was a strange contrast to Mrs. Stowe's usual life, and one at variance with her natural taste, when she appeared before the public as a reader of her own stories in the autumn and winter of 1872-73. She was no longer

able to venture on the effort of a long story, therefore it was manifestly unwise for her to forego the income which was offered through this proposed channel. She wrote to

her friends in Boston: "I have had a very urgent business letter, saying that the lyceums of different towns were making up their engagements, and that if I were going into it I must make my engagements now. It seems to me that I cannot do this. The thing will depend so much on my health and ability to do. You know I could not go round in cold weather. I feel entirely uncertain,

and, as the Yankees say, 'did n't know what to do nor to don't.' My state in regard to it may be described by the phrase 'Kind o' love to hate to wish I did n't- want ter.' I suppose the result will be I shall not work into their lecture system."

I

In April she wrote from Mandarin: "I am painting a Magnolia grandiflora, which I will show you. am appalled by finding myself booked to read.

But I am

getting well and strong, and trust to be equal to the emergency. But I shrink from Tremont Temple, and does not think I can fill it. On the whole I should like to begin in Boston." And in August she said: "I am to

begin in Boston in September.

It seems to me that

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is a little too early for Boston, is n't it? Will there be anybody in town then? I don't know as it's my business, which is simply to speak my piece and take my money."

Her first reading actually took place in Springfield, not Boston, and the next day she unexpectedly arrived at our cottage at Manchester-by-the-Sea. She had read the previous evening in a large public hall, had risen at five o'clock that morning, and found her way to us. Her next readings were given in Boston, the first in the afternoon, at the Tremont Temple. She was conscious that her effort at Springfield had not been altogether successful, — she had not held her large audience; and she was determined to put the whole force of her nature into this afternoon reading at the Tremont Temple. She called me into her bedroom, where she stood before the mirror, with her short gray hair, which usually lay in soft curls around her brow, brushed erect and standing stiffly. "Look here, my dear," she said; "now I am exactly like my father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, when he was going to preach," and she held up her forefinger warningly. It was easy to see that the spirit of the old preacher was revived in her veins, and the afternoon would show something of his power. An hour later, when I sat with her in the anteroom waiting for the moment of her appearance to arrive, I could feel the power surging up within her. I knew she was armed for a good fight.

That reading was a great success. She was alive in every fibre of her being; she was to give portions of "Uncle Tom's Cabin " to men, women, and children who could hardly understand the crisis which inspired it, and she determined to effect the difficult task of making them feel as well as hear. With her presence and inspiration they could not fail to understand what her words had signified to the generation that had passed through the strug

gle of our war. When her voice was not sufficient to make the audience hear, men and women rose from their seats and crowded round her, standing gladly, that no word might be lost. It was the last leap of the flame which had burned out a great wrong.

One of her lively and observant hearers in another city described Mrs. Stowe as "small in stature, with a complexion bordering on the blonde, and with the merriest twinkle in her eye, betokening a reservoir of fun and mirth sufficient to explode a funeral assembly with laughter. In some parts of the scene between Eva and Topsy, she reached the hearts of her audience, and many a tear was pushed out of sight by finger tips and umbrella handles.

"In part third,'" continues this writer, "Laughing in Meeting,' a constant ripple of laughter followed her reading till she reached the point where the deacon was sent sprawling in the centre aisle of the church, when the entire audience broke out' and shook the hall with laughter and applause."

These readings were conducted for her by a Lecture Bureau, who made her a very liberal offer if she would give forty readings in the New England States. She agreed to this plan with the understanding that the readings should be over before December in order to allow her to go at once to Florida.

She wrote to her husband during this tour at a time when he was peculiarly depressed, from Westfield, Massachusetts:

"I have never had a greater trial than being forced to stay away from you now. I would not, but that my engagements have involved others in heavy expense, and should I fail to fulfill them, it would be doing a wrong.

"God has given me strength as I needed it, and I never read more to my own satisfaction than last night.

"Now, my dear husband, please do want, and try, to