enthusiasm. It was a great age, when men had to speak. The time was
ripe, the soil was ready, God gave the good seed of liberty, and the
sower went forth to sow.

Mrs. Stowe tells us how she came to write the last chapter of the book,
the death of "Uncle Tom." She had a coloured woman in her family whose
husband was a slave, living in Kentucky. This black man had invented a
simple tool, was a good salesman, and was permitted to travel from town
to town, and even to cross the river into the Ohio, under no bond save
his solemn pledge to his master not to run away. Mrs. Stowe wrote the
letters for her servant, to this black man in Covington, Ky. One day,
while visiting his wife, in the Stowe home, he said that he would rather
cut off his right hand than break the word he had given to his master.
What white man could boast a more delicate sense of truth? How keen and
delicate the conscience! What weight of manhood in a slave! What
reserves of morality! What latent heroism! The slave's story captured
the imagination of the authoress, and kindled her mind into a creative
mood.

Out of the incident Mrs. Stowe evolved the character of "Uncle Tom." One
Sunday morning, as she sat at the communion table, the picture of Tom's
death rose and passed before her mind. "At the same time," writes her
son, "the words of Jesus were sounding in her ears: 'Inasmuch as ye have
done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto
Me.' It seemed as if the crucified but now risen and glorified Christ
were speaking to her through the poor black man, cut and bleeding under
the blows of the slave whip." Long afterwards some one asked Mrs. Stowe
how she came to write the death of Uncle Tom, and she answered that she
did not write it, that God gave it to her in a vision, that she saw the
overseer flog him to death, and heard his dying words, and merely wrote
down the vision as she saw it. At the time, she had no idea of writing
more: it was a year later when she began the tale of which this incident
became the crisis.

For nearly two years the story ran in the _National Era_, published in
Washington. The book was completed on March 20, 1852, and in spite of
Mrs. Stowe's despondency and apprehension of failure, it sold 3,000
copies the first day, 10,000 in a week, and 300,000 in a year. Save
"Pilgrim's Progress" alone, perhaps no book ever had a wider
circulation, the Bible, of course, and "The Imitation of Christ," by a
Kempi