on, Phillips, and all that small band
whose motto is 'No Union with Slaveholders.'"[60]

After listening to the satisfying sermons of Thomas Wentworth
Higginson at his Free Church in Worcester, she wrote in her diary, "It
is plain to me now that it is not sitting under preaching I dislike,
but the fact that most of it is not of a stamp that my soul can
respond to."[61]

In September she interrupted "the cure" to attend a woman's rights
meeting in Boston, and with Lucy Stone, Antoinette and Ellen Blackwell
visited in the home of the wealthy merchant, Francis Jackson, making
many new friends, among them his daughter, Eliza J. Eddy, whose
unhappy marriage was to prove a blessing to the woman's rights
cause.[62]

At tea at the Garrisons', she met many of the "distinguished" men and
women she had "worshiped" from afar. She heard Theodore Parker preach
a sermon which filled her soul, and with Mr. Garrison called on him in
his famous library. "It really seemed audacious in me to be ushered
into such a presence and on such a commonplace errand as to ask him to
come to Rochester to speak in a course of lectures I am planning," she
wrote her family, "but he received me with such kindness and
simplicity that the awe I felt on entering was soon dissipated. I then
called on Wendell Phillips in his sanctum for the same purpose. I have
invited Ralph Waldo Emerson by letter and all three have promised to
come. In the evening with Mr. Jackson's son James, Ellen Blackwell and
I went to see _Hamlet_. In spite of my Quaker training, I find I enjoy
all these worldly amusements intensely."[63]

* * * * *

In January 1856, Susan set out again on a woman's rights tour of New
York State to gather more signatures for her petitions. This time she
persuaded Frances D. Gage of Ohio, a temperance worker and popular
author of children's stories, to join her. An easy extemporaneous
speaker, Mrs. Gage was an attraction to offer audiences, who drove
eight or more miles to hear her; and in the cheerless hotels at night
and on the long cold sleigh rides from town to town, she was a
congenial companion.

The winter was even colder and snowier than that of the year before.
"No trains running," Susan wrote her family, "and we had a 36-mile
ride in a sleigh.... Just emerged from a long line of snow drifts and
stopped at this little country tavern, supped, and am now roasting
over the hot stove."[64]

Confronted almost