ceptional worker as a good investment.

This new experience was a good investment for Susan as well. She made
many new friends. She won the further respect, confidence, and good
will of men like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Francis
Jackson. Her friendship with Parker Pillsbury deepened. "I can truly
say," she wrote Abby Kelley Foster, "my spirit has grown in grace and
that the experience of the past winter is worth more to me than all my
Temperance and Woman's Rights labors--though the latter were the
school necessary to bring me into the Antislavery work."[76]

Only the crusading spirit of the "antislavery apostles"[77] and what
to them seemed the desperate state of the nation made the hard
campaigning bearable. The animosity they faced, the cold, the poor
transportation, the long hours, and wretched food taxed the physical
endurance of all of them. "O the crimes that are committed in the
kitchens of this land!"[78] wrote Susan in her diary, as she ate heavy
bread and the cake ruined with soda and drank what passed for coffee.
A good cook herself, she had little patience with those who through
ignorance or carelessness neglected that art. Equally bad were the
food fads they had to endure when they were entertained in homes of
otherwise hospitable friends of the cause. Raw-food diets found many
devotees in those days, and often after long cold rides in the
stagecoach, these tired hungry antislavery workers were obliged to sit
down to a supper of apples, nuts, and a baked mixture of coarse bran
and water. Nor did breakfast or dinner offer anything more. Facing
these diets seemed harder for the men than for Susan. Repeatedly in
such situations, they hurried away, leaving her to complete two-or
three-day engagements among the food cranks. How she welcomed a good
beefsteak and a pot of hot coffee at home after these long days of
fasting!

A night at home now was sheer bliss, and she wrote Lucy Stone, "Here
I am once more in my own Farm Home, where my weary head rests upon my
own home pillows.... I had been gone _Four Months_, scarcely sleeping
the second night under the same roof."[79]

It was good to be with her mother again, to talk with her father when
he came home from work and with Mary who had not married after all but
continued teaching in the Rochester schools. Guelma and her husband,
Aaron McLean, who had moved to Rochester, often came out to the farm
with their children.

Turning for relaxat