n, Louisa and Joseph, whom the good mother
frequently alluded to as "the last two drops of blood in her heart,"
and although she had scarcely ever seen a railroad train, she
determined to go to New York herself to see what could be done and to
thank the good people who had already brought so much of happiness to
herself and family. While the mother was in that city the girls were
brought to see her and in later years she often delighted to tell of
their happy meeting and of the good white folks who were brought
together to hear her story. She returned to Washington at the end of
a week, carrying the assurance that the money would be provided for
the redemption of the last two of her children.

Mrs. Louisa Joy, the last of the "Edmondson Children," died only a
short while ago.

[13] _Note_.--This personal narrative of Samuel Edmondson was related by
himself at his home in Anacostia where he died several years ago.

LORENZO DOW[1]

This is the record of a remarkable and eccentric white man who devoted
himself to a life of singular labor and self-denial. In any consideration
of the South one could not avoid giving at least passing notice to Lorenzo
Dow as the foremost itinerant preacher of his time, as the first Protestant
who expounded the gospel in Alabama and Mississippi, and as a reformer who,
at the very moment when cotton was beginning to be supreme, presumed to
tell the South that slavery was wrong.

He arrests attention--this gaunt, restless preacher. With his long hair,
his flowing beard, his harsh voice, and his wild gesticulation, he was so
rude and unkempt as to startle all conservative hearers. Said one of his
opponents: "His manners (are) clownish in the extreme; his habit and
appearance more filthy than a savage Indian, his public discourses a mere
rhapsody, the substance often an insult upon the gospel." Said another as
to his preaching in Richmond: "Mr. Dow's clownish manners, his heterodox
and schismatic proceedings, and his reflections against the Methodist
Episcopal Church, in a late production of his on church government, are
impositions on common sense, and furnish the principal reasons why he will
be discountenanced by the Methodists."

But he was made in the mould of heroes. In his lifetime he traveled not
less than two hundred thousand miles, preaching to more people than any
other man of his time. He went from New England t