creditable book of their
travels, and Lucretia carried enough observations of foreign life in
her head to fill folios.

Mrs. Mott was a housekeeper of the old school, in so far as everything
from garret to cellar passed under her supervision. She took the
entire care of her children, and although with remarkable economy
supplying the wants and guarding against the wastes of a large family,
she did not allow these necessary cares to absorb all her time and
thought, but cultivated the talents entrusted to her in broader
interests than family life. She felt she had duties in the Church and
the State as well as the home. The time most wives and mothers spend
in gaiety and embroidery, she spent in reading and committing to
memory choice thoughts in poetry and prose. The money others spent in
filling their homes with bric-a-brac she spent in books, and the
result proves the superior wisdom of her course.

When conventions were held in Philadelphia, her house was always
filled with guests. As presiding officer in a woman's convention
nothing escaped her notice. She felt responsible that everything
should be done in good taste and order. Her opinions on woman's
nature, sphere, destiny, were thoroughly digested, and any speaker
that did not come up to her exact ideal, was taken delicately to task
when her turn came to speak. As some one remarks, "she had a playful
way of tapping a speaker in a public meeting, as a skillful driver
touches his horses with the tip end of his whip." Once, says Wendell
Phillips, she tried the experiment on me when I had ventured to say
that one of the drawbacks to the movement, was the indifference of
women themselves. Other speakers too expressed sentiments on which
Mrs. Mott differed from them. When she arose she touched them all
round with her gentle raillery, offending no one, just pronounced
enough in her speech to be effective, and in no way compromising
herself. Glancing at the platform on one occasion in Philadelphia, the
central figure, is Lucretia Mott in Quaker costume, in the zenith of
her refined beauty; around her are grouped James Mott, William Lloyd
Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Robert Purvis,
Charles Burleigh, Ernestine L. Rose, Frances Dana Gage, Hannah Tracy
Cutler, Lydia Mott, Martha C. Wright, Ann Preston, Sarah Pugh, Hannah
Darlington, Mary Grew, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy
Stone, as refined and remarkable an assembly of men and w