on he added, that it "had even been suggested that I
might be an emissary or accomplice, in what was suspected to be a
general and preconcerted abolition movement." This explained the
questionings of my hostess, and the provision against any possible
rudeness which I might have received from the "strange men" at the
public table. Thus ended my projected campaign in Missouri. For every
city and hamlet in the State was so haunted by the marching spirit of
the Kansas hero, that to have suggested a lecture on any subject from
a known Abolitionist, would have ruined the political prospects of
even an ex-Governor.

Three years later, assisted by a former resident of Kansas, I lectured
to a very small, but respectful audience in Kansas City; and in the
spring of 1867 was invited by a committee of ladies to lecture at a
Fair of the Congregational Society of that city, with accompanying
assurances from the pastor and his wife, of their confidence in the
salutary influence of such a lecture, on a community which had been
recently treated to an unfriendly presentation of the woman's rights
movement and its advocates. I was too ill at the time to leave home,
but the difference between my anxious efforts three years before to be
heard, and this more than cordial assurance of a waiting audience, was
a happy tonic. It was from persons who knew me only through my
advocacy of woman's equality, and evidenced the progress of our cause.

In December, 1854, on my return from Kansas to Vermont, I spent
several days in St. Louis, in the pleasant family of my friend, Mrs.
Frances D. Gage, who, very much to my regret, was away in Illinois.
The Judge having recently removed to the city, the family were
comparatively strangers; Abolitionists in a pro-slavery community.
Mrs. Gage, I think, had broken ground for temperance, but they could
tell me of no friends to woman's rights. Rev. Mr. Elliot was not then
one of us, as I learned through a son of Mrs. Gage, who called on him
in my behalf for the use of his lecture-room. I felt instinctively
that, unfettered by home and business interests, I was less
constrained than my friend, and resolved, if possible, to win a
hearing for woman. Having secured a hall, I called at the business
office of a gentleman of wealth and high social position--a
slave-holder and opposed to free Kansas, with whom I had formed a
speaking acquaintance in Brattleboro'--and procured from him a voucher
for my respectability. A