orce on the ground of desertion. I laid down the paper, looked at my
hands, and thought:

"Once more you are mine. True, the proceeds of your twenty years of
brick-making are back there in Egypt with your lost patrimony, but we
are over the Red Sea, out in the free desert; no pursuit is possible,
and if bread fails, God will send manna."

While I sat, Mrs. Bancroft came to me, caressed me, and said:

"Old things have passed away, and all things have become new."

CHAPTER XLVII.

OUT INTO THE WORLD AND HOME AGAIN.

In my first lecturing winter I spoke in the Hall of Representatives, St.
Paul, to a large audience, and succeeded past all my hopes. I spoke
there again in the winter of '61 and '62, on the anti-slavery question,
and in a public hall on "Woman's Legal Disabilities." Both were very
successful, and I was invited to give the latter lecture before the
Senate, which I did. The hall was packed and the lecture received with
profound attention, interrupted by hearty applause.

The Senate was in session, and Gen. Lowrie occupied his seat as a
member. It was a great fall for him to tumble from his dictatorship to
so small an honor. He sat and looked at me like one in a dream, and I
could not but see that he was breaking. I hoped he would come up with
others when they began to crowd around me, but he did not.

I had come to be the looked-at of all lookers; the talked-of of all
talkers; was the guest of Geo. A. Nurse, the U.S. Attorney, dined with
the Governor, and was praised by the press. I was dubbed the "Fanny
Kemble of America," and reminded critics of the then greatest Shylock of
the stage. A judge from Ohio said there was "not a man in the State who
could have presented that case (Woman's Legal Disabilities) so well."
Indeed, I was almost as popular as if I were about to be hanged!

A responsible Eastern lecture-agent offered me one hundred dollars each
for three lectures, one in Milwaukee, one in Chicago and one in
Cleveland. I wanted to accept, but was overruled by friends, who thought
me too feeble to travel alone, and that I would make more by employing
an agent. They selected a pious gentleman, whose name I have forgotten,
and we left St. Paul at four o'clock one winter morning, in a prairie
schooner on bob-sleds, to ride to La Crosse.

One of the passengers was a pompous Southerner, who kept boasting of the
"buck niggers" he had sold and the "niggers" he had caught, and his
delight in that so