evolution of one and the same spiritual element "through successive
ages."

She had not much time to dream over her chest of artistic treasures
when the assault of Preston S. Brooks upon Senator Sumner called her
to battle of such force and point that Dr. William H. Furness said, it
was worth having Sumner's head broken.

When death released her from the care of her father, she took
"Bleeding Kansas" under her charge. She writes letters to the
newspapers; she sits up till eleven o'clock, "stitching as fast as my
fingers could go," making garments for the Kansas immigrants; she
"stirs up the Wayland women to make garments for Kansas"; she sends
off Mr. Child to make speeches for Kansas; and then she writes him in
this manner: "How melancholy I felt when you went off in the morning
darkness. It seemed as if everything about me was tumbling down; as if
I were never to have a nest and a mate any more." Surely the rest of
this letter was not written for us to read: "Good, kind, magnanimous
soul, how I love you. How I long to say over the old prayer again
every night. It almost made me cry to see how carefully you had
arranged everything for my comfort before you went; so much kindling
stuff split up and the bricks piled up to protect my flowers." Here is
love in a cottage. This life is not all prosaic.

Old anti-slavery friends came to see her and among them Charles
Sumner, in 1857, spent a couple of hours with her, and left his
photograph; she met Henry Wilson at the anti-slavery fair and talked
with him an "hour or so." Whittier says, "Men like Charles Sumner,
Henry Wilson, Salmon P. Chase, and Governor Andrew availed themselves
of her foresight and sound judgment of men and measures."

When John Brown was wounded and taken prisoner at Harper's Ferry,
nothing was more in character for Mrs. Child than to offer her
services as his nurse. She wrote him under cover of a letter to Gov.
Wise, of Virginia. The arrival of Mrs. Brown, made Mrs. Child's
attendance unnecessary, but the incident led to a lively
correspondence between Mrs. Child and Gov. Wise, in which Mrs.
Senator Mason, of Virginia, joined. Neither of her distinguished
correspondents possessed the literary skill of Mrs. Child. The entire
correspondence was collected in a pamphlet of which 300,000 copies
were sold. On a visit to Whittier at Amesbury, a delegation from a
Republican political meeting called upon her, saying they wanted to
see the woman who "poured