te" was brief, and the
prosecution of a literary career was postponed, by her marriage in
1836, with Prof. Calvin E. Stowe; or, as she announces this momentous
event: "about half an hour more and your old friend, schoolmate,
sister, etc., will cease to be Hattie Beecher and change to nobody
knows who."

The married life of Mrs. Stowe covered a period of fifty years and was
a conspicuously happy one. Prof. Stowe, who seemed so much like a myth
to the general public, was a man of great learning and keen
intelligence, unimaginative as he says himself, but richly endowed
with "a certain broad humor and drollery." His son tells us that he
was "an inimitable mimic and story-teller. No small proportion of Mrs.
Stowe's success as a literary woman is to be attributed to him." The
Sam Lawson stories are said to be a little more his than hers, being
"told as they came from Mr. Stowe's lips with little or no
alteration." For her scholarly husband, Mrs. Stowe had the highest
appreciation and the prettiest way of expressing it: "If you were not
already my dearly loved husband," she writes him, "I should certainly
fall in love with you." Prof. Stowe could also write a love-letter:
"There is no woman like you in this wide world. Who else has so much
talent with so little self-conceit; so much reputation with so little
affectation; so much literature with so little nonsense; so much
enterprise with so little extravagance; so much tongue with so little
scold; so much sweetness with so little softness; so much of so many
things and so little of so many other things." If a man's wife is to
have her biography written, he will not be sorry that he has sent her
some effusive love-letters.

Fourteen years of Mrs. Stowe's beautiful married life were spent in
Cincinnati, with many vicissitudes of ill-health, some poverty, and
the birth of six children, three sons and three daughters. One can get
some idea both of the happiness and the hardship of that life from her
letters. In 1843, seven years after marriage, she writes, "Our straits
for money this year are unparalleled even in our annals. Even our
bright and cheery neighbor Allen begins to look blue, and says $600 is
the very most we can hope to collect of our salary, once $1,200."
Again she writes, "I am already half sick from confinement to the
house and overwork. If I should sew every day for a month to come I
should not be able to accomplish half of what is to be done." There
were trial