good deal of learning, the bed and pillows were thought the most
profitable investment. After this I thought that I had discovered the
philosopher's stone. So when a new carpet or mattress was going to be
needed, or when at the close of the year it began to be evident that
my family accounts, like poor Dora's, 'wouldn't add up,' then I used
to say to my faithful friend and factotum Anna, who shared all my joys
and sorrows, 'Now, if you will keep the babies and attend to things in
the house for a day, I'll write a piece and then we'll be out of the
scrape.' So I became an author,--very modest I do assure you."

The hardships and privations of Mrs. Stowe's residence in Cincinnati
were more than compensated to her by the opportunity it afforded for
intimate acquaintance with the negro character and personal
observation of the institution of slavery. Only the breadth of the
Ohio river separated her from Kentucky, a slave State. While yet a
teacher in the Female Institute, she spent a vacation upon a Kentucky
estate, afterward graphically described in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' as Col.
Shelby's plantation. A companion upon this visit said, "Harriet did
not seem to notice anything in particular that happened....
Afterwards, in reading 'Uncle Tom,' I recognized scene after scene of
that visit portrayed with the most minute fidelity." A dozen years
before there were any similar demonstrations in Boston, she witnessed
in 1838, proslavery riots in Cincinnati when Birney's Abolition press
was wrecked and when Henry Ward Beecher, then a young Cincinnati
editor, went armed to and from his office. She had had in her service
a slave girl whose master was searching the city for her, and whose
rescue had been effected by Prof. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher who,
"both armed, drove the fugitive, in a covered wagon, by night, by
unfrequented roads, twelve miles back into the country, and left her
in safety." This incident was the basis of "the fugitive's escape from
Tom Loker and Marks in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"

Lane Theological Seminary, in which Prof. Stowe held a chair, had, it
is said, "become a hot-bed of abolition." Partly for protection, a
colony of negroes had settled about the seminary, and these families,
says Mrs. Stowe, "became my favorite resort in cases of emergency. If
anyone wishes to have a black face look handsome, let them be left as
I have been, in feeble health, in oppressive hot weather, with a sick
baby in arms, and two othe