ederick Stowe, was struck by the fragment of a shell and, though the
wound healed, he never really recovered. His end was sufficiently
tragic. With the hope of improving his health by a long sea voyage, he
sailed from New York for San Francisco by way of Cape Horn. That he
reached San Francisco in safety, writes his brother, "is known: but
that is all. No word from him or concerning him has ever reached the
loving hearts that have waited so anxiously for it, and of his
ultimate fate nothing is known." Whatever may have been the "spiritual
state" of this son, Mrs. Stowe had now somewhat modernized her
theology and could say, "An endless infliction for past sins was once
the doctrine that we now generally reject.... Of one thing I am
sure,--probation does not end with this life." To stamp out that very
heresy had been no small part of Dr. Beecher's mission in Boston.

In 1863, Prof. Stowe having resigned his chair in Andover, Mrs. Stowe
removed with her family to Hartford where for the remaining
thirty-three years of her life, she made her summer home. The winter
of 1866, she spent with her husband in Florida and, the year
following, she bought in that semi-tropical state an orange orchard,
the fruit of which the year previous had "brought $2,000 as sold at
the wharf." Here for sixteen winters Mr. and Mrs. Stowe made their
home, until her "poor rabbi," as she affectionately calls him, became
too feeble to bear the long journey from Hartford. There she built a
small Episcopal church and she invites her brother Charles to become
an Episcopalian and come and be her minister.

Her son says that "Mrs. Stowe had some years before this joined the
Episcopal church for the purpose of attending the same communion as
her daughters." That she desired to attend the same communion as her
daughters does not seem a sufficient reason for leaving the communion
of her husband. Certainly, she had other reasons. From her fourth
year, she had known the service and, as read by her grandmother at
that time, its prayers "had a different effect upon me," she says,
"from any other prayers I heard in early life." Moreover, she had a
mission to the negro race and believed that the Episcopal service is
specially adapted to their needs: "If my tasks and feelings did not
incline me toward the Church," she writes her brother, "I should still
choose it as the best system for training immature minds such as those
of our negroes. The system was composed wi