ressing Abolitionist meetings, collecting funds for the cause, and
co-operating with the Anti-slavery Committees, of which there were
several thousands. In many homes where the friends of freedom lived he
was a welcome guest, not least welcomed by the children, who always
seemed to refresh his weary heart. 'Out of the mouths of children,' as
the psalmist says (according to one version), 'God gives strength to
true men.' You might often have seen him holding up a little
two-year-old child, saying, 'When John Brown is hanged as a traitor she
can say she used to stand on John Brown's hand.' He was no false
prophet!

Now also he was able to revisit, after two years' absence, the old
homestead where his wife and children were awaiting him, down to the
little one whom he had left an infant in the cradle. 'Come,' says the
strange father to the little prattler, 'I have sung it to all of them;
I must sing it to you.'

Blow ye the trumpet, blow
The gladly solemn sound:
Let all the nations know
To earth's remotest bound.
The year of Jubilee is come,
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.

In strains to which a soul on fire gave enchantment and a tunefulness
of their own he sang that song of Moses and the Lamb, telling of the
Jewish charter of Liberty to which Christ in His turn gave larger
meaning; and the little eyes in the room beheld a transfigured face
which they remembered when he had ceased blowing the trumpet of
Jubilee, and when they sang the same hymn as they laid him beneath the
sod outside that cabin door.

But not long could he stay at home. The year of Jubilee for all these
bondmen was his one thought, and he found friends who regarded him as a
tried man and were prepared to trust him implicitly. Such men as
Beecher and Theodore Parker gave him help spiritual; men like the
wealthy Stearns gave him help financial to the extent of many thousand
dollars, and were content to know that John Brown, however he spent it
(and concerning his plans he was always reticent), would have but one
object--liberty to the captive.

One way in which it was spent was in the working of what was then known
as the underground railway. The opportunist statesman--Henry Clay--had
led many Northern voters to tolerate the passing of the Fugitive Slave
Law, under which the Federal Government facilitated the enforced return
of fugitive slaves found in free states to the plantations of the
South. And the Abolitionists in the