James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen

[312] health was delicate. Her cares were great. In charge of a large family, and compelled by the sternest of all necessities to make the most of very little and poor help in her household labors, much of this wonderful book was actually written by Mrs. Stowe, as she sat, with her portfolio upon her knee, by the kitchen fire, in moments snatched from her domestic cares. We may be pardoned for saying that if the cuisine was half as well managed as the composition, those who sat at Mrs. Stowe's table, as well as those other innumerable ones who have feasted upon the fruits of her literary toil, were fortunate indeed. “The book,” as Prof. Stowe finely says, “was written in sorrow, in sadness, and obscurity, with no expectation of reward save in the prayers of the poor, and with a heart almost broken in view of the sufferings which it described, and the still greater sufferings which it dared not describe.”

Our older readers need not to be told with what avidity the weekly instalments of this serial were caught up and devoured by the readers of the “National era.” The writer of this article was then a little boy in one of the remoter villages of Maine, but remembers how “Uncle Tom's cabin” was the theme of universal discussion, and how those in his own home, and all through the village too, who, had never before bowed down to any idols of fiction, nor served them, were so completely demoralized by this novel, that they not only read it, but read it to their children; and how the papers which contained it, after being nearly worn out in going through so many hands in so many different homes, were as carefully folded up and laid away as if the tear-stains on them were sacred, as indeed they were. We were all, from the baby upward, converted into the most earnest kind of abolitionists. Strangely enough, however, when, after its publication in the “Era,” Mrs. Stowe proposed its republication in book-form to Messrs. Phillips and Sampson of Boston, the proposition was