Laura E. Richards, Maud Howe, Florence Howe Hall, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, in two volumes, with portraits and other illustrations: volume 1

[151] life the Doctor was captain, beyond dispute; yet sometimes the mate felt that she must take her own way, and took it quietly. She was fond of quoting the words of Thomas Garrett,¹ whose house was for years a station of the Underground Railway, and who helped many slaves to freedom.

“How did you manage it?” she asked him. His reply sank deep into her mind.

“It was borne in upon me at an early period, that if I told no one what I intended to do, I should be enabled to do it.”

The bond between our mother and father was not to be entirely broken even by death. She survived him by thirty-four years; but she never discussed with any one of us a question of deep import, or national consideration, without saying, “Your father would think thus, say thus!” It has been told elsewhere ² how she once, being in Newport and waked from sleep by some noise, called to him; and how he, in Boston, heard her, and asked, when next they met, “Why did you call me?” To the end of her life, if startled or alarmed, she never failed to cry aloud, “Chev!”

Children were not the only guests at Green Peace. Some of us remember Kossuth's visit; our mother often told of the day when John Brown knocked at the door, and she opened it herself. To all of us, Charles Sumner and his brothers, Albert and George, Hillard, Agassiz, Andrew, Parker were familiar figures, and fit naturally into the background of Green Peace.