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never crossed their minds; and it is an extraordinary fact that when the disastrous news first came to
North Elba, the family utterly refused to believe it, and were saved from suffering by that incredulity till the arrival of the next weekly mail.
A pause at the threshold.
I had left the world outside, to raise the latch of this humble door amid the mountains; and now my pen falters on the threshold, as my steps did then.
This house is a home of sacred sorrow.
How shall we enter it?
Its inmates are bereft and ruined men and women, as the world reckons; what can we say to them?
Do not shrink; you are not near the world; you are near
John Brown's household.
“ In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer:
they have overcome the world.”
It had been my privilege to live in the best society all my life — namely, that of abolitionists and fugitive slaves.
I had seen the most eminent persons of the age: several men on whose heads tens of thousands of dollars had been set; a black woman, who, after escaping from slavery herself, had gone back secretly eight times into the jaws of death to bring out persons whom she had never seen; and a white man, who, after assisting away fugitives by the thousand, had twice been stripped of every dollar of his property in fines, and when taunted by the
Court, had mildly said, “ Friend, if thee knows any poor fugitive in need of a breakfast, send him to
Thomas Garrett's door.”
I had known these, and such as these; but I had not known the Browns.
Nothing short of knowing them can be called a liberal education.
Lord Byron could not help clinging to
Shelley, because he said he was the only person in whom he saw any thing like disinterested benevolence.
He really believed that that man would give his life for another.
Poor
Byron!
he might well have exchanged his wealth, his peerage, and his genius for a brief training at
North Elba.
Let me pause a moment, and enumerate the members of the family.
John Brown was born in 1800, and his wife in 1816, though both might have been supposed older than the ages thus indicated.
He has had in all twenty children--seven being the offspring of his first wife, thirteen of his second. Four of each race are living--eight in all. The elder division of the surviving family are John and
Jason, both married, and living in
Ohio;
Owen, unmarried, who escaped from
Harper's Ferry, and
Ruth, the wife of
Henry Thompson, who lives on an adjoining farm at
North Elba, an intelligent and noble woman.
The younger division consists of Salmon, aged twenty-three, who resides with his young wife in his mother's house, and three unmarried daughters, Anne, (sixteen,) Sarah, (thirteen,) and Ellen, (five.)