Charles E. Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe compiled from her letters and journals by her son Charles Edward Stowe

I have long thought that I would write you again when I got here, and so I do. I have sent North to have them send me the “Harper's weekly,” in which your new story is appearing, and have promised myself leisurely to devour and absorb every word of it.

While I think of it I want to introduce to you a friend of mine, a most noble man, Mr. Owen, for some years our ambassador at Naples, now living a literary and scholar life in America. His father was Robert Dale Owen, the theorist and communist you may have heard of in England some years since.

Years ago, in Naples, I visited Mr. Owen for the first time, and found him directing his attention to the phenomena of spiritism. He had stumbled upon some singular instances of it accidentally, and he had forthwith instituted a series of researches and experiments on the subject, some of which he showed me. It was the first time I had ever seriously thought of the matter, and he invited my sister and myself to see some of the phenomena as exhibited by a medium friend of theirs who resided in their family. The result at the time was sufficiently curious, but I was interested in his account of the manner in which he proceeded, keeping records of every experiment with its results, in classified orders. As the result of his studies and observations, he has published two books, one “Footfalls on the Boundary of another world,” published in 1860, and latterly, “The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next.” I regard Mr. Owen as one of the few men who are capable of entering into an inquiry of this