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| FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER. 759 together. (She is a white woman.) la bet I have not been in one colored person's house since I left Massachusetts; bat i have a pleasant time. My life reminds me of a beautiful dream. What a difference between thia and York! * * I have met with some of the kindest treatment up here that I have ever received. * • I have lectured three limes this week. After I went from Limerick, I went to Springvale; there I spoke on Sunday night at an Anti-Slavery meeting. Some of the people *re Anti-Slavery, Anti-ram and Anti-Catkolic; and if you could see oar Maine kdies,—gome of them among the noblest types of womanhood you have ever seen I They are for putting men of Anti-Slavery principles in office, * * to cleanse the corrupt fountains of our government by sending men to Congress who will plead for our down-trodden and oppressed brethren, our crushed and helpless sisters, whose tears and blood bedew our soil, whose chains are clanking 'neath our proudest banners, whose cries and groans amid our loudest paeans rise." Everywhere in this latitude doors opened before her, and her gifts were universally recognized as a valuable acquisition to the cause. In the letter above referred to she said: " I spoke in Boston on Monday night. * * * Well, I atn but one, but can do something, and, God helping me, I will try. Mr. Brister from Lowell addressed the meeting; also Rev. ——. Howe. We had a good demonstration." Having read the narrative of Solomon Northrop (12 years a slave), she was led to embrace the Free Labor doctrine most thoroughly; and in a letter dated at Temple, Maine, Oct. 20, 1854, after expressing the interest she took in the annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society of that state, she remarked: "I spoke on Free Produce, and now by the way I believe in that kind of Abolition. Oh, it does seem to strike at one of the principal roots of the matter. I have commenced since I read Solomon Northrup. Oh, if Mrs. Stowe lias clothed American slavery in the graceful garb of fiction, Solomon Northrup comes up from the dark habitation of Southern cruelty where slavery fattens and feasts on human blood with such mournful revelations that one might almost wish Tor the sake of humanity that the tales of horror which he reveals were not BO. Oh, how can we pamper our appetites upon luxuries drawn from reluctant fingers? Oh, could slavery exist long if it did not sit on a commercial throne? I have read somewhere, if I remember aright, of a Hindoo being loth to cut a tree because being a believer in the transmigration of souls, he thought the eonl of his father had passed into it. * * * Oh, friend, beneath the most delicate preparations of the cane can you not see the stinging lash and clotted whip? I have reason to be thankful that I am able to give a little more for a Free Labor dress, if it is coarser. I can thank God that upon its warp and woof I see no stain of blood and tears; that to procure a little finer muslin for my limbs no crushed and broken heart went out in sighs, and that {rom the field where it was raised went up no wild and startling cry unto the throne of God to witness there in language deep and strong, that in demanding that cotton I was nerving oppression's hand for deeds of guilt and crime. If the liberation of the slave demanded it, I could consent to part with a portion of the blood from my own veins if that would do him any good." After having thus alluded to free labor, she gave a short journal of the different places where she had recently lectured from the 5th of September to the 20th of October, which we mention here simply to show the per- |