She was
a small woman; and her pretty curling hair and far-away dreaming eyes,
and her way of becoming occupied in what interested her until she
forgot everything else for the time, all these I first began to see
and understand as I gazed after her retreating figure.
Mrs. Stowe's personal appearance has received scant justice and no
mercy at the hand of the photographer. She says herself, during her
triumphal visit to England after the publication of "Uncle Tom:" "The
general topic of remark on meeting me seems to be that I am not so bad
looking as they were afraid I was; and I do assure you, when I have
seen the things that are put up in the shop windows here with my name
under them, I have been lost in wondering imagination at the boundless
loving-kindness of my English and Scottish friends in keeping up such
a warm heart for such a Gorgon. I should think that the Sphinx in the
London Museum might have sat for most of them. I am going to make a
collection of these portraits to bring home to you. There is a great
variety of them, and they will be useful, like the Irishman's
guideboard which showed 'where the road did not go.'" I remember once
accompanying her to a reception at a well-known house in Boston,
where, before the evening was over, the hostess drew me aside, saying,
"Why did you never tell me that Mrs. Stowe was beautiful?" And indeed,
when I observed her in the full ardor of conversation, with her
heightened color, her eyes shining and awake, but filled with great
softness, her abundant curling hair rippling naturally about her head
and falling a little at the sides (as in the portrait by Richmond), I
quite agreed with the lady of the house.
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