I suppose it is so long ago you may have
forgotten, but it was a word of tenderness and sympathy about my
brother's trial; it was womanly, tender, and sweet, such as at heart
you are. After all, my love of you is greater than my admiration, for
I think it more and better to be really a woman worth loving than to
have read Greek and German and written books....
It seems now but a little while since my brother Henry and I were two
young people together. He was my two years junior, and nearest
companion out of seven brothers and three sisters. I taught him
drawing and heard his Latin lessons, for you know a girl becomes
mature and womanly long before a boy.... Then he married and lived a
missionary life in the new West, all with a joyousness, an enthusiasm,
a chivalry, which made life bright and vigorous to us both. Then in
time he was called to Brooklyn.... I well remember one snowy night his
riding till midnight to see me, and then our talking, till near
morning, what we could do to make headway against the horrid cruelties
that were being practiced against the defenseless blacks. My husband
was then away lecturing, and my heart was burning itself out in
indignation and anguish. Henry told me he meant to fight that battle
in New York; that he would have a church that would stand by him to
resist the tyrannic dictation of Southern slaveholders. I said: "I,
too, have begun to do something; I have begun a story, trying to set
forth the sufferings and wrongs of the slaves.
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