which do not even belong together in any well-organized chapter, but matters which in a persuasive document doubtless were of great value in bringing back to the application the minds of those readers who may have been diverted by the sheer human interest of the tale. "Uncle Tom" was a success which, of course, could not be duplicated. The second antislavery novel, "Dred, a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp," sold enormously on the strength of its predecessor and on its own merits, but it could only fan the embers which had previously been inflamed. The task had been done; and though it was well repeated, and though the application pointed this time to the degrading effects of slavery on the master class, "Dred" could never be anything but an aftermath to "Uncle Tom." With a removal to Andover, Massachusetts, in 1852, Mrs. Stowe accompanied her husband to his last post in another theological school, settling into a congenial New England village in comfort at last and among cultured and orthodox neighbors. And here she continued to write until her final move to Hartford, doing her best work in the field of provincial stories of New England life and character. The first of these, "The Minister's Wooing," was her contribution to the newly established _Atlantic Monthly_. With her recent successes fresh in the public mind, she was an indispensable "selling feature" for the ambitious magazine. With this novel she made her first attempt, since the forgotten "Mayflower" volume, to write a story in which the moral should take care of itself. There was a moral, to be sure, and a striking one, for it pointed to a distrust of the older New England Calvinism and made clear the distinction between a religion that uplifts and a theology that turns to scorn the religion it assumes to fortify. In Simeon Brown she developed the obnoxious professor of the declining faith. He was one of that class of people who, of a freezing day, will plant themselves directly between you and the fire, and there stand and argue to prove that selfishness is the root of all moral evil.... He was one of those men who suppose themselves submissive to the divine will, to the uttermost extent demanded by the extreme theology of that day, simply because they have no nerves to feel, no imagination to conceive what endless happiness or suffering is, and who deal therefore with the great problem of the salvation or damnation of myriads as a problem of theological algebra, to be worked out by their inevitable _x_, _y_, _z_.[24] [24] See "Theological Tea," chap. iv. It answers to the refrain of "The Deacon's Masterpiece," which appeared while she was writing the book: "Logic is logic. That's all I say."