Among several who were bought for liberty "on the auction-block of Plymouth pulpit," was "Pinky," a little colored girl. "She was bought and overbought," said Mr. Beecher. "The rain never fell faster than the tears fell from many that were here." Rose Terry Cooke threw her ring into the contribution box, and Mr. Beecher put it on the child's hand and told her "it was her freedom-ring." Her expression was such a happy one that Eastman Johnson, the artist, painted her on canvas, looking at her freedom-ring. Later she was sent for a year to Lincoln University at Washington, and went back to her own people to become a teacher and a missionary among them. In these years of incessant toil, Mr. Beecher's home was gladdened by the birth of twin boys, Alfred and Arthur, in December, 1852. They both died on the fourth of July in the following year, and were buried in one grave. Mr. Beecher could not hear their names mentioned for years, so overwhelming was the loss to the man who idolized children. In the autumn of 1854, by the aid of friends, he purchased a farm of nearly one hundred acres at Lenox, Berkshire County, Mass. He was a devoted lover of trees. Speaking of a large elm, he said, "It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its face; and when I whispered to myself, 'This is mine,' there was a shrinking, as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of _property_ in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church? So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers!... Thou belongest to no man's hand, but to all men's eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots and the age from thy trunk." Though he said, "The chief use of a farm is to lie down upon," knowing as all brain workers know, how restful it is to stretch one's self upon the ground, yet he always cultivated flowers and vegetables, and made the whole farm a thing of beauty. He felt that he owed much to Ruskin's works. "The sky, the earth, and the waters are no longer what they were to us. We have learned a language and come to a sympathy in them more through the instrumentality of Ruskin's works than by all other instrumentalities on earth, excepting, always, the nature which my mother gave me--sainted be her name."