As matters grew more serious the excitement increased. The printing establishment was mobbed and when Mrs. Stowe saw her brother Henry putting pistols in order, declaring, with set face, that he stood ready to fight if need be, she could see how critical was the time. The mobs even threatened the houses of all that professed abolition sentiments and there was danger that the Theological Seminary might be attacked. From her home at Walnut Hills, Mrs. Stowe could see the light of the burning houses upon the sky for many nights. What was right to think or do, she could not see, but whatever the outcome was she thought that the rule of mob was wrong. While she believed the cause was a just one, she deplored the excesses of the excited people. As for herself, she was not afraid. They were protected, she said afterward in her funny way, by the distance of the Seminary from the city and by the providential depth and adhesiveness of the Cincinnati mud. She was, however, excited, indignant, and thoroughly aroused. She hoped that Mr. Birney would stand his ground in his fireproof building and assert his rights. If she were a man, she cried, she would go and she believed she could take good care of at least one window. By this time Mrs. Stowe had gained some practical knowledge of what the slavery system really meant. When she had been but one year in Cincinnati she had gone with friends to visit a plantation across the river. Here she had seen a happy prosperous slave life, under owners that seemed to be the sincere well-wishers of the negroes who served them. There was little to shock or distress her in what she saw. Most of the day she moved about as one in a dream. She sat apart, heeding not the antics and gambols of the little darkies. But we know that the scenes she saw that day were unconsciously laid up in her memory to be recalled when the building of the book had come into her mind and she needed the material for her great purpose. Years afterward, when the friend who accompanied her on that Kentucky visit read the account of the doings on the Shelby Farm as Mrs. Stowe depicted them in the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she saw in the description an exact correspondence to the events of that day as she remembered them.