Here was, then, a picture of the slave system at its best. Perhaps her gravity and absorption during the picnic merriment of the day was caused by the thought that the owners of the happy plantation had it in their power to separate any husband and father there from his family or any little girl from her mother, and, if he needed the money, sell them to slave traders who would carry them “down the river” to be lost to their own forever. Of what such a fate might mean Mrs. Stowe learned from her brother Charles, who acted for some months as collecting agent for a New Orleans commission house. On one of the trips up the Red River he had come upon a plantation where the slaves were treated with a brutality almost indescribable. Of this he tried to draw a faithful picture in his next letter to his sister, and she had thus placed in her storehouse another chapter for the book she was unconsciously preparing to write. Almost incredible as it may seem, the Legree plantation was, therefore, a scene taken directly from life. In another letter Charles Beecher told how from the deck of a steamer on which he was traveling he had seen a slave mother seek death by springing into the river with her child clasped to her bosom. She preferred death for herself and her child rather than to allow her little girl to enter the life into which she knew she would be sold. Still other ways of seeing the under side of the movement that was going on were being afforded the quiet little woman in the Cincinnati suburb. Every month there was something happening. A press that printed abolition matter was destroyed, a house was mobbed, a free negro was kidnapped, the shop of an abolitionist was riddled, or a negro schoolhouse razed to the ground. And in the mobs of 1840 there was a general attack upon the negro population in the midst of which rescued slaves were caught and hurried back across the line to their plantations. Houses were battered down by cannon, violence and crime naturally followed in the wake of mob law. The smoke of the conflagration could be seen from the house where Mrs. Stowe lived and the sorrowful processions of colored people with what remained of their possessions starting out for Canada, passed by her door; mothers passed with children in their arms or toddling along by their side, and discouraged men, bearing heavy burdens. Sometimes at night she heard the rattle of a big covered wagon in which she would be sure was an escaping woman being helped to the border. In such ways as these Mrs. Stowe was unconsciously trained for a special work. So far the preparation had been mostly by hearsay. The practical demonstrations that followed it were to be even more effective. CHAPTER XV THE GREAT INSPIRATION