That charming writer and whole-souled man, Colonel T. W. Higginson, somewhere tells us that all the things he ever heard or read about slavery did not fix in his soul such a hostility to it as a single scene in a Missouri slave market that he once saw. He says that as he sat here, a purchaser came in to buy a little girl to wait on his wife. Colonel Higginson saw three little sisters brought in who were from eight to twelve years old; they were mulattoes, with sweet, gentle manners; they had evidently been taken good care of, and their pink calico frocks were clean and whole. He saw the gentleman choose one of them and heard him ask her, good-naturedly enough, if she did not wish to go with him. She burst into tears and said, “I would rather stay with my mother.”[13] But her tears were as powerless, of course, as so many salt drops from the ocean. That was the story. All the horrors of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” he said, all the stories told him by fugitive slaves, the scarred backs he afterward saw by dozens among colored recruits, did not impress him as did that hour in the gaol. The whole probable career of that poor, wronged, motherless, shrinking child passed before his mind. It seemed to him that a man must be utterly lost to all manly instincts who would not give his life to overthrow such a system; and he thought that a woman who could tolerate, much less defend it, could not herself be true, could not be pure, or must be fearfully and grossly ignorant. Of such ignorance as this no one can accuse Mrs. Stowe. The personal touch that should fire knowledge into passion and make her keenly feel what had been hitherto but a part of her theory she also was to receive.