“Mrs. Bird slowly opened the drawer. There were little coats of many a form and pattern, piles of aprons, and rows of small stockings; and even a pair of little shoes, worn and rubbed at the toes, were peeping from the folds of a paper. There was a toy horse and wagon, a top, a ball--memorials gathered with many a tear and many a heartbreak. She sat down by the drawer, and, leaning her head on her hands over it wept till the tears fell through her fingers into the drawer; then suddenly raising her head she began with nervous haste selecting the plainest and most substantial articles and gathering them into a bundle. “‘Mamma,’ said one of the boys, ‘are you going to give away _those_ things?’ “‘My dear boys,’ she said softly and earnestly, ‘if our dear, loving little Henry looks down from Heaven he would be glad to have us do this. I could not find it in my heart to give them away to any common person--to anybody that was happy; but I give them to a mother more heart-broken and sorrowful than I am; and I hope God will send his blessings with them!’” Mrs. Stowe herself had learned what it means to the mother to have her child taken from her. In the depths of her own sorrow, when her most beautiful and beloved boy was lying on his dying bed, she had prayed that her anguish might not be suffered in vain. Her prayer was being answered in the great comprehension coming to her that the separation of the family tie was the most poignant wrong in the system of slavery. This feeling she embodied supremely in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the very epic of human compassion. At the time of writing this great book her mind was full, her hand was trained, her soul was aflame. When the great inspiration came she was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but asking no question how or why, she wrote as she was moved to write. How this happened is now to be told.