In the year 1850 the Stowe family were having their first taste of a drizzling, inexorable, northeast storm in the State of Maine. It was while they were getting settled in this new home that the news came to them of the final passing of the Fugitive Slave Act--an event that sent sweeping across the north a furore of indignation. On her way to the new home in Brunswick, Maine, Mrs. Stowe stayed for ten days in Boston at the home of her brother Edward. Here she was in the very hotbed of the abolitionists; and as she heard of the sufferings of the slaves that were risking all to reach the Canada line beyond which they were safe, and of the cruelties inflicted upon those so hapless as to be taken back to their former owners, she cried, “It is incredible, amazing, mournful! I feel as if I should be willing to sink with it, were all this sin and misery to sink in the sea!” The cry of this great sorrow followed her after she was settled in her new home; she remembered all these things and pondered them in her heart; and when she bent over her own new child as he lay sleeping beside her at night, and thought of the slave mothers whose babies had been taken away from them, her tears fell thick upon his sleeping face. Time went on and things did not get any better. Mrs. Stowe was writing to people everywhere north and south to gather unimpeachable testimony on all phases of the slave system, but nothing she heard in any way modified her opinion or her feeling. One day her sister-in-law, Mrs. Edward Beecher, in Boston, wrote her: “Now, Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” This touched Mrs. Stowe to the quick. She determined that she would heed the call. “I will write something--I will if I live,” she said as she rose with a determined gesture. She wrote to thank her sister-in-law for the letter. She said: “As long as the baby sleeps with me nights I cannot do anything, but I will do it at last. I will do that thing if I live.” About this time her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, came to visit her. They sat up all night talking over the thrilling question of the hour. She confided to him that she intended to write something. He told her to do this, and he would scatter the book as thick as leaves of Vallombrosa!