She felt, she said, like a child who had set fire to a packet of gunpowder. And if on the approach to some cathedral door her way was blocked by the crowd waiting to see her as she passed in, she could only, in her amazement, quote the words, “What went ye out for to see? A reed shaken with the wind?” “It seems to me so odd,” she wrote home from England, “so odd and dreamlike that so many persons desire to see me; and now I cannot help thinking that they will think when they do, that God hath chosen the weak things of this world!” Evidently Mrs. Stowe had very little conceit about herself. She was always a quiet, unostentatious little body, “a little bit of a woman,” as she described herself, “just as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff.” She must have been utterly wanting in vanity, for when she began to be famous and everybody was desiring to see her, she thought it all simply wonderful and declared that she was “never very much to look at” in her best days. There have been so many things to say about Harriet Beecher that too little attention has perhaps been given in this book to her personal appearance. Let us make up for that at one stroke. When the Beecher children’s stepmother came to live with them she said that the four youngest children--George, Harriet, Henry and Charles--were all very pretty, and that Harriet and Henry were as lovely children as she ever saw. Harriet combined the aquiline Foote brow with the stronger lines of the Beecher family. She was small in figure and quick in her movements. Her hands were plastic and mobile, the most controlled and manageable hands in the world; their motion made a language in itself. Her dark-brown hair that never lost a warmness of tone until the snow began to fall upon it, curled about her face, and, in the fashion that prevailed during her young ladyhood, was allowed to fall in ringlets on each side. Her eyes were of the blue-gray that takes on all colors as emotion moves the soul; they had often a far-away dreamy expression that came from her complete absorption in thought. For instance, at a luncheon in her honor she did not join in the flow of conversation at all, but sat absorbed in her own thoughts, explaining afterward that she had been making the scheme of a new book and thinking out the characters for it, and had forgotten where she was. In this respect she was like Tennyson who, under similar conditions, is said to have remarked only that he had eaten “too much, much too much!” At other times, however, Mrs. Stowe delighted her fellow guests at some dinner table by her interest in the subject discussed; her heightened color, and her shining eyes, together with the ardor and good sense of her talk, the vivacity of her expression, and the nobility that characterized her points of view, charmed all that came within her circle. After such a time the hostess might go away and complain, as one did, that she had not been told beforehand how beautiful Mrs. Stowe