If she had been able to look into the future, however, she must have been appalled by the view. The darkest period of her life was before her, a time to try the stoutest soul, a stretch of fourteen years of struggle with narrowing means and increasing cares. The Seminary that her father had come into the west to found, and in which Professor Stowe was the chief pillar of scholarship, did not for various reasons unconnected with either of these noble self-sacrificing men, increase in size and financial support as they had hoped it would. Students became fewer and salaries more and more meager. At last Professor Stowe, convinced that he could no longer carry the forlorn hope of that western work with any justice to his family, accepted one of several offers that came to him to enter upon more advantageous professional work in the east and removed to Bowdoin College, his own alma mater, in Brunswick, Maine. In this period, then, between her marriage in 1836 and the removal to Maine in January, 1850, we see our brave little woman putting up the stiffest kind of fight against the most disheartening odds. Under household conditions that grew less and less encouraging for the housekeeper, she toiled on. Sickness visited various members of the family and the burdens grew heavier than the little mother was able to bear. Her knowledge was deepening, and her heart was enlarging, but her strength was too sorely tired. Her struggle was tragic; it is sad to reflect upon, but it is also inspiring! Many who read the pathetic record of these years of privation and suffering will lose sight of the great author in their sympathetic interest in the woman, the wife, and the mother; through her heroism and sweetness and nobility of character during this crucial time she is endeared to us as no fame and glory could ever endear her. Her entry into the profession of literature came through the welcome prospect of a “_douceur_ that might eke out a domestic accommodation.” Her literary training was gained when she was “a young mother and housekeeper in the first years of her novitiate, amid alternate demands from an ever dissolving ‘kitchen cabinet’ and from the two, three and four occupants of her nursery.” And if she had not been what Sam Lawson would call “one of these ’ere facultized persons,” she never could have accomplished the prodigies of work that came from her hands.