"A few days before, when I first heard of the passage of the law, I had visited Miss Crandall with my friend, Mr. George W. Benson, and advised with her as to the course she and her friends ought to pursue when she should be brought to trial. She appreciated at once and fully the importance of leaving her persecutors to show to the world how base they were, and how atrocious was the law they had induced the Legislature to enact--a law, by the force of which a woman might be fined and imprisoned as a felon in the State of Connecticut for giving instruction to colored girls. She agreed that it would be best for us to leave her in the hands of those with whom the law originated, hoping that, in their madness, they would show forth all their hideous features. "Mr. Benson and I, therefore, went diligently around to all who he knew were friendly to Miss Crandall and her school, and counselled them by no means to give bonds to keep her from imprisonment, because nothing would expose so fully to the public the egregious wickedness of the law and the virulence of her persecutors as the fact that they had thrust her into jail. "When I found that her resolution was equal to the trial which seemed to be impending, that she was ready to brave and to bear meekly the worst treatment that her enemies would venture to subject her to, I made all the arrangements for her comfort that were practicable in our prison. It fortunately happened that the most suitable room, unoccupied, was the one in which a man named Watkins had recently been confined for the murder of his wife, and out of which he had been taken and executed. This circumstance we foresaw would add not a little to the public detestation of the _black law_. The jailer, at my request, readily put the room in as nice order as was possible, and permitted me to substitute for the bedstead and mattrass on which the murderer had slept, fresh and clean ones from my own house and Mr. Benson's.