In the fall of 1848, Harrison Gray Otis, writing in advocacy of the election of Zachary Taylor, referred to an incident in 1831, when, as Mayor of Boston, he answered an application from the Governors of Virginia and Georgia for information respecting the persons responsible for _The Liberator_. “Some time afterward,” he says, “it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor: that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors.” Lowell saw the letter in one of the newspapers of the day, clipped out this sentence, pasted it on a sheet of paper, and wrote below it, with the title “the day of small things,” the notable lines which in his collected poems bear the heading “To W. L. Garrison.” The poem was published in the _Standard_, 19 October, 1848, but the incident evidently made a strong impression on him, especially when he considered what had taken place in seventeen years; for immediately afterward he wrote again, and in the number for 26 October, appeared THE EX-MAYOR’S CRUMB OF CONSOLATION. A PATHETIC BALLAD.[77] “Two Governors once a letter writ To the Mayor of a distant city, And told him a paper was published in it, That was telling the truth, and ’t was therefore fit That the same should be crushed as dead as a nit By an Aldermanic Committee: ‘Don’t say so?’ says Otis, ‘I’ll enquire if so ’t is: Dreadful! telling the truth? What a pity! “‘It can’t be the Atlas, that’s perfectly clear, And of course it isn’t the Advertiser, ’T is out of the Transcript’s appropriate sphere, The Post is above suspicion: oh dear, To think of such accidents happening here! I hoped that our people were wiser. While we’re going,’ says Otis, ‘_Faustissimis votis_, How very annoying such flies are!’ “So, without more ado, he enquired all round Among people of wealth and standing; But wealth looked scornful, and standing frowned; At last in a garret with smoke imbrowned, The conspirators all together he found,-- One man with a colored boy banding; ‘’Pon my word,’ says Otis, ‘Decidedly low t is,’ As he groped for the stairs on the landing. “So he wrote to the Governors back agen, And told them t was something unworthy of mention; That t was only a single man with a pen, And a font of type in a sort of den, A person unknown to Aldermen, And, of course, beneath attention; ‘And therefore,’ wrote Otis, _Annuentibus totis_, ‘There’s no reason for apprehension.’