One Sunday morning I walked out towards what is now called the Island. The road was marked by a rail fence, but of buildings there were none. I went so far that I was near the slave pen, a building now standing and which I have visited within a few years. It was of brick, enclosed within a brick wall, and all of a dingy straw color. At a short distance from the building, I met a black woman walking slowly away from it. I said to her: "What building is that?" At once she was in tears, and she said: "That is the pen where the poor black people are kept who are going down to Louisiana." She had then been to visit her daughter, a girl of about eighteen years of age, according to the mother's statement, who was to leave the next morning. She was the last of a family of nine as the woman said, who had been sold and taken away from her. As I was leaving I said: "Who is your master?" She answered: "Mr. Blair, of the _Globe_." In the fourteen years of my manhood, that I acted with the Democratic party, I never said anything in favor of the system of slavery. If otherwise I might have done so, the interview with that old woman would have restrained me. VIII FIRST EXPERIENCE IN POLITICS At the spring election of Groton in 1839, I was chosen a member of the school committee. The other members had been in the service in previous years. They were the Rev. Charles Robinson, the Rev. Mr. Kittredge, Dr. Joshua Green, and Dr. George Stearns. In the early Colonial period the "minister" was often the schoolmaster also. Naturally he took an interest in the education of the children, and previous to the time when school committees were required by statute, he was the self-constituted guide of the teachers and schools. Indeed, the schools were parochial. Whenever the minister visited a school he made a prayer, and the morning exercise in reading was in the New Testament Scriptures--two verses by each pupil. In 1840 the entire board was rejected, and a board composed of school teachers and non- professional men was chosen.