Hon. Gabriel Adams had taken me by the hand at father’s funeral, led me to a stranger and introduced me as: “The child I told you of, but eight years old, her father’s nurse and comforter.” He had smoothed my hair and told me not to cry; God would bless me for being a good child. He was a member of the session when I joined the church; his voice in prayer had smoothed mother’s hard journey through the dark valley; and now, as mayor of the city he had ordered it illuminated in honor of the battle of Buena Vista, and this, too, on Saturday evening, when the unholy glorification extended into the Sabbath. Measured by the standard of his profession as an elder in the church whose highest judicatory had pronounced slavery and Christianity incompatible, no one was more vulnerable than he, and of none was I so unsparing, yet as I wrote, the letter was blistered with tears; but his oft repeated comment was: “Jane is right,” and he went out of his way to take my hand and say: “You were right.” Samuel Black, a son of my pastor, dropped his place as leader of the Pittsburgh bar and rushed to the war. My comments were thought severe, even for me; yet the first intimation I had that I had not been cast aside as a monster, came from his sister, who sent me a message that her father, her husband and herself, approved my criticism. Samuel returned with a colonel’s commission, and one day I was about to pass him without recognition, where he stood on the pavement talking to two other lawyers, when he stepped before me and held out his hand. I drew back, and he said: “Is it possible you will not take my hand?” I looked at it, then into his manly, handsome face, and answered: “_There is blood on it!_ The blood of women and children slain at their own altars, on their own hearthstones, that you might spread the glorious American institution of woman whipping and baby stealing.” “Oh,” he exclaimed, “This is too bad! I swear to you I never killed a woman or a child.” “Then you did not fight in Mexico, did not help to bombard Buena Vista.” His friends joined him and insisted that I did the Colonel great wrong, when he looked squarely into my face, and, holding out his hand, said: “For the sake of the old church, for the sake of the old man, for the sake of the old times, give me your hand.” I laid it in his, and hurried away, unable to speak, for he was the most eloquent man in Pennsylvania. He fell at last at the head of his regiment, while fighting in the battle of Fair Oaks, for the freedom he had betrayed in Mexico.