Women in those days neither spoke in public nor took part in political affairs. But it may be guessed that my mother was deeply interested in all that was going on in the world of affairs, and under her own roof, too, for our house at South Boston became one of the centers of activity of the anti-slavery agitation. My father (who was some seventeen years older than his wife) well understood the power of the press. He had employed it to good effect in his work for the blind, the insane, and others. Hence he became actively interested in the management of the _Commonwealth_, an anti-slavery newspaper, and with my mother’s help edited it for an entire winter. They began work together every morning, he preparing the political articles, and she the literary ones. Burning words were sent forth from the quiet precincts of “Green Peace.” My mother had thus named the homestead, lying in its lovely garden, when she came there early in her married life. Little did she then dream that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise would disturb its serene repose some ten years later. The agitation had not yet become so strong as greatly to affect the children of the household. We played about the garden as usual and knew little of the _Commonwealth_ undertaking, save as it brought some delightful juveniles to the editorial sanctum. The little Howes highly approved of this by-product of journalism! Our mother’s pen had been used before this time to help the cause of the slave. As early as 1848 she contributed a poem to _The Liberty Bell_, an annual edited by Mrs. Maria Norton Chapman and sold at the anti-slavery bazars. “In my first published volume, _Passion Flowers_, appeared some lines ‘On the Death of the Slave Lewis,’ which were wrung from my indignant heart by a story--alas! too common in those days--of murderous outrage committed by a master against his human chattel” (_Recollections of the Anti-Slavery Struggle_, Julia Ward Howe). Another method of arousing the conscience of the nation was through the public platform. My father and his friends were anxious to present the great question in a perfectly fair way. So a series of lectures was given in Tremont Temple, where the speakers were alternately the most prominent advocates of slavery at the South and its most strenuous opponents at the North. Senator Toombs, of Georgia, and General Houston, of Texas, were among the former. It was, probably, at this lecture course that my father exercised his office as chairman in an unusual way. In those days it was the custom to open the meeting with prayer, and some of the contemporary clergymen were very long-winded. Dr. Howe informed each reverend gentleman beforehand that at the end of five minutes he should pull the latter’s coat-tail. The divines were in such dread of this gentle admonition that they invariably wound up the prayer within the allotted time.