“You must sleep now, John Brown.” But before lying down, the old man looked hard into the broad, dark face. Douglass nodded his head. “I’m with you, John Brown. Rest a little. Then we’ll talk,” Douglass said and tiptoed from the room. * * * * * When John Brown left the house in Alexander Street several days later, he was expected in many quarters. He went first to Boston, George L. Sterns, the Massachusetts antislavery leader, paying his expenses. Sterns, who had never met “Osawatomie Brown,” had written to Rochester offering to introduce him to friends of freedom in Boston. They met on the street outside the committee rooms in Nilis’ Block, with a Kansas man doing the honors; and Brown went along to Sterns’ home. Coming into the parlor to greet the man who had become a household word during the summer of 1856, Mrs. Sterns heard her guest saying, “Gentlemen, I consider the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence one and inseparable.” “I felt,” she said later, writing about the profound impression of moral magnetism Brown made on everybody who saw him in those days, “that some old Cromwellian hero had dropped down among us.” Emerson, she remembered, called him “the most ideal of men, for he wanted to put all his ideas into action.” Yet Mrs. Sterns was struck by his modest estimate of the work he had in hand. After several efforts to bring together their friends to meet Captain Brown in his home, Sterns found that Sunday was the only day that would serve everybody’s convenience. Being a little uncertain how this might strike their guest’s ideas of religious propriety, Sterns prefaced his invitation with something like an apology. “Mr. Sterns,” came the prompt reply, “I have a little ewe-lamb that I want to pull out of the ditch, and the Sabbath will be as good a day as any to do it.” Over in Concord he went to see Henry David Thoreau. They sat at a table covered with lichens, ferns, birds’ nests and arrowheads. They dipped their fingers into a large trencher of nuts, cracked the shells between their teeth, and talked as kindred souls. Thoreau, lean and narrow-chested, thrust his big ugly nose forward and, with his searching gray eyes, probed the twisted steel of John Brown. The hermit believed then what he said afterward, when he served his term in jail: “When one-sixth of a people who are come to the land of liberty are enslaved, it is time for free men to rebel.” The secretary of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee received Captain Brown with cautious respect. Half an hour later he was saying, “By God, I’ll _make_ them give him money!” But the Committee warned, “We must know how he will use the money.” Kind-hearted, genial Gerrit Smith was glad to have his old friend with him for a few days. “Be sure of your men,” he advised. “My men need not be questioned, sir.” John Brown spoke a little stiffly.