Be this how it may, at the time of that visit to La Grange spoken of above, Miss Wright’s thoughts and aspirations were directed with a persistent and indomitable enthusiasm, which made the groundwork of her character, to doing something for the improvement of the condition of the slave populations in the southern states of the great transatlantic republic. Both Frances and Camilla Wright were ladies of considerable fortune; and I believe that General La Fayette wished much to induce his ward Frances not to employ her means in the scheme she was now bent on. But she was of age,--I fancy some six or seven years more than that--and he had no authority to interfere with her purpose, with which besides, otherwise than as likely to be pecuniarily disastrous to her, he entirely sympathised. Her purpose was to purchase a property in the valley of the Mississippi--in Alabama I think it was--with the slaves upon it, to free them all immediately, and to cultivate the estate by their free labour, living there with them in a sort of community, the principles and plan of which were, I fancy, very largely based upon the ideas and schemes of Mr. Owen of Lanark. His son, Robert Dale Owen, subsequently well known in Europe as the author of sundry works on spiritualism and political speculations, and as United States Consul at Naples and perhaps other cities, was a life-long friend of Miss Wright’s. Now, my parents had taken with them to La Grange my next brother, Henry, who has been mentioned as the companion of my early London rambles, and who was then rapidly approaching manhood without having found for himself, or having had found for him, any clear prospect of earning the livelihood which it was clearly enough necessary that he should earn in some way; and Miss Wright proposed to my mother to bring him to America to join in her projected establishment and experiment at “New Harmony”--such I believe to have been the name which Miss Wright gave to her property. The original name, I think, was Nashoba, but my knowledge of any of these matters is very imperfect. I know that the whole scheme ended in complete disappointment to all concerned, and entire failure. To Miss Wright it involved very considerable pecuniary loss, which, as I learned subsequently from my mother, she bore with the utmost fortitude and cheerfulness, but without any great access of wisdom as regarded her benevolent schemes for the political and economical improvement of human, and especially black, society. I never saw her again; but remember to have heard of her marrying a French teacher of languages at the close of a course of lectures given by her against the institution of matrimony. All that I heard from my mother and my brother of their connection with Miss Wright, of her administration of affairs at New Harmony, and her conduct when her experiment issued in failure and disappointment, left with me the impression of her genuinely highminded