Colored boys and girls came to the classes Mrs. Stowe had for her own children. One little fellow was claimed by his former master, arrested and put up at auction. The distracted mother begged and pleaded for help. Harriet Beecher Stowe went out and raised the money to buy the child and give him back to his mother. Pathetic incidents such as these were continually coming to the attention of the professor’s family. In Cincinnati this New England woman had a real acquaintance with negroes, and was quick to note their peculiar characteristics. Unconsciously she was absorbing and assimilating pictures of slavery which later served a great purpose. “What is there here to satisfy one whose mind is awakened on the subject?” she asked. “No one can have it brought before him without an irrepressible desire to do something, but what is there to be done?” To find this something-to-do gradually became one of her chief thoughts, even though her domestic cares were almost overwhelming and her health suffered from the strain. The resources of the family did not increase. One year she was ill six months out of the twelve, yet she put up the stiffest kind of fight against the most disheartening odds. Whenever the household was in a comparative calm she would seize her pen and write some story or sketch. A delicate, highly strung, little woman, with seven children on her hands, she wrote in the tumult of the living-room, with babies tumbling about her, with tables being set and cleared away, with children being washed and dressed, and everything imaginable in a household going on. Doctor Stowe received a call to Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. Perhaps the family was glad to leave the excited atmosphere of Cincinnati where feeling on the slavery question was so inflamed, and live once more in the calm of New England. Yet for Mrs. Stowe it was not to remain for long a calm background. On the journey north she stopped in Boston at the home of her brother Edward. The fugitive slave bill was being debated in Congress just at this time and everywhere the hearts of thinking men were stirred. Her visit came at the height of the fierce and fiery discussion of the proposed law which not only gave southern owners the right to pursue their slaves into free states, but forced the North to assist in the business. Her brother had received and forwarded fugitives many a time. She heard heartrending accounts of slaves recaptured and dragged back in irons, of children torn from their mothers and sold south--this breaking up of families offended her most of all. Soon after the Stowes were settled in their Maine home a letter came from her sister-in-law in Boston. “Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something to make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”