Reading this letter aloud to the family, when she came to that sentence Harriet Beecher Stowe rose, crushed the paper in her hand, and with a look on her face that her children never forgot, she exclaimed, “I will write something--if I live, I will!” She was forty years old, in delicate health, overladen with responsibilities; a devoted mother, with small children, one still a baby; with untrained servants requiring supervision; with her pupils to be taught daily; and boarders to eke out the limited salary--her hands were full to overflowing. It seemed unlikely that she would ever do anything but this ceaseless labor. But her heart burned within her for those in bondage. The law passed and the fugitives were hunted out and sent back into servitude and death. The people of the North looked on indifferently. Could she, a woman with no reputation, waken them by anything she might write? While at a communion service in the little church at Brunswick, like a vision the death of Uncle Tom on Legree’s plantation came before her. Scarcely able to control her sobbing, she hurried home, locked herself in her room, and wrote it out, exactly as it stands now, in a white heat of passionate enthusiasm. She read it to her two little boys, ten and twelve years old. Through his sobs one of them said, “Oh, mamma, slavery is the most cursed thing in the world!” Then she wrote the opening chapters and offered the manuscript to Doctor Bailey who had moved his paper from Cincinnati to Washington. He accepted it and arranged that it should be printed in weekly instalments--a dangerous method unless the story is completed before publication begins. With only fragments of her time to write, she sent off the necessary chapters each week, composed sometimes in pain and weariness, under almost insurmountable difficulties, seldom revised, sometimes not even punctuated. But the story was to her so much more intense a reality than any other earthly thing that the required pages never failed.