The subject possessed her. Her whole being was saturated with her theme. Her hot indignation was welling up, her deep pity was a part of her inmost soul. Day and night it was there in her mind, waiting to be written, needing but a few hours to bring it into sentences and paragraphs. She had been a guest at the Shelby plantation soon after her arrival in Cincinnati. Now, nearly twenty years later, she described the details of that visit with minutest fidelity--the humble cot of the negro, the planter’s mansion, the funny pranks and songs of the slaves. Eliza’s escape was suggested by the story of one of her own servants. Uncle Tom’s simple honor and loyalty were characteristics impressed on her by the husband of a former slave woman for whom she wrote letters, a man who remained in bondage rather than break his promise to his master and so win his freedom. Topsy was a child in Mrs. Stowe’s mission Sunday-school class, who only grinned in bewilderment when asked, “Have you ever heard anything about God?” When the teacher asked again, “Do you know who made you?” the answer was, “Nobody as I knows on,” the eyes twinkling as she added, “I ’spect I growed.” And Legree’s plantation was pictured to her in a letter from her brother Charles, who went on a business trip up the Red River to an estate where the slaves were treated with a brutality almost indescribable. Her own experiences thus gave the personal touch that fires knowledge into passion. “My heart was bursting with the anguish excited by the cruelty and injustice our nation was showing to the slave, and praying God to let me do a little, and to cause my cry for them to be heard. Weeping many a time as I thought of the slave mothers whose babes were torn from them, I put my lifeblood, my prayers, my tears, into the book,” was her own graphic description of its making. The story was not so much composed by her as imposed upon her. Scenes and conversations and incidents rushed on her with a vividness and importunity admitting of no denial. She had no choice in the matter, the book insisted on getting itself into shape and could not be withstood. Years afterward an old sea captain asked to shake hands with the author of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. “I did not write it,” said the white-haired lady gently. “You didn’t?” he ejaculated in great surprise. “Why, who did, then?” “God wrote it,” she replied simply, “I merely did His dictation.” “Amen,” said the captain reverently, and walked thoughtfully away. The serial ran in the _New Era_ from June of 1851 to the following April. When it was nearing completion a firm in Boston offered to print it in book form, but feared failure if it was much longer. “I can not stop,” was her answer, “until it is done.” Henry Ward Beecher told his sister his plans to work against slavery in Plymouth church. “I too have begun to do something,” was her reply; “I have begun a story trying to set forth the sufferings and wrongs of the slaves.”