Invited to England, Mrs. Stowe found her journey there almost a royal progress. People stood at their doors to see her pass by. Children ran ahead of the carriage and offered her flowers. “That’s her,” cried out the newsboys on the street, “d’ye see the courls?” A national penny offering, coming from all classes of society, was turned into a thousand golden sovereigns and presented to her, to be used for the cause of the slave. There were many addresses and public meetings and demonstrations of sympathy, and from the people a perfect ovation. The great of the court, of literary England, anti-slavery leaders, united to pay her homage. One of her gifts she brought back to America, in order to complete its record. The Duchess of Sutherland gave her a gold bracelet in the form of a slave’s shackles, inscribed “We trust it is a memorial of a chain that is soon to be broken.” Its links bore the dates for the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself in England and her possessions. Later Mrs. Stowe had other links marked for the ending of slavery in the District of Columbia, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery in this country--changes due largely to her work, two of these events coming within a decade after _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ was published. After her return to America, Mrs. Stowe kept on writing--sketches of her experiences abroad, essays and stories of New England life, and a second slavery novel called _Dred_, which the critics announced a greater book than _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, but its popular success was less. Her whole soul was bound up in the affairs of the nation as the crisis of 1861 drew nearer. She dreaded war, yet believed that it was the red-hot iron that must burn away the nation’s disease. “It was God’s will,” she said, “that this land, north as well as south, should deeply and terribly suffer for the sin of consenting to and encouraging the great oppressions of the south; that the ill-gotten wealth which had arisen from striking hands with oppression and robbery should be paid back in the taxes of war; that the blood of the poor slave, that had cried so many years from the ground in vain, should be answered by the blood of the sons from the best hearthstones through all the free states; that the slave mothers whose tears nobody regarded should have with them a great company of weepers, north and south, Rachels weeping for their children and refusing to be comforted; that the free states who refused to listen when they were told of lingering starvation, cold, privation, and barbarous cruelty as perpetrated on the slave, should have lingering starvation, cold, hunger, and cruelty doing its work among their own sons, at the hands of these slave masters with whose sins our nation had connived.”