Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/415

Rh environments of these noble people were modified by the sincere hospitality with which we were received. My husband and Mr. Weld had been classmates in Lane Seminary, and were among the students who left that institution when the discussion of the slavery question was forbidden by the President, Dr. Lyman Beecher. They talked with zest of those early days until a late hour. As Charles Stuart and the two sisters were also good conversationalists, I listened with pleasure and profit, and during the three days under that roof obtained much general knowledge of anti-slavery and church history; volumes of information were condensed in those familiar talks, of lasting benefit to me, who then knew so little of reforms.

How changed was the atmosphere of that home to me next day. True, there were still no pictures on the walls, but the beautiful boy in his bath, the sunlight on his golden hair, with some new grace or trick each day, surpassed what any brush could trace. No statues graced the corners; but the well-built Northern hero of many slavery battles, bound with the silken cords of love and friendship to those brave women from the South, together sacrificing wealth and fame and ease for a great principle, formed a group worthy the genius of a Rogers to portray.

It has been my good fortune to meet these noble friends occasionally in the course of our busy lives, sometimes under their roof, sometimes under mine, and as, day by day, the nobility, the transparency, the unselfishness of their characters have grown upon me, the memories of the old stone house and its care-worn inmates, have stood transfigured before me, with almost a celestial radiance. In grouping the main facts of this eventful life, and analyzing the impelling motives that made Angelina Grimké the heroic woman she was, I can not serve her memory better than in giving the beautiful tributes of loving friends at the close of her life.

Angelina, the youngest daughter of Judge Grimké, of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, was born in Charleston, S. C., February 20, 1805. From her earliest years, her sympathies were with the cruelly treated race around her; and when a child, she had her little bottle of oil, and other simple medicaments, with which in the darkness she would steal out of the house to some wretched