It was a melancholy shipwreck. It happened
about four o'clock on the morning of the 22d of April. Professor
Fisher, of Yale College, was one of the passengers. Out of twenty-
three cabin passengers, but one reached the shore. He is a Mr.
Everhart, of Chester County, Pennsylvania. He informs me that
Professor Fisher was injured by things that fetched away in the cabin
at the time the ship was knocked down. This was between 8 and 9
o'clock in the evening of the twenty-first. Mr. Fisher, though badly
bruised, was calm and resolute, and assisted Captain Williams by
taking the injured compass to his berth and repairing it. About five
minutes before the vessel struck Captain Williams informed the
passengers of their danger, and all went on deck except Professor
Fisher, who remained sitting in his berth. Mr. Everhart was the last
person who left the cabin, and the last who ever saw Professor Fisher
alive."
I should not have spoken of this incident of family history with such
minuteness, except for the fact that it is so much a part of Mrs.
Stowe's life as to make it impossible to understand either her
character or her most important works without it. Without this
incident "The Minister's Wooing" never would have been written, for
both Mrs. Marvyn's terrible soul struggles and old Candace's direct
and effective solution of all religious difficulties find their origin
in this stranded, storm-beaten ship on the coast of Ireland, and the
terrible mental conflicts through which her sister afterward passed,
for she believed Professor Fisher eternally lost.
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