" There's for you! Can you wonder now that such a
wicked woman should be gone from you a full month instead of the week
I intended? Ah, welladay!"
At last the house was finished, the removal from Brunswick effected,
and the reunited family was comfortably settled in its Andover home.
The plans for the winter's literary work were, however, altered by
force of circumstances. Instead of proceeding quietly and happily with
her charming Maine story, Mrs. Stowe found it necessary to take notice
in some manner of the cruel and incessant attacks made upon her as the
author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and to fortify herself against them by
a published statement of incontrovertible facts. It was claimed on all
sides that she had in her famous book made such ignorant or malicious
misrepresentations that it was nothing short of a tissue of
falsehoods, and to refute this she was compelled to write a "Key to
Uncle Tom's Cabin," in which should appear the sources from which she
had obtained her knowledge. Late in the winter Mrs. Stowe wrote:--
"I am now very much driven. I am preparing a Key to unlock 'Uncle
Tom's Cabin.' It will contain all the original facts, anecdotes, and
documents on which the story is founded, with some very interesting
and affecting stories parallel to those told of Uncle Tom. Now I want
you to write for me just what you heard that slave-buyer say, exactly
as he said it, that people may compare it with what I have written.
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