It seems now but a little time since my brother Henry and I were two
young people together. He was my two years junior, and nearest
companion out of seven brothers and three sisters. I taught him
drawing and heard his Latin lessons, for you know a girl becomes
mature and womanly long before a boy. I saw him through college, and
helped him through the difficult love affair that gave him his wife;
and then he and my husband had a real German, enthusiastic love for
each other, which ended in making me a wife. Ah! in those days we
never dreamed that he, or I, or any of us, were to be known in the
world. All he seemed then was a boy full of fun, full of love, full of
enthusiasm for protecting abused and righting wronged people, which
made him in those early days write editorials, and wear arms and swear
himself a special policeman to protect the poor negroes in Cincinnati,
where we then lived, when there were mobs instigated by the
slaveholders of Kentucky.
Then he married, and lived a missionary life in the new West, all with
a joyousness, an enthusiasm, a chivalry, which made life bright and
vigorous to us both. Then in time he was called to Brooklyn, just as
the crisis of the great anti-slavery battle came on, and the Fugitive
Slave Law was passed. I was then in Maine, and I well remember one
snowy night his riding till midnight to see me, and then our talking,
till near morning, what we could do to make headway against the horrid
cruelties that were being practiced against the defenseless blacks.
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