munity where she has lived, and especially in the hearts and minds she has aided in educating for the service of the church and world. And still, as for so many years, she is prosecuting the same good work, with the same success. Without denying the claims of her own family and home, in which she

has reared to womanhood the two adopted, the only children given to her to rear,—she is still laboriously employed in the duties of her great charge at the college. In her daily work of personal interview and consultation with pupils and teachers, and the matrons of the homes in which the pupils reside; in assigning daily exercises and studies; in familiar lectures to the young ladies on all topics, outside of the general course of instruction in the classes, on which they need instruction and advice, Mrs. Dascomb is still adding to the reputation she has already won, as a woman of eminent ability and service. But, pre-eminently, her best record is yet to be written. It must be traced in the career of the many gifted young women whom she has aided in fitting for service, good and great, like her own. Their success, when its causes are fully known, will add new lustre to the crown, which she now so unconsciously wears.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.

BY REV. E. P. PARKER.

HARRIET BEECHER, daughter of Rev. Lyman Beecher, D.D., was born in the town of Litchfield, in the State of Connecticut, on the 14th day of June, in the year of our Lord 1812. Her father, than whom no man of his generation is more reverently and affectionately remembered, was one of the sturdiest and grandest men that New England has produced. Among American divines his position as a theologian was one of distinction, and as a pulpit orator he stood full abreast with the most eloquent. There have been no more powerful preachers in our country than he.

In the year 1799 he married Roxana Foote, whose father, Eli Foote, was a genial and cultivated man, and, notwithstanding he was a royalist and churchman, was universally respected and honored. She was also the grand-daughter of General Ward, who served under Washington in the Revolutionary war. This union was blessed with eight children: Catharine, William, Edward, Mary, George, Harriet, Henry Ward, and Charles. Dr. Beecher had sworn never to marry a weak woman; nor, in marrying Roxana Foote, did he forswear himself. In one of the Mayflower sketches, in the character of Aunt Mary, and later, in a letter contributed to the "Autobiography of Lyman Beecher (vol. I., page 301), Mrs. Stowe herself describes her

mother. She was a woman of extraordinary talents, rare culture, fine taste, sweet and gentle temper; full of the Holy Ghost and of that power which comes not with observation, but whose exercise is alike unconscious and irresistible.

She died when Harriet was not quite four years old, but "her memory and example had more influence in moulding her family, in deterring from evil and exciting to good, than the living presence of many mothers."

Mrs. Stowe relates that when, in her eighth year, she lay dangerously ill of scarlet fever, she was awakened one evening just at sunset by the voice of her father praying at her bedside, and heard him speaking of "her blessed mother, who is a saint in heaven!" The passage in Uncle Tom, where St. Clair describes his mother's influence, is simply a reproduction of the influence of Mrs. Stowe's own mother, as it had always been in her family.

All who have read the "Minister's Wooing" must remember the beautiful letter which Mary wrote to the Doctor. That letter is one which, years before, Mrs. Beecher had written, and was copied by Mrs. Stowe into the pages of her story. Immediately after her mother's death, Harriet was taken to live with her mother's sister, in whose well-ordered house the little girl found a happy home, the tenderest care, and the benefits of an unusually wholesome moral discipline and intellectual companionship. Her mother had been a quiet but devout churchwoman who, at her marriage with Dr. Beecher, conformed herself to the simpler manners of the Congregational churches, and bent her steps to the ways in which her husband walked, but not without cherishing an ineradicable love of the better way in which her fathers walked and worshipped. Something of this feeling Harriet may have inherited. IIaving had such a mother, she found herself, in the circle of her mother's relatives, surrounded by those who

believed in the Church, and walked after its ordinances only, with all their hearts. Nor is it unlikely that these facts furnish a sufficient explanation of that preference for the mode of divine worship which obtains in the Episcopalian Church, which, in these later years, Mrs. Stowe has publicly manifested.

Of her pleasant life in the farm-house at Nutplains; of the good old grandma with bright white hair, who took her the little motherless into her arms, and held her close, and wept over her; who read the evening service, after supper, from a great prayer-book, with such impressiveness as touched the child's heart with a feeling of its intrinsic simplicity and beauty which she never outgrew; and who also, in the sincerity of her toryism, often read over, with trembling voice, the old prayers for king, queen, and royal family, grieving that they should have been omitted in all the churches; of her energetic, precise, smart, orderly Aunt Harriet, who was one of the women who contrive to bring all their plans to pass and to have their ways perfectly, a splendid specimen of the best kind of a genuine Yankee woman, believing in the Church with a faith in which disdain of all Meeting-house religion was so far mingled that, when on a visit to Litchfield, she could not bring herself to listen to Dr. Beecher, of whom she was very proud and fond, but must needs go to Church, where all things were "done decently and in order,” — who did more than encourage little Harriet to "move gently, to speak softly and prettily, to say 'yes, ma'am' and 'no, ma'am,'" to keep her clothes clean, and knit and sew at regular hours, to go to Church on Sundays and make all the responses, and come home and be thoroughly drilled in the catechism; of her Uncle George who was a great reader, and full of poetry, and had Burns and Scott at his tongue's end, and whose recitations of Scott's ballads were the first poems she ever heard; of the house stored with all manner

of family relics, and also with all manner of strange and wonderful things brought by a sea-faring uncle, from the uttermost parts of the earth, supplied moreover with what were exceedingly rare things in those days, a well-selected library, and a portfolio of fine engravings, of all these things Mrs. Stowe tells us in one of her pleasantest letters, and adds, "The little white farm-house under the hill was a Paradise to us, and the sight of its chimneys after a day's ride was like a vision of Eden!"

Nearly two years passed by, and Harriet, now again in her father's house, wonders at "a beautiful lady, very fair, with bright-blue eyes, and soft auburn hair," who comes into the nursery where she with her younger brothers are in bed, and kisses them, and tells them she loves them and will be their mother. This fair stranger was Dr. Beecher's second wife, Harriet Porter, of Portland, Maine; and of little Harrict she writes to her friends very handsomely: "Harriet and Henry are as lovely children as I ever saw, amiable, affectionate, and very bright." She speaks also of "the great familiarity and great respect subsisting between parent and children," and of the household as "one of great cheerfulness and comfort." "Our domestic worship is very delightful. We sing a good deal, and have reading aloud as much as we can. It seems the highest happiness of the children to have a reading circle.” These observations afford us glimpses of that inner domestic life amid whose healthful and quickening influences Mrs. Stowe's child-life developed itself. Her sister Catharine writes of her when she was five years of age: "Harriet is a very good girl. She has been to school all this summer, and has learned to read very fluently. She has committed to memory twenty-seven hymns and two long chapters in the Bible. She has a remarkably retentive memory, and will make a good scholar." She very early manifested a great eagerness for books, and "read everything she could lay