in consequence of the news of John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry (of which I had not before heard), the excitement was such that he could not persuade the ladies to come out. With some hesitation he added, that it "had even been suggested that I might be an emissary or accomplice, in what was suspected to be a general and preconcerted abolition movement." This explained the questionings of my hostess, and the provision against any possible rudeness which I might have received from the "strange men" at the public table. Thus ended my projected campaign in Missouri. For every city and hamlet in the State was so haunted by the marching spirit of the Kansas hero, that to have suggested a lecture on any subject from a known Abolitionist, would have ruined the political prospects of even an ex-Governor.
Three years later, assisted by a former resident of Kansas, I lectured to a very small, but respectful audience in Kansas City; and in the spring of 1867 was invited by a committee of ladies to lecture at a Fair of the Congregational Society of that city, with accompanying assurances from the pastor and his wife, of their confidence in the salutary influence of such a lecture, on a community which had been recently treated to an unfriendly presentation of the woman's rights movement and its advocates. I was too ill at the time to leave home, but the difference between my anxious efforts three years before to be heard, and this more than cordial assurance of a waiting audience, was a happy tonic. It was from persons who knew me only through my advocacy of woman's equality, and evidenced the progress of our cause.
In December, 1854, on my return from Kansas to Vermont, I spent several days in St. Louis, in the pleasant family of my friend, Mrs. Frances D. Gage, who, very much to my regret, was away in Illinois. The Judge having recently removed to the city, the family were comparatively strangers; Abolitionists in a pro-slavery community. Mrs. Gage, I think, had broken ground for temperance, but they could tell me of no friends to woman's rights. Rev. Mr. Elliot was not then one of us, as I learned through a son of Mrs. Gage, who called on him in my behalf for the use of his lecture room. I felt instinctively that, unfettered by home and business interests, I was less constrained than my friend, and resolved, if possible, to win a hearing for woman. Having secured a hall, I called at the business office of a gentleman of wealth and high social position — a slave-holder and opposed to free Kansas, with whom I had formed a speaking acquaintance in Brattleboro' — and procured from him a voucher for my respectability. Armed with this I
