a searching glance around the ear, the older man, with a significant nod to his companion, laid his hand upon the saloon door an instant, and every person in the car had risen to his feet, electrified by the wail of a "Rachel mourning for her children." "O, father! she's my child! she's my child!" I reached the door, which was guarded by the sheriff, in a condition of mental exaltation (or concentration), which to this day reflects itself at the recollection of that agonizing cry of the beautiful young mother, set upon by the myrmidons of the law whose base inhumanity shames the brute! "Who is it?" "What is it?" "What does it all mean?" were the anxious queries put up on all sides. I answered: "It means, my friends, that a woman has no legal right to her own babies; that the law-makers of this Christian country (!) have given the custody of the babies to the father, drunken or sober, and he may send the sheriff—as in this case—to arrest and rob her of her little ones! You have heard sneers at 'Woman's Rights.' This is one of the rights—a mother's right to the care and custody of her helpless little ones!"
From that excited crowd—all young men and grown boys, I being the only woman among them—rose thick and fast—"They've no business with the woman's babies!" "Pitch 'em overboard!" "I'll help." "Good for you; so'll I!" "All aboard." (The conductor had come upon the scene). "All aboard." "Wait a minute till he gets the other child," cries the old man, rushing out of the saloon with a little three-year-old girl in his arms, while the sheriff rushed in. Standing behind the old man, I beckoned to the conductor, who knew me, to "go on," and in five minutes we were across the Massachusetts line, and I was in the saloon. With his hand on her child, the sheriff was urging the mother to let go her hold. "Hold on to your baby," I cried, "he has no right to take it from you, and is liable to fine and imprisonment for attempting it. Tell me, Mr. C——, are you helping the other party as a favor, or in your official capacity? In the latter case you might have taken her child in Vermont, but we are in Massachusetts now, quite out of your sheriff's beat." "The grandfather made legal custodian by the father, was he? That would do in Vermont, sir, but under the recent decision of a Massachusetts Court, given in a case like this, only the father can take the child from its mother, and in attempting it you have made yourselves liable to fine and imprisonment." Thus the "sheriffalty" was extinguished, and mother and child took their seat beside me in the car.
Meantime the conductor had made the old gentleman understand that they could get off at the next station, where they might take the "up train," and get back to their "team" on the Vermont side of the "line." As they could get no carriage at the bare little station, and with the encumbrance of the child, could not foot it six miles in the cold and snow, they must wait some three or four hours for the train, which suggested the possibility of a rescue. I could not stop over a train, but I could take the baby along with me, if some one could be found—The conductor calls. The car stops. As the child robbers step out (the little girl, clutched in the old grandfather's arms) 'mid the frantic cries of the mother and the execrations of the passengers, two middle-aged gentlemen of fine matter-of-fact presence, entered. I at once met their questioning faces with a hurried statement of facts, and the need of some intelligent, humane gentleman to aid the young mother in the recovery of her little girl. Having spoken together aside, the younger man introduced "Dr. B——, who lives in the next town, where papers can be made out, and a sheriff be sent back to bring the men and child; the lady can go with the doctor, and the baby with Mrs. Nichols. I would stop, but I must be in my seat in the Legislature." "I have no money, only my ticket to take me to my friends," exclaimed the anxious mother. "I will take care of that," said the good doctor; "you won't need any." "They will have to pay," I whispered....
I gave my lecture at Templeton to a fine audience; accepted an invitation to return and give a second on the same subject, and having left the dear little toddler happy and amply protected, at noon next day found myself back at Orange, where I had left the mother. Here the conductor, who by previous arrangement, left a note from me telling her where to go for her baby, reported that the party had been brought to Orange for trial, spent the night in care of the sheriff, and were released on giving up the little girl and paying a handsome sum of the needful to the mother. He had scarcely ended his report when the pair entered the car, like myself, homeward bound. The old gentleman, care-worn and anxious, probably thinking of his team left standing at the Vermont station, looked straight ahead, but the kind-hearted sheriff caught my eye and smiled. In my happiness I could not do otherwise than give smile for smile.
Arrived at home, I found the affair, reported by the conductor of the evening train, had created quite an excitement, sympathy being decidedly with the mother. I was credited with being privy to the escapade and the pursuit, and as having gone purposely to the rescue. Had this been true, I could not have managed it better, for a good Providence went with me. I received several memorial "hanks" of yarn, with messages from the donors that "they would keep me in knitting-work while preaching woman's rights on the railroad"—a reference to my practice of knitting on the cars, and the report that I gave a lecture on the occasion to my audience there.
And thus was the seed of woman's educational, industrial, and political rights sown in Vermont, through infinite labor, but in the faith and perseverance which bring their courage to all workers for the right.
WISCONSIN.
In September and October, 1853, I traveled 900 miles in Wisconsin, as agent of the Woman's State Temperance Society, speaking in forty-three towns to audiences estimated at 30,000 in the aggregate, people coming in their own conveyances from five to twenty miles. I went to Wisconsin under an engagement to labor as agent of the State Temperance League, an organization composed of both sexes and officered by leading temperance men—at the earnest and repeated solicitations of its delegates whom I met at the "Whole World's Temperance Convention," held in New York City in September, and who were commissioned by the League to employ speakers to canvass the State; the object being to procure the enactment of a "Maine Law" by the next Legislature. These delegates had counseled, among others, with Horace Greeley, who advised my employment, curiosity to hear a woman promising to call out larger audiences and more votes for temperance candidates in the pending election.
I, at first, declined to make the engagement, on the ground that I could not be spared from my newspaper duties; but to escape further importunity, finally consented to "ask my husband at home," and report at New York, where one of the gentlemen would await my answer, and myself, if I decided to accept their proposition. My husband's cheerful, "Go, wife, you will be doing just the work you love, and enjoying a journey which you have not means otherwise to undertake," and a notice from Mrs. Lydia F. Fowler, that she would join us in the trip with a view to arranging for physiological lectures at eligible points in the State, decided me to go. Mrs. F.'s company was not only a social acquisition, but a happy insurance against pot-house witlings on the alert to impale upon the world's dread laugh, any woman who, to accomplish some public good, should venture for a space to cut loose from the marital "buttons" and go out into the world alone!
In making the engagement, I had taken it for granted, that the right and propriety of woman's public advocacy of temperance was a settled question in the field to which I was invited. But arrived at Milwaukee, I found that the popular prejudice against women as public speakers, and especially the advocacy of Woman's Rights, with which I had for years been identified, had been stirred to its most disgusting depths by a reverend gentleman who had preceded us, and who had for years been a salaried "agent at large," of the New York State Temperance Society. A highly respectable minority of the Executive Committee of the League endorsed the action of their delegation, but were overruled by a numerical majority, and I found myself in the position of agent "at large," while the reverend traducer secured his engagement in my place.
This turn of affairs, embarrassing at first, proved in the end providential—a timely clearance for a more congenial craft—since the women of the State had organized a Woman's State Temperance Society, and advertised a Convention to meet the following week at Delavan, the populous shire town of Walworth County, fifty miles distant in the interior. Thither the friendly Leaguers proposed to take us. Meantime it was arranged that
