in these harmless reprisals, and to look at life with the same
wholesomely fantastic vision. But she remembered one abolition visitor
of whom none of them made fun, but treated with a serious distinction
and regard,--an old man with a high, narrow forehead, and thereon a
thick upright growth of gray hair; who looked at her from under bushy
brows with eyes as of blue flame, and took her on his knee one night and
sang to her "Blow ye the trumpet, blow!" He and her uncle had been
talking of some indefinite, far-off place that they called Boston, in
terms that commended it to her childish apprehension as very little less
holy than Jerusalem, and as the home of all the good and great people
outside of Palestine.

In fact, Boston had always been Dr. Ellison's foible. In the beginning
of the great antislavery agitation, he had exchanged letters
(corresponded, he used to say) with John Quincy Adams on the subject of
Lovejoy's murder; and he had met several Boston men at the Free Soil
Convention in Buffalo in 1848. "A little formal perhaps, a little
reserved," he would say, "but excellent men; polished, and certainly of
sterling principle": which would make his boys and girls laugh, as they
grew older, and sometimes provoke them to highly colored dramatizations
of the formality of these Bostonians in meeting their father. The years
passed and the boys went West, and when the war came, they took service
in Iowa and Wisconsin regiments. By and by the President's Proclamation
of freedom to the slaves reached Eriecreek while Dick and Bob happened
both to be home on leave. After they had allowed their sire his rapture,
"Well, this is a great blow for father," said Bob; "what are you going
to do now, father? Fugitive slavery and all its charms blotted out
forever, at one fell swoop. Pretty rough on you, isn't it? No more men
and brothers, no more soulless oligarchy. Dull lookout, father."