to-night.  He frequently came to our house after that and my mother often said to him, “Mr. Douglass, you will work yourself to death,” but he replied that until the slaves were free, and that would be very soon, he must devote his life to them.  But after that, said he, “I will retire to Rochester, New York, where I have some land and will build a house.”  He told us how many rooms it would have, what decorations would be there, but when the war had been over several years, he came to the house again and my father asked him about the house in Rochester.  “Well,” he said, “I have not built that one yet, but I have my plans for it.  I have some work yet to do; I must take care of the freedmen in the South, and look after their financial prosperity, then I will build my cottage.”  You all remember that he never built his house, but suddenly went on into the unknown of the greatest work of his life.

I remember that in 1852, my father came with another man who was put for the night into the northwest bedroom—­this is the room where those New Englanders always put their friends, because, perhaps, pneumonia comes there first—­that awful, cold, dismal, northwest bedroom.  Thinking a favorite uncle had come, I went to the door early in the morning.  The door was shut—­one of those doors which, if you lift the latch, the door immediately swings open.  I lifted the latch and prepared to leap in to awaken my uncle and astonish him by my early morning greeting.  But when the door swung back, I glanced toward the bed.  The astonishment chills me at this moment, for in that bed was not my uncle; but a giant, whose toes stood up at the foot-board, and whose long hair was spread out over the pillow and his long gray whiskers lay on the bed clothes, and oh, that snore—­it sounded like some steam horn.  That giant figure frightened me and I rushed out into the kitchen and said, “Mother, who is that strange man in the northwest bed room?” and she said, “Why, that is John Brown.”  I had never seen John Brown before, although my father had been with him in the wool business in Springfield.  I had heard some strange things about John Brown, and the figure of the man made them seem doubly terrible.  I hid beside my mother, where I said I would stay until the man was through his breakfast, but father came out and demanded that the boys should come in, and he set me right under the wing of that awful giant.  But when John Brown saw us coming in so timidly, he turned to us with a smile so benign and beautiful and so greatly in contrast to what we had pictured him, that it was a transition.  He became to us boys one of the loveliest men we ever knew.  He would go to the barn with us and milk the cows, pitch the hay from the hay-mow; he drove the cattle to water for us, and told us many a story, until the dear, good old man became one of the treasurers of our life.  It is true that my mother thought he was half crazy, and consequently she and father did not always agree