From the year 1850 conventions were held in various States, and their respective legislatures were continually besieged; New York was thoroughly canvassed by Miss Anthony and others.  Appeals, calls for meetings, and petitions were circulated without number.  In 1854 I prepared my first speech for the New York legislature.  That was a great event in my life.  I felt so nervous over it, lest it should not be worthy the occasion, that Miss Anthony suggested that I should slip up to Rochester and submit it to the Rev. William Henry Channing, who was preaching there at that time.  I did so, and his opinion was so favorable as to the merits of my speech that I felt quite reassured.  My father felt equally nervous when he saw, by the Albany Evening Journal, that I was to speak at the Capitol, and asked me to read my speech to him also.  Accordingly, I stopped at Johnstown on my way to Albany, and, late one evening, when he was alone in his office, I entered and took my seat on the opposite side of his table.  On no occasion, before or since, was I ever more embarrassed—­an audience of one, and that the one of all others whose approbation I most desired, whose disapproval I most feared.  I knew he condemned the whole movement, and was deeply grieved at the active part I had taken.  Hence I was fully aware that I was about to address a wholly unsympathetic audience.  However, I began, with a dogged determination to give all the power I could to my manuscript, and not to be discouraged or turned from my purpose by any tender appeals or adverse criticisms.  I described the widow in the first hours of her grief, subject to the intrusions of the coarse minions of the law, taking inventory of the household goods, of the old armchair in which her loved one had breathed his last, of the old clock in the corner that told the hour he passed away.  I threw all the pathos I could into my voice and language at this point, and, to my intense satisfaction, I saw tears filling my father’s eyes.  I cannot express the exultation I felt, thinking that now he would see, with my eyes, the injustice women suffered under the laws he understood so well.

Feeling that I had touched his heart I went on with renewed confidence, and, when I had finished, I saw he was thoroughly magnetized.  With beating heart I waited for him to break the silence.  He was evidently deeply pondering over all he had heard, and did not speak for a long time.  I believed I had opened to him a new world of thought.  He had listened long to the complaints of women, but from the lips of his own daughter they had come with a deeper pathos and power.  At last, turning abruptly, he said:  “Surely you have had a happy, comfortable life, with all your wants and needs supplied; and yet that speech fills me with self-reproach; for one might naturally ask, how can a young woman, tenderly brought up, who has had no bitter personal experience, feel so keenly the wrongs of her sex?  Where did you learn this lesson?” “I learned it