my door, and in walked Cousin Charley with a quart bottle of liquid blacking, which he prepared to empty on my devoted head.  I begged so eloquently and trembled so at the idea of being dyed black, that he said he would let me off on one condition, and that was to get him, by some means, into Miss Fitzhugh’s room.  So I ran screaming up the stairs, as if hotly pursued by the enemy, and begged her to let me in.  She cautiously opened the door, but when she saw Charley behind me she tried to force it shut.  However, he was too quick for her.  He had one leg and arm in; but, at that stage of her toilet, to let him in was impossible, and there they stood, equally strong, firmly braced, she on one side of the door and he on the other.  But the blacking he was determined she should have; so, gauging her probable position, with one desperate effort he squeezed in a little farther and, raising the bottle, he poured the contents on her head.  The blacking went streaming down over her face, white robe, and person, and left her looking more like a bronze fury than one of Eve’s most charming daughters.  A yard or more of the carpet was ruined, the wallpaper and bedclothes spattered, and the poor victim was unfit to be seen for a week at least.  Charley had a good excuse for his extreme measures, for, as we all by turn played our tricks on him, it was necessary to keep us in some fear of punishment.  This was but one of the many outrageous pranks we perpetrated on each other.  To see us a few hours later, all absorbed in an anti-slavery or temperance convention, or dressed in our best, in high discourse with the philosophers, one would never think we could have been guilty of such consummate follies.  It was, however, but the natural reaction from the general serious trend of our thoughts.

It was in Peterboro, too, that I first met one who was then considered the most eloquent and impassioned orator on the anti-slavery platform, Henry B. Stanton.  He had come over from Utica with Alvin Stewart’s beautiful daughter, to whom report said he was engaged; but, as she soon after married Luther R. Marsh, there was a mistake somewhere.  However, the rumor had its advantages.  Regarding him as not in the matrimonial market, we were all much more free and easy in our manners with him than we would otherwise have been.  A series of anti-slavery conventions was being held in Madison County, and there I had the pleasure of hearing him for the first time.  As I had a passion for oratory, I was deeply impressed with his power.  He was not so smooth and eloquent as Phillips, but he could make his audience both laugh and cry; the latter, Phillips himself said he never could do.  Mr. Stanton was then in his prime, a fine-looking, affable young man, with remarkable conversational talent, and was ten years my senior, with the advantage that number of years necessarily gives.