During the winter in Boston I attended all the lectures, churches, theaters, concerts, and temperance, peace, and prison-reform conventions within my reach.  I had never lived in such an enthusiastically literary and reform latitude before, and my mental powers were kept at the highest tension.  We went to Chelsea, for the summer, and boarded with the Baptist minister, the Rev. John Wesley Olmstead, afterward editor of The Watchman and Reflector.  He had married my cousin, Mary Livingston, one of the most lovely, unselfish characters I ever knew.  There I had the opportunity of meeting several of the leading Baptist ministers in New England, and, as I was thoroughly imbued with Parker’s ideas, we had many heated discussions on theology.  There, too, I met Orestes Bronson, a remarkably well-read man, who had gone through every phase of religious experience from blank atheism to the bosom of the Catholic Church, where I believe he found repose at the end of his days.  He was so arbitrary and dogmatic that most people did not like him; but I appreciated his acquaintance, as he was a liberal thinker and had a world of information which he readily imparted to those of a teachable spirit.  As I was then in a hungering, thirsting condition for truth on every subject, the friendship of such a man was, to me, an inestimable blessing.  Reading Theodore Parker’s lectures, years afterward, I was surprised to find how little there was in them to shock anybody—­the majority of thinking people having grown up to them.

While living in Chelsea two years, I used to walk (there being no public conveyances running on Sunday) from the ferry to Marlborough Chapel to hear Mr. Parker preach.  It was a long walk, over two miles, and I was so tired, on reaching the chapel, that I made it a point to sleep through all the preliminary service, so as to be fresh for the sermon, as the friend next whom I sat always wakened me in time.  One Sunday, when my friend was absent, it being a very warm day and I unusually fatigued, I slept until the sexton informed me that he was about to close the doors!  In an unwary moment I imparted this fact to my Baptist friends.  They made all manner of fun ever afterward of the soothing nature of Mr. Parker’s theology, and my long walk, every Sunday, to repose in the shadow of a heterodox altar.  Still, the loss of the sermon was the only vexatious part of it, and I had the benefit of the walk and the refreshing slumber, to the music of Mr. Parker’s melodious voice and the deep-toned organ.

Mrs. Oliver Johnson and I spent two days at the Brook Farm Community when in the height of its prosperity.  There I met the Ripleys,—­who were, I believe, the backbone of the experiment,—­William Henry Channing, Bronson Alcott, Charles A. Dana, Frederick Cabot, William Chase, Mrs. Horace Greeley, who was spending a few days there, and many others, whose names I cannot recall.  Here was a charming family of intelligent men and women, doing their own farm