I looked forward to the Anti-Slavery Anniversary with the keenest pleasure and hope.  I should see luminous faces; I should bear the voice of wisdom; I should gather strength and courage and return to my task-garden refreshed and quickened.  But when I read the official notice in the Standard and Liberator of the grounds on which the meeting was given up, “that nothing should be done at this solemn crisis needlessly to check or divert the mighty current of popular feeling which is now sweeping southward with the strength and impetuosity of a thousand Niagaras,” I was surprised and puzzled.  I have read Phillips’ War Speech, marked the tenor and spirit of the Liberator, seen the stars and stripes paraded in the Standard, perused James Freeman Clarke’s sermon, and I feel more desolate and solitary than ever.  Mrs. Stanton, too, is for War for the Union, and I say to myself:  “How will Susan Anthony and Parker Pillsbury and all the other old comrades be affected by these signs of the times?”

Miss Anthony replied in the same strain: 

A feeling of sadness, almost of suffocation, has been mine ever since the first announcement that the anti-slavery meeting was postponed.  I can not welcome the demon of expediency or consent to be an abettor, by silence any more than by word or act, of wicked means to accomplish an end, not even for the sake of emancipating the slaves.  I have tried hard to persuade myself that I alone remained mad, while all the rest had become sane, because I have insisted that it is our duty to bear not only our usual testimony but one even louder and more earnest than ever before....  The Abolitionists, for once, seem to have come to an agreement with all the world that they are out of time and place, hence should hold their peace and spare their rebukes and anathemas.  Our position to me seems most humiliating, simply that of the politicians, one of expediency not principle.  I have not yet seen one good reason for the abandonment of all our meetings, and am more and more ashamed and sad that even the little Apostolic number have yielded to the world’s motto—­“the end justifies the means.”

As the long, hard winter’s work had left her very tired she gladly turned to that haven of refuge, the farm-home.  The father, who was willing always to put the control of affairs into her capable hands, took this opportunity to make a long-desired trip to Kansas, going the first of May and returning in September.  She assumed the entire management of the farm, put in the crops, watched over, harvested and sold them; assisted her mother with the housework and the family sewing and, by way of variety, pieced a silk quilt and wove twenty yards of rag carpet in the old loom.  She found time, more-over, to go to the Progressive Friends’ meeting at Junius and to attend the State Teachers’ Convention at Watertown.  She also managed a large anti-slavery Fourth of July meeting at Gregory’s grove, near Rochester,