her guests at the breakfast table, Henry Ward Beecher, Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Mrs. Severance, Mrs. Davis and others.  She received a hearty welcome and Mrs. Hooker insisted she should sit down and have a cup of tea or coffee.  Mr. Beecher joined in the entreaty, saying:  “Now, Miss Anthony, you know you have to make a big speech today.  When I want to be very effective and make people cry, I drink a cup of tea before speaking; when I want to be very clever and make them laugh, I drink coffee; but when I want them to cry half the time and laugh the other half, I take a cup of each.”

In a letter to Miss Anthony after she returned home Mrs. Hooker said:  “I am astonished at the praise I receive for my part in the convention, and humbled too, for I realize how worthy of all these pleasant and commendatory words you and others have been all these years, and what have you received—­or rather what have you not received?  Thank God, that is all over now and you are to have blue sky and clear sailing.  It must be through suffering we enter the gates of peace.”  But the peace was a long way off and the hardest struggle was yet to come!  A little later Mrs. Hooker wrote to a friend: 

I can’t tell you how my heart swells—­but there is present within me one undercurrent of feeling that will come to the surface ever and anon, viz., the wonderful dignity, strength and purity of the early workers in this reform.  I can’t wait for history to do them justice; I want to make history today, and so far as in me lies I will do it.  I have come in at the death and get a large share of the glory, and lo, here are these, a great company, who have been in the field for thirty years, and a whole generation has passed them by unrecognized.  Every one here says, “Our noble friend Susan has carried the day right over the heads of all of us.”  Said one of our editors, Charles Dudley Warner, a man of finest taste and culture, when he had been praising the dignity and power of the whole platform:  “Susan Anthony is my favorite.  She was the only woman there who never once thought of herself.  You could see in her every motion and in her very silence that the cause was all she cared for, self was utterly forgotten.”

He had indeed struck the key note to Miss Anthony’s strongest characteristic, utter forgetfulness of self, total self-abnegation, self-sacrifice without a consciousness that it was such.  Mrs. Hooker’s statement that she “had come in at the death” shows the strong faith of most of these early workers that it would be only a brief time until the rights they claimed would be recognized and granted; but she herself has labored faithfully yet another thirty years without breaking down the Chinese Wall of opposition.

One object of Mrs. Hooker in calling this Hartford convention was to see if she could not bring together what were now becoming known as “the New York and Boston wings of the suffrage party,” but she comments:  “We have decided to give up our attempts at reconciliation; we have neither time nor strength to spare, and if we had, they would probably fail.”