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laid by one hundred of it when a severe illness put an end to his efforts.
After many prayers and much consideration of the matter, his feeble old wife said to him one day, “
Paul, I'm a gwine up to New York myself to see if I can't get that money.”
Her husband objected that she was too feeble, that she would be unable to find her way, and that Northern people had got tired of buying slaves to set them free, but the resolute old woman clung to her purpose and finally set forth.
Reaching New York she made her way to Mr. Beecher's house, where she was so fortunate as to find Mrs. Stowe.
Now her troubles were at an end, for this champion of the oppressed at once made the slave woman's cause her own and promised that her children should be redeemed.
She at once set herself to the task of raising the purchase-money, not only for Milly's children, but for giving freedom to the old slave woman herself.
On May 29, she writes to her husband in Brunswick:--
The mother of the Edmondson girls, now aged and feeble, is in the city.
I did not actually know when I wrote “ Uncle Tom” of a living example in which Christianity had reached its fullest development under the crushing wrongs of slavery, but in this woman I see it. I never knew before what I could feel till, with her sorrowful, patient eyes upon me, she told me her history and begged my aid. The expression of her face as she spoke, and the depth of patient sorrow in her eyes, was beyond anything I ever saw.
“Well,” said I, when she had finished, “ set your heart at rest; you and your children shall be redeemed.
If I can't raise the money otherwise, I will pay it myself.”
