money. We have heard that it looked very large indeed to the modest lady who then received it. She was the wife of a Professor of Divinity in Bowdoin College, and she was living at Brunswick the seat of that institution, a village about thirty miles to the northeast of Portland in Maine.
Even now Maine is a land of careful economy; but at that time the salaries of learned professors ranged from six hundred dollars a year to fifteen hundred; and few indeed were the lucky men who received the larger sum. This mother added something to the family income by teaching daily a class of eight young ladies. Besides this, she did with her own hands all the work of the household, except the roughest part, which was performed, after a fashion, by a girl fresh from Ireland who could not speak the English language. And here was a hundred dollar check in the house! It was bewildering. Editors in Washington do not send checks to remote villages in Maine except for cause. What had Mrs. Stowe done that the editor of the National Era, a paper of limited circulation, should distinguish her thus?
She had published a volume of sketches and stories called the "Mayflower," which first saw the light in 1849, two years before. She had been a writer from her childhood. During her young-lady years she had been a member in Cincinnati of a literary society called the "Semicolon Club," for which she had written a great number of tales and sketches of character. These pieces were the delight of the club; but a certain degree of literary talent is so common among New England girls, that few persons seem to have perceived in them the promise of a splendid career. Mrs. Stowe afterwards contributed to periodicals, and at last, the best of her writings having been published in the "Mayflower," she enjoyed a certain celebrity on both sides of the ocean.
