It seems extraordinary at this distance that Smith, a rich man, who certainly spent a great deal of money in the Anti-slavery cause, and who gave Brown three hundred dollars in cash at about this time, should have been willing to take money nominally from Brown for his rocky acres.
On his way to the West from Ohio, Brown wrote a strange and pathetic letter to his wife and children. "If I should never return," he said, "it is my particular request that no other monument be used to keep me in remembrance than the same plain one that records the death of my grandfather and son; and that a short story, like those already on it, be told of John Brown, the fifth, under that of grandfather." This refers to the tombstone of his grandfather, which he had removed from Connecticut to North Elba. The request tells the story of his pride in his Puritan lineage. It betrays his own strong feeling that he
