"It was a Sabbath evening," he says. "I had spoken about fifteen
minutes when the most hideous outcries--yells and screeches--from
a crowd of men and boys, who had surrounded the house, startled
us, and then came heavy missiles against the doors and the blinds
of the windows. I persisted in speaking for a few minutes, hoping
the doors and blinds were strong enough to withstand the attack.
But presently a heavy stone broke through one of the blinds,
scattered a pane of glass, and fell upon the head of a lady
sitting near the center of the hall. She uttered a shriek and fell
bleeding on the floor."
There was a panic, of course, and the Abolition lecturer would have
been roughly handled by the mob if a young lady, a sister of the poet
Whittier, had not taken him by the arm, and walked with him through
the astonished crowd. They did not feel like attacking a woman.
There was nothing unusual, except the part performed by the young
lady, in the affair described in the foregoing narrative. Mobs were of
constant occurrence in the period of which we are speaking. It was not
in the slave States that they were most frequent.
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