task and become so absorbed by it as to forget everything in the world except the scene she was describing. She would return to her oven to find it as cold as it was at midnight; not a spark of fire left, and the bread risen and running over the trough. But she kept on for about eighteen months and finished the work.
It is not true that she had to seek for a publisher, although her publisher did think she ought to have stopped at the end of the first volume and thus make it a more salable work. Its success is freshly remembered. Mrs. Stowe realized her wild dream of being able to buy from the profits of the work "a new silk dress." Within two years two million copies of the work had been sold, and it has been translated into every cultivated language. If the sacred rights of authors and artists were duly protected by international law, she would have been enriched by this one work. Many other persons have been enriched by it, but not she, the gentle and great woman who created it. It is a pleasure, however, to know, as I was assured the other day by the publisher, that "Uncle Tom" still has an average sale of about four thousand copies a year.
