A short time before leaving Belleville, Mrs. Weld and Sarah adopted the Bloomer costume on account of its convenience, and the greater freedom it permitted in taking long rambles, but neither of them ever admired it or urged its adoption on others.  Mrs. Weld, it is true, wrote a long and eloquent letter to the Dress Reform Convention which met in Syracuse in the summer of 1857, but it was not to advocate the Bloomer, but to show the need of some dress more suitable than the fashionable one, for work and exercise.  She also urged that as woman was no longer in her minority, no longer “man’s pretty idol before whom he bowed in chivalric gallantry,” or “his petted slave whom he coaxed and gulled with sugar-plum privileges, whilst robbing her of intrinsic rights,” but was emerging into her majority and claiming her rights as a human being, and waking up to a higher destiny:  as she was beginning to answer the call to a life of useful exertion and honorable independence, it was time that she dressed herself in accordance with the change.  “I regard the Bloomer costume,” she says, “as only an approach to that true womanly attire which will in due time be inaugurated.  We must experiment before we find a dress altogether suitable....  Man has long enough borne the burden of supporting the women of the civilized world.  When woman’s temple of liberty is finished—­when freedom for the world is achieved—­when she has educated herself into useful and lucrative occupations, then may she fitly expend upon her person her own earnings, not man’s.  Such women will have an indefeasible right to dress elegantly if they wish, but they will discard cumbersomeness and a useless and absurd circumference and length.”

Sarah says, in a letter to a friend, that the Bloomer dress violated her taste, and was so opposed to her sense of modesty that she could hardly endure it.  During the residence at Eagleswood, both sisters discarded it altogether.

The John Brown tragedy was of course deeply felt by Sarah and Angelina, and the bitter and desperate feelings which inspired it fully sympathized with.  Angelina was made quite ill by it, while Sarah felt her soul bowed with reverence for the deluded but grand old man.  “O Sarah!” she writes to Sarah Douglass, “what a glorious spectacle is now before us.  The Jerome of Prague of our country, the John Huss of the United States, now stands ready, as they were, to seal his testimony with his life’s blood.  Last night I went in spirit to the martyr.  It was my privilege to enter into sympathy with him; to go down, according to my measure, into the depths where he has travailed, and feel his past exercises, his present sublime position.”

As mentioned a few pages back, two of John Brown’s men, who died with him at Harper’s Ferry, were brought to Eagleswood and there quietly interred.  The pro-slavery people of Perth Amboy threatened to dig up the bodies, but the men and boys of Eagleswood showed such a brave front, and guarded the graves so faithfully, that the threat could not be accomplished.