To Otis who was then nearly seventy years of age Garrison addressed his rebuke in tones of singular solemnity.  It seemed to him that the aged statesman had transgressed against liberty “under circumstances of peculiar criminality.”  “Yet at this solemn period,” the reprobation of the prophet ran, “you have not scrupled, nay, you have been ambitious, to lead and address an excited multitude, in vindication of all imaginable wickedness, embodied in one great system of crime and blood—­to pander to the lusts and desires of the robbers of God and his poor—­to consign over to the tender mercies of cruel taskmasters, multitudes of guiltless men, women, and children—­and to denounce as an ‘unlawful and dangerous association’ a society whose only object is to bring this nation to repentance, through the truth as it is in Jesus.”

These audacious and iconoclastic performances of the reformer were not exactly adapted to turn from him the wrath of the idol worshipers.  They more likely added fuel to the hot anger burning in Boston against him.  Three weeks passed after his departure from the city, and his friends did not deem it safe for him to return.  Toward the end of the fourth week of his enforced absence, against which he was chafing not a little, an incident happened in Boston which warned him to let patience have its perfect work.  It was on the night of September 17th that the dispositions of the city toward him found grim expression in a gallows erected in front of his house at 23 Brighton street.  This ghastly reminder that the fellow-citizens of the editor of the Liberator continued to take a lively interest in him, “was made in real workmanship style, of maple joist five inches through, eight or nine feet high, for the accommodation of two persons.”  Garrison and Thompson were the two persons for whom these brave accommodations were prepared.  But as neither they nor their friends were in a mood to have trial made of them, the intended occupants consented to give Boston a wide berth, and to be somewhat particular that they did not turn in with her while the homicidal fit lasted.

This editing his paper at long range, and this thought of life and safety Garrison did not at all relish.  They grew more and more irksome to his fearless and earnest spirit.  For his was a “pine-and-fagot” Abolitionism that knew not the fear of men or their wrath.  But now he must needs have a care for the peace of mind of his young wife, who was, within a few months, to give birth to a child.  And her anxiety for him was very great.  Neither was the anxiety of devoted friends and followers to be lightly disregarded.  All of which detained the leader in Brooklyn until the 25th of the month, when the danger signals seemed to have disappeared.  Whereupon he set out immediately for his post in Boston to be at the head of his forces.  He found the city in one of those strange pauses of popular excitement, which might signify the ebb of the tide or only the