From time to time I had given him hints that I was afraid of being too late for dinner at my lodgings; and when the sight-seeing was at last ended, he very coolly and complacently said, “Now, if you really think you are too late for dinner at your place, I shall be under the necessity of asking you to go and take a plate with me.”  Those were the ipsissima verba.  I could scarcely keep my gravity; but I replied, “Thank you, sir; I want to go to the centre of the city, and I can easily get a dinner at any eating-house.”  He both nodded and expressed an entire concurrence, and seemed to think it an admirable arrangement.  In parting, he pressed me to preach for him on the following Thursday, but I declined.  The next day I was told, on unquestionable authority, that two or three years ago one of the elders of this gentleman’s church, meeting a man from South America whom he took to be a mixture of Spaniard and Indian, requested his company to church.  The stranger assented, and sat with him in his pew.  He liked the service, became interested, and went again and again.  At last it was whispered that he was a “Nigger,”—­i.e. had a slight mixture of African blood in him.  The next week a meeting of the Session was held, at which it was unanimously resolved that the intruder’s entrance into the body of the church must be prohibited.  Two men were stationed at the door for that purpose.  The stranger came.  He was stopped, and told that he could not be allowed to enter the body of the church, there being a place up in the gallery for coloured people.  The man remonstrated, and said he had been invited to take a seat in Mr. So-and-so’s pew.  “Yes,” they replied, “we are aware of that; but public feeling is against it, and it cannot be allowed.”  The stranger turned round, burst into tears, and walked home.

Mr. Johnson, of the Tribune, told me that two or three years ago he and thirty or forty more were returning from an Anti-slavery Convention held at Harrisburgh in Pennsylvania.  They had left by railway for Philadelphia at 3 o’clock in the morning.  At a town called Lancaster they stopped to breakfast.  In the company were two coloured gentlemen, one of whom was a minister.  They all sat down together.  Soon the waiters began to whisper, “A nigger at table!” “There is two!” The landlord quickly appeared, seized one of the coloured gentlemen by the shoulder, and asked him how he dared to sit down at table in his house.  The company remonstrated, and assured him that those whose presence appeared to be so offensive were very respectable men, friends of theirs, whom they had invited to sit down.  It was all in vain.  The landlord would hear nothing; “the niggers must go.”  “Very well,” said the rest of the company; “then we shall all go.”  Away they went, and left the refined landlord to console himself for the loss of a large party to breakfast.  They had to travel all the way to Philadelphia before they could break their fast.