all, urging them to the attainment of that higher liberty with which Christ maketh his children free.  In every quarter we were assured that the day was like a Sabbath.  Work had ceased; the hum of business was still, and noise and tumult were unheard on the streets.  Tranquillity pervaded the towns and country.  A Sabbath indeed! when the wicked ceased from troubling, and the weary were at rest, and the slave was free from his master!  The planters informed us that they went to the chapels where their own people were assembled, greeted them, shook hands with them, and exchanged the most hearty good wishes.

The churches and chapels were thronged all over the island.  At Cedar Hall, a Moravian station, the crowd was so great that the minister was obliged to remove the meeting from the chapel to a neighboring grove.

At Grace Hill, another Moravian station, the negroes went to the Missionary on the day before the first of August, and begged that they might be allowed to have a meeting in the chapel at sunrise.  It is the usual practice among the Moravians to hold but one sunrise meeting during the year, and that is on the morning of Easter:  but as the people besought very earnestly for this special favor on the Easter morning of their freedom, it was granted to them.

Early in the morning they assembled at the chapel.  For some time they sat in perfect silence.  The missionary then proposed that they should kneel down and sing.  The whole audience fell upon their knees, and sung a hymn commencing with the following verse: 

   “Now let us praise the Lord,
   With body, soul and spirit,
   Who doth such wondrous things,
   Beyond our sense and merit.”

The singing was frequently interrupted with the tears and sobbings of the melted people, until finally it was wholly arrested, and a tumult of emotion overwhelmed the congregation.

During the day, repeated meetings were held.  At eleven o’clock, the people assembled in vast numbers.  There were at least a thousand persons around the chapel, who could not get in.  For once the house of God suffered violence, and the violent took it by force.  After all the services of the day, the people went again to the missionaries in a body, and petitioned to have a meeting in the evening.

At Grace Bay, the people, all dressed in white, assembled in a spacious court in front of the Moravian chapel.  They formed a procession and walked arm in arm into the chapel.  Similar scenes occurred at all the chapels and at the churches also.  We were told by the missionaries that the dress of the negroes on that occasion was uncommonly simple and modest.  There was not the least disposition of gaiety.

We were also informed by planters and missionaries in every part of the island, that there was not a single dance known of, either day or night, nor so much as a fiddle played.  There were no riotous assemblies, no drunken carousals.  It was not in such channels that the excitement of the emancipated flowed.  They were as far from dissipation and debauchery, as they were from violence and carnage.  GRATITUDE was the absorbing emotion.  From the hill-tops, and the valleys, the cry of a disenthralled people went upward like the sound of many waters, “Glory to God, glory to God.”