Her judgment was convinced, however, very shortly afterwards, by a discussion of the subject with Weld and some others, and she then wrote to Jane Smith to set her name down, as she found her testimony in the great cause was greatly strengthened by keeping clean hands.

There is much told of their meetings, and their other experiences in New York, which is very interesting, and for which I regret I have not room.  Angelina describes in particular one visit they made to a poor family, that of one of her Sunday-school pupils, where they stayed to tea, being afterwards joined by Mr. Weld, who came to escort them home.  She says of him:—­

“I have seen him shine in the Convention and in refined circles, but never did I admire him so much.  His perfect ease at this fireside of poverty showed that he was accustomed to be the friend and companion of the poor of this world.”

The family here mentioned was doubtless a colored one, as it was in the colored Sunday school that both sisters taught.  They had already proved, by their friendship for Sarah Douglass, the Fortens, and other colored families of Philadelphia, how slight was their prejudice against color, but the above incident proves the entire sincerity of their convictions and their desire to avail themselves of every opportunity to testify to it.  Still, there is no doubt that to the influence of Theodore Weld’s conversations they owed much of their enlightenment on this as well as on some other points of radical abolitionism.  It was after a talk with him that Angelina describes the Female Anti-Slavery Society of New York as utterly inefficient, “doing literally nothing,” and ascribes its inefficiency to the sinful prejudice existing there, which shut out colored women from any share in its management, and gave little encouragement to them even to become members.

She adds:  “I believe it is our duty to visit the poor, white and colored, just in this way, and to receive them at our houses.  I think that the artificial distinctions in society, the separation between the higher and the lower orders, the aristocracy of wealth and education, are the very rock of pauperism, and that the only way to eradicate this plague from our land will be to associate with the poor, and the wicked too, just as our Redeemer did.  To visit them as our inferiors, the recipients of our bounty, is quite a different thing from going among them as our equals.”

In her next letter to Jane Smith, Angelina gives an interesting account of H.B.  Stanton’s great speech before the Committee of the Massachusetts legislature on the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; a speech which still ranks as one of the ablest and most brilliant ever delivered in this country.  There is no date to this letter, but it must have been written the last of February or first of March, 1837.  She begins thus:—­

“I was wondering, my dear Jane, what could be the reason I had not heard from thee, when brother Weld came in with thine and Mira’s letters hanging from the paper on which they had been tied.  ’I bring you,’ he said, ’a good emblem of the fate of abolitionists,—­so take warning;’ and held them up to our view....