From New Jersey they went up the North River with Gerrit Smith, holding interesting meetings at Hudson and Poughkeepsie.  At the latter place they spoke to an assembly of colored people of both sexes, and this was the first time Angelina ever addressed a mixed audience, and it was perhaps in accordance with the fitness of things that it should have been a colored one.  She often spoke of this in after years, looking back to it with pleasure.  Here, also, they attended a meeting of the Anti-slavery Society of the Protestant Episcopal Methodist Church, and spoke against the sin of prejudice.  In a letter to Sarah Douglass, Sarah says:—­

“My feelings were so overcome at this meeting that I sat down and wept.  I feel as if I had taken my stand by the side of the colored American, willing to share with him the odium of a darker skin, and I trust if I am permitted again to take my seat in Arch Street Meeting House, it will be beside thee and thy dear mother.”

These Hudson River meetings ended the labors of the sisters in New York for the time.  They returned to the city to take a little needed rest, and to prepare for the Female Anti-Slavery Convention, which was to meet there early in May.  The Society which had sent them forth had reason to be well satisfied with its experiment.  Not only had they awakened enthusiasm and sincere interest in abolition, but had demonstrated the ability of women to publicly advocate a great cause, and the entire propriety of their doing so.  One of the members, of the committee asserted that it would be as impossible to calculate the number of converts they had made, as to estimate the encouragement and strength their zeal and eloquence had given to abolitionists all over the country.  Men were slow to believe the reports of their wives and sisters respecting Angelina’s wonderful oratory, and this incredulity produced the itching ears which soon drew to the meetings where the Grimke sisters were to speak more men than women, and gave them the applause and hearty support of some of the ablest minds of New England.  The Female Anti-slavery Convention opened with seventy-one delegates; the Misses Grimke, at their own request, representing South Carolina.  During this convention they met many congenial souls, among whom they particularize Lydia M. Child, Mary T. Parker, and Anna Weston, as sympathizing so entirely with their own views respecting prejudice and the province of woman.

The latter question had long been Sarah’s pet problem, to the solution of which she had given much thought and study, ever since the time when she was denied participation in her brother’s education because of her sex.  It is scarcely too much to say that to her mind this question was second in importance to none, and though the word enfranchisement, as applied to woman, had not yet been uttered, the whole theory of it was in Sarah’s heart, and she eagerly awaited the proper time and place to develop it.  Angelina, while holding the same views, would probably