At Newcastle-on-Tyne and some other places various friends came out to meet us, some of whom presented us with most splendid bouquets of hothouse flowers.  This region has been the seat of some of the most zealous and efficient antislavery operations in England.

About night our cars whizzed into the depot at Birmingham; but just before we came in a difficulty was started in the company.  “Mr. Sturge is to be there waiting for us, but he does not know us, and we don’t know him; what is to be done?” C——­ insisted that he should know him by instinct; and so after we reached the depot, we told him to sally out and try.  Sure enough, in a few moments he pitched upon a cheerful, middle-aged gentleman, with a moderate but not decisive broad brim to his hat, and challenged him as Mr. Sturge; the result verified the truth that “instinct is a great matter.”  In a few moments our new friend and ourselves were snugly encased in a fly, trotting off as briskly as ever we could to his place at Edgbaston, nobody a whit the wiser.  You do not know how snug we felt to think we had done it so nicely.

The carriage soon drove in upon a gravel walk, winding among turf, flowers, and shrubs, where we found opening to us another home as warm and kindly as the one we had just left, made doubly interesting by the idea of entire privacy and seclusion.

After retiring to our chambers to repair the ravages of travel, we united in the pleasant supper room, where the table was laid before a bright coal fire:  no unimportant feature this fire, I can assure you, in a raw cloudy evening.  A glass door from the supper room opened into a conservatory, brilliant with pink and yellow azalias, golden calceolarias, and a profusion of other beauties, whose names I did not know.

The side tables were strewn with books, and the ample folds of the drab curtains, let down over the windows, shut out the rain, damp, and chill.  When we were gathered round the table, Mr. Sturge said that he had somewhat expected Elihu Burritt that evening, and we all hoped he would come.  I must not omit to say, that the evening circle was made more attractive and agreeable in my eyes by the presence of two or three of the little people, who were blessed with the rosy cheek of English children.

Mr. Sturge is one of the most prominent and efficient of the philanthropists of modern days.  An air of benignity and easy good nature veils and conceals in him the most unflinching perseverance and energy of purpose.  He has for many years been a zealous advocate of the antislavery cause in England, taking up efficiently the work begun by Clarkson and Wilberforce.  He, with a friend of the same denomination, made a journey at their own expense, to investigate the workings of the apprentice system, by which the act of immediate emancipation in the West Indies was for a while delayed.  After his return he sustained a rigorous examination of seven days before a committee of the House of Commons, the result of which successfully demonstrated the abuses of that system, and its entire inutility for preparing either masters or servants for final emancipation.  This evidence went as far as any thing to induce Parliament to declare immediate and entire emancipation.