“Equip me for the war,
    And teach my hands to fight;
  My simple, upright heart prepare,
    And guide my words aright.

  “Control my every thought,
    My whole of sin remove;
  Let all my works in thee be wrought,
    Let all be wrought in love.

  “Oh, arm me with the mind,
    Meek Lamb! that was in thee;
  And let my knowing zeal be join’d
    With perfect charity.

  “With calm and temper’d mind
    Let me enforce thy call;
  And vindicate thy gracious will,
    Which offers life to all.

  “Oh, may I love like thee,
    In all thy footsteps tread;
  Thou hatest all iniquity,
    But nothing thou hast made.

  “Oh, may I learn the art,
    With meekness to reprove;
  To hate the sin with all my heart,
    But still the sinner love.”

You must read this hymn to “Isaiah,” and tell him about the prayer-meeting.  While the “friends of the slave,” as you call them, are holding such humiliating meetings as you describe, in behalf of the slaves, and are vexing themselves and chafing under the imagination of their unmitigated sorrows and “oppression,” the slaves themselves, all over the South, are holding prayer-meetings, and are blessing God that they are “raised ’way up to heaven’s gate in privilege.”  As I sat in that prayer-meeting I could almost have risen and asked the prayers of the slaves in behalf of many at the North who are making themselves and others nearly insane on their behalf.  But I thought of my former ignorance and prejudice, and said, “And such were some of you.”

I will tell you some of the little incidents which meet one every day, and which give you impressions respecting the relations between the whites and blacks, full as instructive as those received in any other way.

Crossing a public street, which is steep, in the city of ——­, a truckle-cart came by me at great speed, drawn by a white boy, with another white boy pushing, and seated in it, erect and laughing, was a fine-looking black boy of about the same age as his white playmates.  Around the corner of another street there came by me, with a skip-and-jump step, two white girls, about thirteen years old, and between them—­the arms of the three all intertwined—­was another girl of the same age, as black as ebony.  On they went jumping, and keeping step, and singing.

I had not been accustomed to such sights in Beacon Street, on my visits to Boston.  “Friends of the slave,” as we most surely are, and some of us being decorated with that name by way of distinction, significant of our all-absorbing business “to raise the black man at the South to the condition of a human being,” when we get them there we are not greeted in the streets with pictures of white and black children on such terms as appeared in these two casual incidents.  Nothing at first struck me with greater wonder at the South than to see the most fashionably dressed ladies in the most public streets stop to help a black woman with a burden on her head, if she needed assistance, or to hold a gate open for a man with a wheelbarrow.