Sometimes she would contrast their
appearance with the laborers she had seen wending their way into their
lowly huts; and then her face would grow sober even to sadness. A
puzzled expression would flit over her countenance, as if she were
trying to solve a problem which was inexplicable to her.
One day on the hunt for some new excitement, her father passed down
Tremont St., and saw advertised, in large letters, on the entrance to
Tremont Temple, "Anti Slavery Meeting;" and never having been in such a
place before he entered, impelled by a natural curiosity to hear what
could be said against a system in which he had been involved from his
earliest recollections, without taking the pains to examine it.
The first speaker was a colored man. This rather surprised him. He had
been accustomed to colored men all the days of his life; and as such, he
had known some of them to be intelligent, shrewd, and wide awake; but
this was a new experience. The man had been a slave, and recounted in
burning words the wrongs which had been heaped upon him. He told that he
had been a husband and a father: that his wife had possessed (for a
slave) the "fatal gift of beauty;" that a trader, from whose presence
her soul had recoiled with loathing, had marked her as his prey.
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