“Then,” said another lady, “how have you learned so much of God, and heavenly things?”
“Well, ‘pears like a gift from above.”
“Can you have the Bible read to you?”
“Why, yes; Paul, he reads a little, but then he has so much work all day, and when he gets home at night he’s so tired! and his eyes is bad. But then the Sperit teaches us.”
“Do you go much to meeting?”
“Not much now, we live so far. In winter I can’t never. But, O! what meetings I have had, alone in the corner,—my Saviour and only me!” The smile with which these words were spoken was a thing to be remembered. A little girl, daughter of one of the ladies, made some rather severe remarks about somebody in the daguerreotype rooms, and her mother checked her.
The old lady looked up, with her placid smile. “That puts me in mind,” she said, “of what I heard a preacher say once. ‘My friends,’ says he, ‘if you know of anything that will make a brother’s heart glad, run quick and tell it; but if it is something that will only cause a sigh, ‘bottle it up, bottle it up!’ O, I often tell my children, ‘Bottle it up, bottle it up!’”
When the writer came to part with the old lady, she said to her: “Well, good-by, my dear friend; remember and pray for me.”
“Pray for you!” she said, earnestly. “Indeed I shall,—I can’t help it.” She then, raising her finger, said, in an emphatic tone, peculiar to the old of her race, “Tell you what! we never gets no good bread ourselves till we begins to ask for our brethren.”
The writer takes this opportunity to inform all those friends, in different parts of the country, who generously contributed for the redemption of these children, that they are at last free!