out to the plantations in the neighbourhood and elsewhere. Here also I often had to listen to and to answer the same multitude of trivial and wearisome questions, one of the worst and most frequent of which was, “Do the United States answer your expectations?”
Yet even here I also became acquainted with some excellent people, both men and women, real Christians and true citizens of the world, who are silently labouring at the work of emancipation, wisely and effectually; assisting the slaves into the path of self-emancipation,—that is to say, giving opportunity to those slaves to acquire money, helping them to keep it, and encouraging them to industry and good conduct, with a view to their liberation at a certain time; in a few years perhaps, or it may be less, and afterwards giving them that freedom for which they have worked. How beautiful it seemed to me when I saw them, in particular an elderly gentleman and lady, how good they seemed to me, and how amiable! How happy I felt myself in knowing them! One of these friends of humanity had advanced to a negro woman a little capital, which enabled her, by her own labour, not only to pay monthly interest to her owner for the money he had paid for her, but by which she had the means of purchasing the freedom of four of her children; the fifth had yet to be purchased, but even this one also would shortly be free, through the help of a benevolent man. And who does not admire this slave, who thinks nothing of continuing herself a slave, but merely of purchasing the freedom—of emancipating her children? Such a mother would, in the times of Athens and Sparta, have been proclaimed as “an honour to humanity.” But this mother remains an unknown slave. It is true that she feels herself well off in her situation, and does not wish for a freedom which at her age could not be obtained but at the exchange of a life free from care, for one much harder—at least in Liberia. “When I am old,” said she,
