alas! he had "not a farthing" with which to
discharge him from his embarrassment. Fortunately, if he wanted money he
did not want friends. And one of these, Jacob Horton, of Newburyport,
who had married his "old friend and playmate, Harriet Farnham," came to
his rescue with the requisite amount.

On the day and place appointed Garrison appeared before the
Congregational Societies with an address, to the like of which, it is
safe to say, they had never before listened. It was the Fourth of July,
but the orator was in no holiday humor. There was not, in a single
sentence of the oration the slightest endeavor to be playful with his
audience. It was rather an eruption of human suffering, and of the
humanity of one man to man. What the Boston clergy saw that afternoon,
in the pulpit of Park Street Church, was the vision of a soul on fire.
Garrison burned and blazed as the sun that July afternoon burned and
blazed in the city's streets. None without escaped the scorching rays of
the latter, none within was able to shun the fervid heat of the former.
Those of my readers who have watched the effects of the summer's sun on
a track of sandy land and have noted how, about midday, the heat seems
to rise in sparkling particles and exhalations out of the hot,
surcharged surface, can form some notion of the moral fervor and passion
of this Fourth of July address, delivered more than sixty years ago, in
Boston. Through all the pores of it, over all the length and breadth of
it, there went up bright, burning particles from the sunlit sympathy and
humanity of the young reformer.

In beginning, he animadverted, among other things, on the spread of
intemperance, of political corruption, on the profligacy of the press,
and, amid them all, the self-complacency and boastfulness of the
national spirit, as if it bore a charmed life.

"But," he continued, "there is another evil which, if we had to contend
against nothing else, should make us quake for the issue. It is a
gangrene preying upon our vitals--an earthquake rumbling under our
feet--a mine accumulating material for a national catastrophe. It should
make this a day of fasting and prayer, not of boisterous merriment and
idle pageantry--a day of great lamentation, not of congratulatory joy.
It should spike every cannon, and haul down every banner. Our garb
should be sack-cloth--our heads bowed in the dust--our supplications for
the pardon and assistance of Heaven.

"Sirs, I am not come