ng down to the piazza, she saw a white man mending a
harness on a horse. "Those whips," said she, inquiringly,--"they have
rather interfered with my peace. Any of the colored people been doing
wrong?" He hesitated, and kept on fixing his harness, till, finally, he
turned round,--for he had been standing with his back to her and, as she
supposed, to hide his chagrin at being questioned on so trying a
subject. "Truth is, Madam," said he, taking a large piece of tobacco and
a knife from his pocket, and helping himself slowly,--"truth is, we have
so much of this work to do, we have to begin early. Sorry it disturbed
you;" and he gathered up the reins and drove off.

The whips kept up their racket. "Here," said she to herself, "is the
house of Bondage. How can I spend a month here?" She thought that she
would peep round the house. Yet she feared that she should be considered
as intruding into things which she had better not meddle with. But the
screams became so fearful that she could no longer restrain herself. She
rushed round the corner of the house, and came full against a black
woman rinsing some fustian clothes in a tub near the rain-spout. "Do
dear tell me," said she, "what they are doing to those people. Who is
whipping them? What have they done?" The black woman stopped, and looked
round without taking her hands from her tub, and then said, as she went
on rinsing, "Lorfull help you, Missis, dem's de young uns scaring de
birds out of de grain."

What bliss there was to her in that moment of relief! Six or eight
little negroes were sauntering about at their morning work, each having
a rude whip, with tape for a snapper, interrupting the hungry birds at
their breakfast.

I expected to see a wretched, down-trodden, alms-house looking set of
creatures; for the word _slave_, and all the changes which are rung on
that word, made me think only of people who are convicts, such as you
see in the state-prison yard at Charlestown, Mass. I never expected that
they would look me in the face, but would skulk by me as a spy or enemy.
A Christian heart is overjoyed to find what religion and society have
done for these colored people. If one who had never heard of "slavery"
should be set down here, the Northern idea of "bondage" would not soon
occur to him.

In the Presbytery which includes Charleston, S.C., there are two
thousand eight hundred and eighty-nine church-members, and of these one
thousand six hundred-and thirty-seven