at bright temple
And crowns above the sky."

[Footnote A: Starry regions.]

I put in this whole hymn, because Sojourner, carried away with her own
feeling, sang it from beginning to end with a triumphant energy that
held the whole circle around her intently listening. She sang with
the strong barbaric accent of the native African, and with those
indescribable upward turns and those deep gutturals which give such a
wild, peculiar power to the negro singing,--but above all, with such an
overwhelming energy of personal appropriation that the hymn seemed to be
fused in the furnace of her feelings and come out recrystallized as a
production of her own.

It is said that Rachel was wont to chant the "Marseillaise" in a manner
that made her seem, for the time, the very spirit and impersonation of
the gaunt, wild, hungry, avenging mob which rose against aristocratic
oppression; and in like manner, Sojourner, singing this hymn, seemed to
impersonate the fervor of Ethiopia, wild, savage, hunted of all nations,
but burning after God in her tropic heart, and stretching her scarred
hands towards the glory to be revealed.

"Well, den ye see, after a while I thought I'd go back an' see de folks
on de ole place. Well, you know, de law had passed dat de culled folks
was all free; an' my old missis, she had a daughter married about dis
time who went to live in Alabama,--an' what did she do but give her my
son, a boy about de age of dis yer, for her to take down to Alabama?
When I got back to de ole place, they told me about it, an' I went right
up to see ole missis, an' says I,--

"'Missis, have you been an' sent my son away down to Alabama?'

"'Yes, I have,' says she; 'he's gone to live with your young missis.'

"'Oh, Missis,' says I, 'how could you do it?'

"'Poh!' says she, 'what a fuss you make about a little nigger! Got more
of 'em now than you know what to do with.'

"I tell you, I stretched up. I felt as tall as the world!

"'Missis,' says I, '_I'll have my son back agin!_'

"She laughed.

"'_You_ will, you nigger? How you goin' to do it? You ha'n't got no
money.'

"'No, Missis,--but _God_ has,--an' you'll see He'll help me!'--an' I
turned round an' went out.

"Oh, but I _was_ angry to have her speak to me so haughty an' so
scornful, as ef my chile wasn't worth anything. I said to God, 'O Lord,
render unto her double!' It was a dreadful prayer, an' I didn't know how
true it would come.

"Well, I didn't right