iting the various meetings for
worship and bearing his testimony against slaveholders, greatly to their
disgust and indignation. On one occasion he entered the Market Street
Meeting, and a leading Friend requested some one to take him out. A
burly blacksmith volunteered to do it, leading him to the gate and
thrusting him out with such force that he fell into the gutter of the
street. There he lay until the meeting closed, telling the bystanders
that he did not feel free to rise himself. "Let those who cast me here
raise me up. It is their business, not mine."

His personal appearance was in remarkable keeping with his eccentric
life. A figure only four and a half feet high, hunchbacked, with
projecting chest, legs small and uneven, arms longer than his legs; a
huge head, showing only beneath the enormous white hat large, solemn eyes
and a prominent nose; the rest of his face covered with a snowy
semicircle of beard falling low on his breast,--a figure to recall the
old legends of troll, brownie, and kobold. Such was the irrepressible
prophet who troubled the Israel of slave-holding Quakerism, clinging like
a rough chestnut-bur to the skirts of its respectability, and settling
like a pertinacious gad-fly on the sore places of its conscience.

On one occasion, while the annual meeting was in session at Burlington,
N. J., in the midst of the solemn silence of the great assembly, the
unwelcome figure of Benjamin Lay, wrapped in his long white overcoat,
was seen passing up the aisle. Stopping midway, he exclaimed, "You
slaveholders! Why don't you throw off your Quaker coats as I do mine,
and show yourselves as you are?" Casting off as he spoke his outer
garment, he disclosed to the astonished assembly a military coat
underneath and a sword dangling at his heels. Holding in one hand a
large book, he drew his sword with the other. "In the sight of God," he
cried, "you are as guilty as if you stabbed your slaves to the heart, as
I do this book!" suiting the action to the word, and piercing a small
bladder filled with the juice of poke-weed (playtolacca decandra), which
he had concealed between the covers, and sprinkling as with fresh blood
those who sat near him. John Woolman makes no mention of this
circumstance in his Journal, although he was probably present, and it
must have made a deep impression on his sensitive spirit. The violence
and harshness of Lay's testimony, however, had nothing in common with
the t