ints, the only resort to ascertain the latest intelligence, and
to collect information respecting the movements of the black
population, and the company, however exceptionable, being termed there
respectable, I adopted the plan, on several successive evenings, of
quietly smoking a cigar and listening to passing observations and
remarks. Some of these were disgusting enough; so much so, that I will
not offend my readers by repeating them. Suffice it to say, that any
individual possessing the slightest pretensions to the name of
gentleman, in any hotel I had visited in England, on indulging in the
indecorous language I heard at these places, would, by a very summary
process, have met with ejectment, without ceremony. Here, however, a
laxity of moral feeling prevails, that stifles all sense of propriety;
and scurrility, obscene language, and filthy jests, of which the
coloured population are, I suppose, per force of habit, the principal
butts, form the chief attractions of such places of resort to their
vitiated frequenters.

In the course of these visits I was present at some angry altercations;
one of these referred to the recent visit of an individual who was
termed by the disputants an "incendiary abolitionist," and who, it
appeared, had been detected in the act of distributing tracts, which had
been published at Salem, in Massachusetts, exposing the disabilities the
African race were labouring under. Extracts from one of these tracts
were read, and appeared very much to increase the violence of the
contending parties, one of whom insisted that the publication contained
nothing but what might be read by every slave in the sacred Scriptures,
and that, therefore, it could not be classed as dangerous, although he
admitted that it contained notions of "human rights" that were
calculated to imbue the mind of the "niggers" with unbecoming ideas.
These sentiments did not at all accord with those of the company, and
several expressions of doubt as to the soundness of the speaker's own
pro-slavery principles, together with the increasing excitement, caused
him to withdraw from the contest. His immediate antagonist, who was
evidently the leading man on the occasion, enlarged on the danger
attending the sufferance of such men at large in the slave states, and
proceeded, with great volubility, to quote various passages from the
Black Code to show that the Legislature had contemplated the intrusion
of such pestilent fellows, and ha