elt a mission to go and comfort her. It was curious to see
the tall, gaunt, dusky figure stalk up to the bed with such an air of
conscious authority, and take on herself the office of consoler
with such a mixture of authority and tenderness. She talked as from
above,--and at the same time, if a pillow needed changing or any office
to be rendered, she did it with a strength and handiness that inspired
trust. One felt as if the dark, strange woman were quite able to take
up the invalid in her bosom, and bear her as a lamb, both physically and
spiritually. There was both power and sweetness in that great warm soul
and that vigorous frame.

At length, Sojourner, true to her name, departed. She had her mission
elsewhere. Where now she is I know not; but she left deep memories
behind her.

To these recollections of my own I will add one more anecdote, related
by Wendell Phillips.

Speaking of the power of Rachel to move and bear down a whole audience
by a few simple words, he said he never knew but one other human being
that had that power, and that other was Sojourner Truth. He related a
scene of which he was witness. It was at a crowded public meeting in
Faneuil Hall, where Frederick Douglas was one of the chief speakers.
Douglas had been describing the wrongs of the black race, and as he
proceeded, he grew more and more excited, and finally ended by saying
that they had no hope of justice from the whites, no possible hope
except in their own right arms. It must come to blood; they must fight
for themselves, and redeem themselves, or it would never be done.

Sojourner was sitting, tall and dark, on the very front seat, facing the
platform; and in the hush of deep feeling, after Douglas sat down, she
spoke out in her deep, peculiar voice, heard all over the house,--

"Frederick, IS GOD DEAD?"

The effect was perfectly electrical, and thrilled through the whole
house, changing as by a flash the whole feeling of the audience. Not
another word she said or needed to say; it was enough.

It is with a sad feeling that one contemplates noble minds and bodies,
nobly and grandly formed human beings, that have come to us cramped,
scarred, maimed, out of the prison-house of bondage. One longs to know
what such beings might have become, if suffered to unfold and expand
under the kindly developing influences of education.

It is the theory of some writers, that to the African is reserved,
in the later and palmier days of the ear