decent-looking colored woman
with a child, who looked too feeble to walk, and the child too heavy for
her to carry. She beckoned to a conductor, but he swept by and took no
more heed of her than if she had been a dog. There was a young lady
sitting in the car, who remarked to her mother, as a very filthy-looking
white man entered, 'See, they will let that filthy creature ride and
prohibit a decent respectable colored person!' The mother quietly
assented.
"From her dress I took her to be a Quakeress, for she had a lovely dress
of dove-colored silk. The young lady had scarcely uttered the words when
a young man who sat next the mother deliberately arose, and beckoned to
the man with the sooty clothes to take his seat; but fortunately for the
Quakeress, a lady who was sitting next her daughter arose just at that
moment, and left the seat, and the old man without noticing the
manoeuvre passed over to the other side, and thus avoided the contact. I
was amused, however, about one thing; for the young man who gave up his
seat was compelled to ride about a mile standing."
"Served him right," said Thomas Carpenter; "it was a very contemptible
action, to attempt to punish the hardihood of the young lady by
attempting to soil her mother's dress; and yet little souls who feel a
morbid satisfaction in trampling on the weak, always sink themselves in
the scale of manhood."
While this conversation was going on, the tea bell rang, and Josiah and
his little charge sat down to a well supplied table; for the Friends,
though plain and economical, are no enemies to good living.
Anna had brought the high-chair in which their own darling had sat a few
months before, when she had made gladness and sunshine around her
parent's path.
There was a tender light in the eye of the Quakeress as she dusted the
chair, and sat Minnie at the table.
"Do you think," said Thomas, addressing Josiah, "that we will ever
outgrow this wicked, miserable prejudice?"
"Oh, yes, but it must be the work of time. Both races have their work to
do. The colored man must outgrow his old condition of things, and thus
create around him a new class of associations. This generation has known
him as a being landless, poor, and ignorant. One of the most important
things for him to do is to acquire land. He will never gain his full
measure of strength until (like Anteus) he touches the earth. And I think
here is the great fault, or misfortune of the race; they seem
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