I should
think that the improvement in some of the cabins was not very
much in advance of what it was in Slavery. The cabins are made
with doors, but not, to my recollection, a single window pane or
speck of plastering; and yet even in some of those lowly homes I
met with hospitality. A room to myself is a luxury that I do not
always enjoy. Still I live through it, and find life rather
interesting. The people have much to learn. The condition of the
women is not very enviable in some cases. They have had some of
them a terribly hard time in Slavery, and their subjection has
not ceased in freedom. * * * One man said of some women,
that a man must leave them or whip them. * * * Let me
introduce you to another scene: here is a gathering; a large
fire is burning out of doors, and here are one or two boys with
hats on. Here is a little girl with her bonnet on, and there a
little boy moves off and commences to climb a tree. Do you know
what the gathering means? It is a school, and the teacher, I
believe, is paid from the school fund. He says he is from New
Hampshire. That may be. But to look at him and to hear him
teach, you would perhaps think him not very lately from the
North; at least I do not think he is a model teacher. They have
a church; but somehow they have burnt a hole, I understand, in
the top, and so I lectured inside, and they gathered around the
fire outside. Here is another--what shall I call
it?--meeting-place. It is a brush arbor. And what pray is that?
Shall I call it an edifice or an improvised meeting-house? Well,
it is called a brush arbor. It is a kind of brush house with
seats, and a kind of covering made partly, I rather think, of
branches of trees, and an humble place for pulpit. I lectured in
a place where they seemed to have no other church; but I spoke
at a house. In Glenville, a little out-of-the-way place, I spent
part of a week. There they have two unfinished churches. One has
not a single pane of glass, and the same aperture that admits
the light also gives ingress to the air; and the other one, I
rather think, is less finished than that. I spoke in one, and
then the white people gave me a hall, and quite a number
attended.... I am now at Union Springs, where I shall probably
room with three women. But amid all this roughing it in the