“I next came under the influence of a very humble serving-man. He opened up new directions to me and gave me new impulses. He was a colored man; and I am not ashamed to say that my whole life, my whole career respecting the colored race in the conflict which was so long carried on in this country, was largely influenced by the effect produced on my mind, when I was between eight and ten years of age, by a poor old colored man who worked on my father’s farm, named Charles Smith. He did not set out to influence me; he did not know that he did it; I did not know it until a great while afterwards; but he gave me impulses, and impulses which were in the right direction; for he was a godly and hymn-singing man, who made wine fresh every night from the cluster. He used to lie upon his humble bed (I slept in the same room with him) and read his Testament, unconscious, apparently, that I was in the room; and he would laugh and talk about what he read, and chuckle over it with that peculiarly unctuous throat-tone which belongs to his race. I never had heard the Bible really read before; but there, in my presence, he read it, and talked about it to himself and to God. He turned the New Testament into living forms right before me. It was a revelation and an impulse to me. “He talked to me about my soul more than any member of my father’s family. These things impressed me with the conviction that he was a Christian; and I never saw anything in him that led me to think otherwise. The feeling that I was sinful, that I needed to be born again, that there was such a thing as a regenerate life produced by the Spirit of God in the soul—these feelings came to me by observing the actual example of persons that I lived with more than from all other sources put together.” But above all others for diffusive and permanent impression affecting his whole nature, bringing him into sympathy with God in all his works as in all his words, and increasing to the day of his death, was the influence of his own mother. “The memory of my mother as one sainted has exerted a singular influence on me. After I came to be about fourteen or fifteen years of age I began to be distinctly conscious that there was a silent, secret, and, if you please to call it so, romantic influence which was affecting me. It grew and it grows, so that in some parts of my nature I think I have more communion with my mother, whom I never saw except as a child three years old, than with any living being. I am conscious that all my life long there has been a moral power in my memory of her. It is evident to me that while in education and in other material respects her death was a deprivation, it was also an inspiration, a communion—one of those invisible blessings which faith comprehends, but which we are not apt to weigh and to estimate.