The social life of the well-to-do colored family generally centres about the church, and with a regularity unusual among the white people, father and mother and children attend the Sunday and week-day meetings. Colored society is also at the period of the bazaar and fair, the concert and dramatic entertainment. Money is raised by this means for the church, the private charity, or to supplement the dues of the mutual benefit society. There are a number of Negroes in the different large cities who support themselves by concerts and readings, appearing at benefits in the North and South, where they receive a third or a half of the receipts. Amateur performances are also common. A young New York college man, one winter evening, saw two refined, remarkably well-dressed colored women turn in at the entrance of the Grand Central Palace. Purchasing a ticket for the benefit, as it proved, of a colored day nursery (the entertainment netted $2300), he followed them to find himself in the Afro-American social world. For while the amateur dancing and singing upon the stage were pretty and attractive, the young man was far more interested in the audience. "And the disappointing thing about it," he remarked in telling of it afterwards, "was that they were exactly like other people." To use the newspaper phrase, "there was no 'story.'" They were a group of Americans, trained in the social conventions of their own land. There are many secret and benefit societies among the Negroes in New York. The Masons have nine meeting places; the Elks, ten lodges. The Odd Fellows have twenty-two places of meeting. The United Order of True Reformers, a strong Negro organization in the South, where it conducts large business enterprises, has forty-four head-quarters in church and hall and private house, where meetings are held twice a month. Many benefit societies are closely associated with the churches. Colored men and women are very busy with their multitudinous church and society and benefit meetings. I remember once attending an evening service at a colored church when the minister preached the sermon to the benefit orders of St. Luke's and the Galilean Fishermen. The officers, some of them carrying spears with blue and red and white trimmings, marched down the aisle and took their seats at the front of the pulpit. Their leader was in purple, wearing a huge badge like a breastplate with yellow and green stones. The women, equally prominent with the men, were dressed one in yellow with green over it, and broad purple bands, two in white with golden crowns. The pageant was very pretty, even beautiful, but too artless in its simple enjoyment of color and display for the conventional society of New York, and the colored "four hundred" were not in it.