Then comes the cheering prospect of Heaven: O take your shoes from off your feet And walk into the golden street! And this concluding stanza: I do believe without a doubt That a Christian has a right to shout! As the concluding strain of this psalm of praise and of prayer sank away into silence they carefully led a very old colored man to the platform. This was Old John the Baptist, as the negroes affectionately called him; he was looked up to as a sort of patriarch in Israel on account of his goodness and spirituality. The whiteness of his matted hair and the deep furrows in his face testified to the many, many years in which the pain of slavery had been burned into his soul. As they assisted him up the steps it could be seen that he was blind, and a deep hush fell upon the room as he raised his hands and lifted up his voice in prayer. He gave thanks for the joy of this day of emancipation and for their escape from the woe of slavery; he prayed for the friends and relatives so tenderly beloved that they had left behind, and, above all, he prayed that their feelings of joy and triumph at their own escape might not lead them into vainglorious pride and arrogance. The chief burden of his prayer was that humility might dwell in the hearts of his people. “O God, keep us humble, keep us humble,” he repeated. “Let not thy people be puffed up with pride and then forget the God that brought them out of Egypt into Canaan’s land!” During these simple, but most impressive, ceremonies Mrs. Stowe sat on the platform, her heart throbbing with the tragedy of the scene. There was a deep, absorbed, dreamy look in her eyes as she sat there pondering on all this great national matter. As she looked out over the vast assemblage, a fragment only of the great exodus from slavery, she grew more and more assured in her mind that the steps that had been taken were right. She thought over what had already been done. It was right to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and to exclude it from the territories of the United States; it had been a good stroke for the United States to make that treaty with Great Britain for the suppression of the slave trade, making it legal to hang a convicted slaver as a pirate. And it was clear to her that the government offer of compensation to the slave owners in the southern states, to whom the negro was property, was a just and fair offer. She believed in release from slavery as a growth rather than as a sudden cut-off, and thought that this offer had been a move in the right direction. Therefore, she thought, it is right and sensible to lead up by these steps to the promise of full freedom to all--which the President had promised--or perhaps one should say, threatened, in the important document, the Emancipation Proclamation, which he had given out some four weeks before. “Oh, if he only will hold firm to this!” she prayed, “and if the Cabinet and the army and the country will only stand by him!”