A bountiful supper followed, and the evening passed very pleasantly and rapidly in conversation; with many reminiscences of our life at the Springs, and the various persons we had met there. At length he ordered the Bible brought forward, and the servants summoned for prayers. A large number, including the house-servants, and their husbands and children who lived in the kitchen and other adjacent buildings, were soon assembled. The master and myself were the only white persons in the group. He sat near me in a large chair, thin, pale, and sickly, his two crutches lying across his legs, and seemed profoundly interested and impressed. With a stillness that was almost motionless and breathless, and with a fixed, an earnest, an excited attention, such as I have never seen, only as I have seen it in many similar groups, they all listened while I read to them a portion of the blessed Word of God--that Word that I have found so potent to soothe and cheer and bless the most ignorant and the most oppressed--and then we all bowed together before our common Father, and in language as simple as I could command I earnestly besought his blessing to rest upon them all, and commended master and slaves to his compassionate care and love. As, after the lapse of so many years, the long-closed chambers of memory open at my bidding, and, recalling this scene, I for the first time commit it to pages that can be read by others, it all stands revealed before me, so vivid, so _present_, so unspeakably tender and precious in its memories, that again and again I have been compelled to lay down my pen and wipe the fast-falling tears that would flow as I have lived over again the golden, glorious hour thus spent in communing with God and comforting his enslaved and suffering poor. The same divine power comes down upon me now, while I write, as when I knelt in the midst of that dark group, melting my soul with a tenderness so inexpressibly sweet, and irradiating my whole being with a joy so unearthly that I can but exclaim with the poetess: "Tell us if the gleams of glory, Bursting on us when we pray, Are not transient, blest revealings Of our _home_, so far away; Loving glances of our Father, Sent to lure our souls away."