On the outward voyage (which was from Liverpool in June) he found in one of the berths a dying man, and conversed with him about the state of his soul. The invalid owned that his mother used to speak to him every day about these things. ‘Poor fellow!’ writes Norman; ‘perhaps it was in answer to her prayers that in his last hours he had beside him those who spoke to him the truth’; and ‘I am very thankful that I did not delay speaking to him,’ was the minister’s thought, as ‘the coffin slid down and plunged into the ocean.’ But in Macleod the gay and the grave alternated in a manner that bewildered, if it did not shock, the pious stranger: one moment he would be in tears with sacred emotion, the next he was capable of raptures of gladness just for life’s sake. Nor of his sincerity either way was there ever, on the part of those who knew him, the shadow of a doubt. In social circles, and particularly among fellow-voyagers, he was always the dominant spirit, brimming with genius and good humour, and so expansive and sympathetic that every one was almost immediately his friend. When the ship reached its destination, the passengers drank the health of the deputies with three times three. At Washington he had an interview with the President, Mr. Polk,--’a plain man, of short stature, rather dark complexion, large forehead, and hair erect’. But what he was in search of was a slave-market. He was directed to a certain private house. ‘With my own eyes,’ he thought, ‘shall I now see the strange sight--a brother-man for sale.’ Through a large gate, grated with massive iron bars, he was admitted to a courtyard. On one side, in the cellars of the owner’s dwelling, was the abode of the men; on the side opposite was a small barrack for the women. A female carrying a child at once accosted him, beseeching that if he bought her he would buy her child. ‘Five hundred dollars,’ said the master, puffing his cigar, while an old negress cried from the outside to the slaves, ‘Keep up your heart, keep up your heart.’ Norman sickened at the sight. Here was slavery in its most mitigated form, and yet the impression made upon him ‘by _seeing_ instead of hearing was overwhelmingly bitter. Men and women,’ he wrote, ‘my brothers and sisters, bought and sold, without crime--without their consent--slaves for life--slaves from childhood;--it was enough.’ During the American war he declared that the British sympathy for the South was to him an inscrutable mystery.