Europe -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
watching her gentle, cheerful ways, and her sympathy with all the bright
life around her. Since the war, in which her husband and only brother R.
S------(who commanded the first coloured regiment from Massachusetts,
and was buried under his negroes at Fort Wagner) were killed, she has
devoted herself to the Freedmen, and is Honorary Secretary to the
Society for educating them. After breakfast we started in the yacht for
the neighbouring island, on which the great Methodist camp-meeting was
going on. This Sunday was the great day. They have occupied this island
for some years, and have built there a whole town of pretty little
wooden houses like big Chinese toys, dotted about amongst the trees.
Most of them consist of only one long room, divided by curtains in the
middle. The front half opens to the street, but raised one step above it
is the sitting-room, and the inmates sleep in the back, behind the
curtains. A few houses have a story above; but F------ bought a lot of
photographs for us, which will show you the style of house better than a
page of description. There were literally thousands of people on the
island, upwards of two thousand collected in a huge circular tent in the
middle of the houses, where a preacher was shouting to them. We sat on
the skirts of the congregation and listened for some time, but as he was
only talking wildly about Nebuddah, Positivism, Theodore Parker, and
other heresies and heretics, I was not edified, and got no worship till
he had done, when we all stood up and sang the doxology, which was very
impressive. I was much disappointed at the gathering in a religious
point of view. It was a rare chance for a man with a living word in him,
those thousands of decent, sober, attentive New England men and women.
They told me that in the evening it would be much more interesting, when
there would be great singing of hymns, and many persons would tell how
they came to experience religion as they call it; but we could not stay
for this. The meeting lasts for weeks, and is in fact an excuse for the
gathering at a pretty sea-place in the early autumn of a number of good
folk who would think the ordinary watering-places ungodly, but have a
longing for a break in their ordinary colourless lives. We sailed back
in time for early dinner, meeting on the way huge steamers packed with
passengers for the campmeeting, till they were top heavy. Next day we
spent in, fishing off the rocks for blue-fish, and in a beautiful little
lake of three-quarters of a mile long (one of several in the island) for
bass. I caught a blue fish of nine lbs., the biggest and strongest I
have ever caught, also the only bass which was taken; so I naturally
crowed loudly. The island hours are: breakfast, eight o’clock or half
past eight; dinner, two or three; tea, with cold meat, half-past six or
seven. After tea on both evenings we got into full swing on the war. I
found Mr. F------ and his wife deeply grieved and prejudiced as to our
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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