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Once more, my little Agatha, am I in the "Friends" city, after a beautiful day's sail on Chesapeake Bay and   [p. 512]   the Delaware, disturbed only by strange ladies who asked and asked again the usual senseless questions. Ah, if they only knew how they tormented me, how much I required silence and rest, they would leave me at peace--I am so worn out by the life of excitement and by the heat in Washington. I must endeavor to regain my strength by the sea. The gentlemen were much better. I met with some sensible, kind people among them.

Professor Hart came on board to meet me at Philadelphia, and took me to his house, where I now am, as a member of the family.

In company with Lucretia Mott I visited several families of free negroes in this city, among the rest the negro minister of an Episcopal church here; he was a tall, good-tempered, and most respectable man, a daguerreotypist, and spoke French and some other languages very well. These free negroes strike me in the same way as the slaves; they are good-natured and full of feeling, with a deal of imitative power and great originality, but their excellent qualities are of quite a different kind to those of the whites, and no schools or institutions of learning will ever bring them to the same point; nor do I know why they should be so brought. The merits of the whites are accompanied by the faults of the whites.

Among the few colored people, as they like to be called whom I saw here, I was most interested by a young mulatto woman, Sarah Douglas, a charming girl, with a remarkably intelligent countenance. She was the teacher in a school of about sixty children, negroes and mulattoes, and she praised them for their facility in learning, but said that they forgot equally fast, and that it was difficult to bring them beyond a certain point. She herself was one of the most beautiful examples of true cultivation among the colored people.

I have also again paid a visit to dear Mary Townsend, that beautiful child of the inner light, with those supernaturally   [p. 513]   beaming eyes. I now knew for the first time that these beaming eyes could scarcely bear the light of day, that she was not able to read nor to write a page without extreme suffering, and that her work on "Insect Life" was dictated with bandaged eyes. Thus lay she, immovable and blind, as she prepared the winged life of the children of nature, "thankful," writes she in her preface, "if my little book may be a means of preventing the cruelty to insects which children are so prone to." "It has enabled me at times to forget," says she, further, "that I was confined within the four walls of my chamber. It has taken me out into the fields and into the roads, and renewed my admiration of the wonderful works of the Creator."

Thus lies she, as it were, fettered and blind till day when the deliverer, Death, shall release the angel's wings. Fettered and blind, and yet, nevertheless, how keen-eyed and winged in comparison with many! The effect of that inner light! She is called in the family "the Innermost"' and I will convey her image across the sea to my "Innermost."

That inner light! That life of the inner light! I thank the city of the Friends for a new revelation of this.

The next time I write to you will be from the sea-side in New Jersey. On Thursday we go to Cape May. But before that I shall make an excursion into the country, to the house of a lady, a friend of Mr. Downing, an American Madame De Sevigne.