When the family from the Hut entered the chapel, all the rest of the congregation were in their customary seats.  This arrival, however, added materially to the audience, Great Smash and Little Smash, the two Plinys, and some five or six coloured children, between the ages of six and twelve, following in the train of their master.  For the blacks, a small gallery had been built, where they could sit apart, a proscribed, if not a persecuted race.  Little did the Plinys or the Smashes, notwithstanding, think of this.  Habit had rendered their situation more than tolerable, for it had created notions and usages that would have rendered them uncomfortable, in closer contact with the whites.  In that day, the two colours never ate together, by any accident; the eastern castes being scarcely more rigid in the observance of their rules, than the people of America were on this great point.  The men who would toil together, joke together, and pass their days in familiar intercourse, would not sit down at the same board.  There seemed to be a sort of contamination, according to the opinions of one of these castes, in breaking bread with the other.  This prejudice often gave rise to singular scenes, more especially in the households of those who habitually laboured in company with their slaves.  In such families, it not unfrequently happened that a black led the councils of the farm.  He might be seen seated by the fire, uttering his opinions dogmatically, reasoning warmly against his own master, and dealing out his wisdom ex cathedra, even while he waited, with patient humility, when he might approach, and satisfy his hunger, after all of the other colour had quitted the table.

Mr. Woods was not fortunate in the selection of his subject, on the occasion of which we are writing.  There had been so much personal activity, and so much political discussion during the past week, as to prevent him from writing a new sermon, and of course he was compelled to fail back on the other end of the barrel.  The recent arguments inclined him to maintain his own opinions, and he chose a discourse that he had delivered to the garrison of which he had last been chaplain.  To this choice he had been enticed by the text, which was, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” a mandate that would be far more palatable to an audience composed of royal troops, than to one which had become a good deal disaffected by the arts and arguments of Joel Strides and the miller.  Still, as the sermon contained a proper amount of theological truisms, and had a sufficiency of general orthodoxy to cover a portion of its political bearing, it gave far more dissatisfaction to a few of the knowing, than to the multitude.  To own the truth, the worthy priest was so much addicted to continuing his regimental and garrison course of religious instruction, that his ordinary listeners would scarcely observe this tendency to loyalty; though it was far different with those who were eagerly looking for causes of suspicion and denunciation, in the higher quarters.