tone, he added, “And to thee, who claimest to be a minister of Christ, I would say that thy Master requires thee to give deliverance to the captive, and let the oppressed go free.  My friend, hast thou a conscience void of offence?  When thou liest down at night, is thy mind always at ease on this subject?  After pouring out thy soul in prayer to thy Heavenly Father, dost thou not feel the outraged sense of right, like a perpetual motion, restless within thy breast?  Dost thou not hear a voice telling thee it is wrong to hold thy fellow men in slavery, with their wives and their little ones?”

The preacher manifested some emotion at this earnest appeal, and confessed that he sometimes had doubts on the subject; though, on the whole, he had concluded that it was right to hold slaves.  One of his daughters, who was a widow, seemed to be more deeply touched.  She took Friend Hopper’s hand, at parting, and said, “I am thankful for the privilege of having seen you.  I never talked with an abolitionist before.  You have convinced me that slave-holding is sinful in the sight of God.  My husband left me several slaves, and I have held them for five years; but when I return, I am resolved to hold a slave no longer.”

Friend Hopper cherished some hope that this preaching and praying slaveholder would eventually manumit his bondmen; but I had listened to his conversation, and I thought otherwise.  His conscience seemed to me to be asleep under a seven-fold shield of self-satisfied piety; and I have observed that such consciences rarely waken.

At the time of the Christians riots, in 1851, when the slave-power seemed to overshadow everything, and none but the boldest ventured to speak against it, Friend Hopper wrote an article for the Tribune, and signed it with his name, in which he maintained that the colored people, “who defended themselves and their firesides against the lawless assaults of an armed party of negro-hunters from Maryland,” ought not to be regarded as traitors or murderers “by men who set a just value on liberty, and who had no conscientious scruples with regard to war.”

The first runaway, who was endangered by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, happened to be placed under his protection.  A very good-looking colored man, who escaped from bondage, resided some years in Worcester, Massachusetts, and acquired several thousand dollars by hair-dressing.  He went to New-York to be married, and it chanced that his master arrived in Worcester in search of him, the very day that he started for that city.  Some person friendly to the colored man sent information to New-York by telegraph; but the gentleman to whom it was addressed was out of the city.  One of the operators at the telegraph office said, “Isaac T. Hopper ought to know of this message;” and he carried it himself.  Friend Hopper was then eighty years old, but he sprang out of bed at midnight, and went off with all speed to hunt up the fugitive.  He found