step in as they pass, to each place where intoxicating drinks are sold, until they return reeling from the cemetery.

As to the Irish funerals, the first I observed consisted of twenty-eight carriages, crammed with people of all ages, with laughing faces and loud jollity, dressed in red and green ribbons, rendered more conspicuous by being blown about through the open windows by the wind. Not having observed the little modest hearse which preceded all this fun and frolic, the inquiry was not unnatural, if these people were going to a fair,-and the surprise was great to learn that they were following a funeral to the Popish burial-ground at Williamsburgh.

The hearse, in America, is a modest, low conveyance, somewhat lower and narrower than our carriages for pianofortes, free from the pomp of plumes, which look so like an attempt to put an air of grandeur on the most subduing event in life. The absence of escutcheons and blazonry on the house of the departed becomes the simplicity of a republic. A more touching and simple symbol we first observed in Baltimore, and saw it afterwards in Philadelphia and elsewhere. Where death has entered, a strip of black crape is attached to the handle of the front door, the length of which indicates the age of the departed, so that no unwarned visitors can intrude on private sorrow. It is also customary in some places to fix the outside shutters with crape in a position more than half closed, so

that the inmates live in that obscured light for many weeks, or months, if it be the head of the family who is dead, or if the departed is deeply mourned.

The Americans, partaking as they do of the mixture of many nations, have caught up tastes and habits from various quarters. The German neat and tasteful arrangement of small things, shews itself in the very hanging of the empty fruit-baskets in festoons at a gardener's stall, and the arranging of small flower-pots with an eye to the undulating line of beauty. And thus, in putting the Hall of Independence, at Philadelphia, in mourning for the late President, they had drawn a long piece of crape through the beak of the eagle which floats over the figure of Washington, in such a manner, that its folds fell gracefully down, shading the statue on either side. The effect was beautiful, and suggestive of many thoughts. Men may be cut off, but institutions will remain. -a President may expire, but the Republic will survive.

Ah! what a noble country! and yet how like this blighted world! It has a dark shade mingling among its stars and stripes-one under which it sighs and groans. When will vigour, true independence and virtue, be given to it to remove that dark shade, and allow all who admire its achievements and honour its ingenious industry, to admire without a sigh, and to honour without a drawback?

That dark shade would not withdraw from the

mind in the Hall of Independence, nor even at Washington, when the heart swelled in contemplation of the magnificent Capitol and all the affairs transacted within it. It appeared in the countenance and manner of the southerner, so different from those of the north. It hung about the figure of the shrinking free coloured man, who seems to quail under the cold eye of the white. It trembled around the lowly quiet celerity of the slave who watched your look as if it were his duty to conjecture your wants, not from love, but from fear. It even clouded the services of the handy little boy who ran from wing to wing of the busy hotel, carrying all sorts of small wares and messages. might be happy in his ignorance, poor boy! he was not harshly treated, and his mother was in the house. But he was not his mother's child-he was his master's. She was not her own, nor her husband's-she also was her master's. And who was he?—a humane man enough, born, under Providence, with a white skin, otherwise he too might have become the chattel of another.

He

Forgive the generous wish that no tarnish should be on your country's standard. I know that millions of you hate the system which I mourn-I know that it is not foreign remark or interference which will rid you of it. You are a free people. Your own intelligence and moral energy must reclaim you-no external powers can turn you back if you go astray. You have expelled slavery from one half

of your land, and live in the expectation that you will presently rid the other half of it, nay, that you will ultimately be the happy means of expelling it from the world. Yet perhaps there is some deception in your case. Can it be, as one has heard it many times stated, that, had it not been for foreign interference, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware would have ceased to hold slaves ere now? Why, if you would do right, allow your displeasure against "foreign interference" to have any power in inducing you to continue a wrong? Do you not deceive yourselves? I see our countryman James Stuart, in his "Three Years in America," adopted the idea of the friends with whom he conversed, that in ten years slavery would be at an end in Kentucky. That was said in 1830. Twenty-one years of ill-gotten gains and woe have passed since then. The delusions of hope that tend but to prolong a system which themselves abhor, are they not most pernicious and unfounded? When did evil arise and break itself to pieces, and rejoice over its own ruins? It cannot be. The better genius of Kentucky must awake and do the work-and rising from the wreck of its wrong, spring up to what just principles, genius, industry, and plentiful and fertile land, and free institutions, can make it. It must heal itself and if it does not, another ten, another twenty years may pass, and Kentucky and Delaware will be found as they are now, groaning and hating, but enduring and abetting slavery.

It was not my design to allude to this most painful subject. But in contemplating death, the termination of all our toils and all our gains, how could the depression of the coloured race and its termination fail to arise in the mind? "Behold the tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter. Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead, more than the living who are yet alive." Yea-presently-haste to be just before the time comes, for presently "the small and the great will lie down together, where the servant is free from his master."

Having fallen on this sore subject, it is right to make an observation or two to place British motives for remarking on the condition of the Africo-American race in a kinder point of view than that in which they generally first appear to an American.

We are not used to see coloured people at home, though our own heavy share of the evil and responsibility of transporting them from Africa, and placing them in a state of bondage, leads us to think much of them in absence, and to be anxious about their condition when we see them and visit their haunts.

For myself and it may truly be said of thousands besides-my observation and questions about them are from motives the very reverse of a desire to censure, or a pleasure in remarking on what is felt by Americans to be the unsound and inconsistent part of their constitution. I wanted to know their posi