Mou-Setse - a Negro Hero

One very bitter day in March there was great commotion among the black people of St Louis. The snow was falling thickly, the wind was blowing. Inclement as the whole winter had been, this day seemed the worst of all; but it did not deter the freed blacks from braving its hardships, from hurrying in crowds from place to place, and above all from repairing in vast crowds to their own churches. Every coloured church in St Louis was full of anxious blacks, but they had not assembled for any purposes of worship. Unless, indeed, we except that heart worship which takes in the ever-present Christ, even when he comes hungry, naked, and in the guise of a stranger. The black people of St Louis made beds in the church pews and kindled fires in the basements.

Having made all preparations, they went, headed by their preachers, to the quays; there to meet some six hundred famished and shivering emigrants, who had come up the river all the way from the States of the Mississippi Valley and Louisiana.