"In the country, these people seem simple, grave, severe, always
industrious, and, at first, cold and reserved in their manners towards
each other, but with great warmth of heart. They are all obedient to
the word of their minister, who lives among them just like any other
man, and marries and has children.
"Everything in their worship is plain and austere; their churches are
perfectly desolate; they have no chants, no pictures, no
carvings,--only a most disconsolate, bare-looking building, where they
meet together, and sing one or two hymns, and the minister makes one or
two prayers, all out of his own thoughts, and then gives them a long,
long discourse about things which I cannot understand enough English to
comprehend.
"There is a very beautiful, charming young girl here, the daughter of
my hostess, who is as lovely and as saintly as St. Catharine, and has
such a genius for religion, that, if she had been in our Church, she
would certainly have been made a saint.
"Her mother is a good, worthy matron; and the good priest lives in the
family. I think he is a man of very sublime religion, as much above
this world as a great mountain; but he has the true sense of liberty
and fraternity; for he has dared to oppose with all his might this
detestable and cruel trade in poor negroes, which makes us, who are so
proud of the example of America in asserting the rights of men, so
ashamed for her inconsistencies.
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