Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/568

560 New York hungry and not a little indignant and disgusted at such barbarism. There were influential persons on board the Alida, on this occasion, a word from whom might have spared me this indignity; but there was no Edward Marshall among them to defend the weak and rebuke the strong.

When Miss Sarah Jane Clark, one of America's brilliant literary ladies, known to the world under the nom de plume of Grace Greenwood, was young and as brave as she was beautiful, I encountered, on one of the Ohio river steamers, an experience similar to that on the Alida, and that lady, being on board, arose from her seat at the table, expressed her disapprobation and, with her sister, moved majestically away to the upper deck. Her conduct seemed to amaze the lookers on, but it filled me with grateful admiration.

When on my way, in 1852, to attend at Pittsburg the great Free Soil Convention which nominated John P. Hale for President and George W. Julian for Vice-President, the train stopped for dinner at Alliance, Ohio, and I attempted to enter the hotel with the other delegates, but was rudely repulsed, when many of them, learning of it, rose from the table, denounced the outrage and refused to finish their dinners.

In anticipation of our return, at the close of the convention, Mr. Sam. Beck, the proprietor of the hotel, prepared dinner for three hundred guests, but when the train arrived not one of the large company went into his place, and his dinner was left to spoil.

A dozen years ago, or more, on one of the frostiest and coldest nights I ever experienced, I delivered a lecture in the town of Elmwood, Illinois, twenty miles distant from Peoria. It was one of those bleak and flinty nights, when prairie winds pierce like needles, and a step on the snow sounds like a file on the steel teeth of a saw. My