Page:The Story of the Jubilee Singers (7th).djvu/36

 services. On Monday a free concert was given and a collection taken at the close. The audience was large but the contribution small.

It was on this Sunday and Monday, so well remembered all over the world, that the great Chicago fire swept away the houses of 100,000 people and property to the value of $200,000,000. In Ohio, as everywhere else, people could scarcely think or talk about anything else, much less give money to any other object.

There had not been for ten years a week that would have been, to all appearances, such an unfavourable time for the Singers to commence their work. Out of money and in debt as they were, they donated the entire proceeds of their first paid concert, which amounted to something less than $50, to the Chicago relief fund. This was given in Chillicothe, and called out a card from the Mayor and leading citizens cordially commending to public patronage the two concerts that followed.

Here at Chillicothe they met with an indignity which was often repeated in the next year's experience. Applying at one of the principal hotels for entertainment, they were refused admittance because of their colour. Treated in the same way at a second, they only secured shelter at a third by the landlord's giving up his own bedroom to them to use as a parlour, and furnishing them their meals before the usual hour, that his other guests might not leave the house. This odious and cruel caste-spirit it was to be a part of their mission—little as it was in their plans and painful as it was in ex