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she thought me ‘all wrong.’
It was, however, something like a cold sponge-bath,that Washington Street walk by the side of a black man,--rather terrible at the outset, but wonderfully warming and refreshing afterwards!
I had literally jumped ‘in medias res.’
But I did not hear until years afterwards, and a long time after Douglass had held office in Washington under Federal Government, and the slavery of his own race had been washed out in blood, what I was doing for him at the moment that as a friend I asked him to walk home with me to dinner.
How little do we appreciate acts that seem trivial or something worse to us, but which to others, affected by such acts, are of indispensable importance!
Beautiful to me seems now the act, inasmuch as it helped to raise a poor, down-trodden soul into a proper self-appreciation.
And how much I thank God that He led me by giving me a love of freedom, and something like a conscience to act as I did then.”
1
The strain of that walk upon Bowditch
1 Many years afterwards, when an assemblage of anti-slavery veterans and hosts of young colored men were honoring Frederick Douglass in a public hall in Boston, he alluded to this incident with the remark, “Dr. Bowditch I greet joyfully here, for he first treated me as if I were a man.”
Boston, the. Atlantic Monthly. Press, 1921.
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