We hurried to dress, remembering our engagements to breakfast this
morning with a brother of our host, whose cottage stands on the same
ground, within a few steps of our own. I had not the slightest idea of
what the English mean by a breakfast, and therefore went in all
innocence, supposing that I should see nobody but the family circle of
my acquaintances. Quite to my astonishment, I found a party of between
thirty and forty people. Ladies sitting with their bonnets on, as in a
morning call. It was impossible, however, to feel more than a momentary
embarrassment in the friendly warmth and cordiality of the circle by
whom we were surrounded.

The English are called cold and stiff in their manners; I had always
heard they were so, but I certainly saw nothing of it here. A circle of
family relatives could not have received us with more warmth and
kindness. The remark which I made mentally, as my eye passed around the
circle, was--Why, these people are just like home; they look like us,
and the tone of sentiment and feeling is precisely such as I have been
accustomed to; I mean with the exception of the antislavery question.

That question has, from the very first, been, in England, a deeply
religious movement. It was conceived and carried on by men of devotional
habits, in the same spirit in which the work of foreign missions was
undertaken in our own country; by just such earnest, self-denying,
devout men as Samuel J. Mills and Jeremiah Evarts.

It was encountered by the same contempt and opposition, in the outset,
from men of merely worldly habits and principles; and to this day it
retains that hold on the devotional mind of the English nation that the
foreign mission cause does in America.