UNITARIAN FESTIVAL. 



199 



top gallery of the hall — the largest in New England — and 

 looked for a few minutes on two thousand well-dressed people, 

 seated at ten wide tables the length of the hall, covered with 

 flowers and fruits and pretty eatables. He never thought an 

 eating-display so beautiful before ; but he noted that while 

 the waiters were " coloured," there were none of the proscribed 

 race among the guests. He soon went away, sad and dis- 

 pirited, to write his letters. After a time he came back, and 

 was taken to the platform by Dr. Gannett, whose earnest, 

 feeling, and eloquent speech at the end of the meeting, in which 

 he referred to those who had died during the year, came home 

 to his heart; but he had been longing in vain, at this great 

 meeting of the elite of the State, for some appeal for humanity. 

 He was now a guest of Dr. Gannett's. They were both struck 

 with noticing that the heartiest response during the speaking 

 was to an allusion to Theodore Parker, who for many years 

 had been under the ban of the Unitarian leaders : he was 

 now on that journey from which he never returned. Though 

 on many points Philip and his host differed, they were alike in 

 their intensity of affection and tenderness of conscience.* He 

 felt it good to be in a home where prayer was wont to be 

 made, and he was greatly in sympathy with Dr. Gannett's son, 

 William Channing Gannett, who a few years after left the 

 university to devote himself to teaching the freed negroes in 

 the Sea Islands, South Carolina, during the war. 



One evening, there was a meeting of ministers at his 

 host's, at which Dr. Bellows and Dr. Osgood of New York took 

 part. The latter (who has since become an Episcopalian), 

 spoke of the " denying school of Priestley and Belsham " as 

 the very worst form of Christianity ; and there was a general 

 feeling that it had never taken root among them ! Among 

 those present was Starr King, "who is thirty-four, but looks 

 eighteen. He attended to everything, but did not speak a 

 word : said to be very clever." He it was who, in the coming 

 war, did more than any man to induce California (where he 



* See "Ezra Stiles Gannett, a Memoir. By his son, W. C. Gannett." 

 Boston, 1875. 



