Negroes were wont to come to him with such moving accounts of their needs in this respect that he could not help supplying them.[2] On Saturday evenings and Sundays his home was crowded with numbers of those "whose very Countenances still carry the air of importunate Petitioners" for the same favors with those who came before them.

Complaining that his stock was exhausted, and that he had to turn away many disappointed, he urged his friends to send him other suitable books, for nothing else, thought he, could be a greater inducement to their industry to learn to read.
[Footnote 1: Fawcett, _Compassionate Address_, etc., p.

33.] [Footnote 2: Fawcett, _Compassionate Address_, etc., p.

33.] Still more reliable testimony may be obtained, not from persons particularly interested in the uplift of the blacks, but from slaveholders.

Their advertisements in the colonial newspapers furnish unconscious evidence of the intellectual progress of the Negroes during the eighteenth century.