Page:The Story of the Jubilee Singers (7th).djvu/57

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attend and enjoy. There was need of and a wide demand for just such healthful and elevating diversion as these concerts afforded.

Beginning with several concerts in Boston, they now visited successively the more prominent points in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and a number of places in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, meeting everywhere an enthusiasm and a helpfulness from friends not unlike that by which they were borne through Connecticut the month previous.

Among the presents received in Boston was a $1,000 organ for the University, from Smith Brothers. Hon. A. C. Barstow, of Providence, had heard them at Oberlin, and tendered them the use of his beautiful music-hall at that city, where their concerts were one repeated ovation. Returning to the same city some days subsequently, after singing at Worcester, Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, Wakefield, Andover, Cambridgeport, Taunton, and other points, another concert yielded them about $1,000.

At Andover and Taunton the good-will of the people took the shape of contributions for the purchase of books for the University library. Reaching Boston again, $1,235 was taken in at a matinée on Saturday afternoon, the largest sum ever realised up to that time from the admission receipts alone of any one entertainment.

Their songs, which had been written out for the first time by Mr. Theodore F. Seward, the distinguished teacher and composer, and published in book-form, were sold by hundreds at their concerts,