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| FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER. 777 tunity for work and wages combined. She went to work, and got ten dollars a month. She has contrived to get some education, and has since been teaching school While her former mistress hu been to her for help. " Do not the milla of God grind exceedingly fine? And she has helped that mistresa, and so has the colored man given money, from what I beard, to his former master. After all, friend, do we not belong to one of the best branches of the human race ? And yet, how have our people been murdered in the South, and their bones scattered at the grave's mouth I Oh, when will we have a government strong enough to make human life safe? Only yesterday I heard of a murder committed on a man for an old grudge of several years' standing. I had visited the place, but had just got away. Last summer a Mr. Luke was hung, and several other men also, I heard." While surrounded with this state of affairs, an appeal reached her through the columns of the National Standard, setting forth a state of very great suffering and want, especially on the part of the old, blind and decrepit Freed-men of the District of Columbia. After expressing deep pity for these unfortunates, she added : " Please send ten dollars to Josephine Griffing for me for the suffering poor of the District of Columbia. Just send it by mail, and charge to my account." Many more letters written by Mrs. Harper are before us, containing highly interesting information from Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, and even poor little Delaware. Through all these States she has traveled and labored extensively, as has been already stated; but our space in this volume will admit of only one more letter: " I have been traveling the beat part of the day. * * Can you spare a little time from 3'our book to just take a peep at some of onr Alabama people? If you would see some instances of apparent poverty and ignorance that I have seen perhaps you would not wonder very much at the conservative voting in the State. A few days since I was about to pay a woman a dollar and a quarter for some washing in ten cent (currency) notes, when she informed me that she could not count it; she must trust to my honesty—she could count forty cents. Since I left Eufaula I have seen something of plantation life. The first plantation I visited was about five or sir miles from Eufaula, and I should think that the improvement in some of the cabins was not very much in advance of what it was in Slaver}'. The cabins are made with doors, but not, to my recollection, a single window pane or speck of plastering; and yet even in some of those lowly homes I met with hospitality. A room to myself is a luxury that I do not always enjoy. Still I live through it, and find life rather interesting. The people have much to learn. The condition of the women is not very enviable in some cases. They have had some of them a terribly hard time in Slavery, and their subjection has not ceased in freedom. • * One man said of some women, that a man must leave them or whip them. * * Let me introduce you to another scene: here is a gathering; a large fire is burning ont of doors, and here are one or two boys with hats on. Here is a little girl with her bonnet on, and there a little boy moves off and commences to climb a tree. Do you know what the gathering means? It is a school, and the teacher, I believe, is paid from the school fund. He says he is from New Hampshire. That may be. But to look at him and to hear him teach, you would perhaps think him not very'lately from the North; at least I do not think he is a model teacher. They have a church; but somehow they have burnt a hole, I understand, in the top, and so I lectured inside, and they gathered around the fire outside. Here ia |