amid the misery, sin and strife, is the highest and most blessed
position that a man can hold, and because I esteem the calling so highly
I would not rush into it unless I felt divinely commissioned."




Chapter III


Mrs. Harcourt was a Southern woman by birth, who belonged to that class
of colored people whose freedom consisted chiefly in not being the
chattels of the dominant race--a class to whom little was given and from
whom much was required. She was naturally bright and intelligent, but
had come up in a day when the very book of the Christian's law was to
her a sealed volume; but if she had not been educated through the aid of
school books and blackboards, she had obtained that culture of manners
and behavior which comes through contact with well-bred people, close
observation and a sense of self-respect and self-reliance, and when
deprived of her husband's help by an untimely death, she took up the
burden of life bravely and always tried to keep up what she called "a
stiff upper lip." Feeling the cramping of Southern life, she became
restive under the privations and indignities which were heaped upon free
persons of color, and at length she and her husband broke up their home
and sold out at a pecuniary sacrifice to come North, where they could
breathe free air and have educational privileges for their children. But
while she was strong and healthy her husband, whose health was not very
firm, soon succumbed to the change of climate and new modes of living
and left Mrs. Harcourt a stranger and widow in a strange land with six
children dependent on her for bread and shelter: but during her short