flowers on the pillow closed their petals. When the negro girl
knelt down before the grate, with her back to the bed and the soles
of her shoes set up straight side by side like two gray bricks, the
eyes were softly opened again, Gabriella had never seen a head like
this negro girl's, that is, never until the autumn before last,
when she had come out into this neighborhood of plain farming
people to teach a district school. Whenever she was awake early
enough to see this curiosity, she never failed to renew her study
of it with unflagging zest. It was such a mysterious, careful
arrangement of knots, and pine cones, and the strangest-looking
little black sticks wrapped with white packing thread, and the
whole system of coils seemingly connected with a central mental
battery, or idea, or plan, within. She studied it now, as the fire
was being kindled, and the kindler, with inflammatory blows of the
poker on the bars of the grate, told her troubles over audibly to
herself: "Set free, and still making fires of winter mornings; how
was THAT? Where was any freedom in THAT? Her wages? Didn't she work
for her wages? Didn't she EARN her wages? Then where did freedom
come in?"

One must look low for high truth sometimes, as we gather necessary
fruit on nethermost boughs and dig the dirt for treasure. The
Anglo-Saxon girl lying in the bed and the young African girl
kindling her fire--these two, the highest and the humblest types of
womanhood in the American republic--were inseparably connected in
that room that morning as children of the same Revolution. It had
cost the war of the Union, to enable this African girl to cast away
the cloth enveloping her head--that detested sign of her slavery--
and to arrange her hair with ancestral taste, the true African
beauty sense. As long as she had been a slave, she had been