their plantations laid waste. On these unprepared and innocent
girls thus fell most heavily not only the mistakes and misdeeds of
their own fathers and mothers but the common guilt of the whole
nation, and particularly of New England, as respects the original
traffic in human souls. The change in the lives of these girls was
as sudden and terrible as if one had entered a brilliant ballroom
and in the voice of an overseer ordered the dancers to go as they
were to the factories.

To the factories many of them went, in a sense: to hard work of
some sort--to wage-earning and wage-taking: sometimes becoming the
mainstay of aged or infirm parents, the dependence of younger
brothers and sisters. If the history of it all is ever written, it
will make pitiful, heroic, noble reading.

The last volume of Gabriella's memoirs showed her in this field of
struggle--of new growth to suit the newer day. It was so unlike the
first volume as to seem no continuation of her own life. It began
one summer morning about two years after the close of the war--an
interval which she had spent in various efforts at self-help, at
self-training.

On that morning, pale and trembling, but resolute, her face heavily
veiled, she might have been seen on her way to Water Street in
Lexington--a street she had heard of all her life and had been
careful never to enter except to take or to alight from a train at
the station. Passing quickly along until she reached a certain ill-
smelling little stairway which opened on the foul sidewalk, she
mounted it, knocked at a low black-painted plank door, and entered
a room which was a curiosity shop. There she was greeted by an