gone; she went to live
with near relatives; and during the remaining years of the war was
first in one household, then another, of kindred or friends all of whom
contended for the privilege of finding her a home. But at the close of
the war, Gabriella, issuing from the temporary shelters given her
during the storm, might have been seen as a snow-white pigeon flying
lost and bewildered across a black cloud covering half the sky.

The third volume--the Peace Book in which there was no Peace: this was
the beginning of Gabriella, child of the Revolution. She did not now
own a human being except herself; could give orders to none but
herself; could train for this work, whip up to that duty, only herself;
and if, she was still minded to play the mistress--firm, kind,
efficient, capable--must be such a mistress solely to Gabriella.

By that social evolution of the race which in one country after another
had wrought the overthrow of slavery, she had now been placed with a
generation unique in history: a generation of young Southern girls, of
gentle birth and breeding, of the most delicate nature, who, heiresses
in slaves and lands at the beginning of the war, were penniless and
unrecognized wards of the federal government at its close, their slaves
having been made citizens and 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 trembli