grew up the hatred of races. The whites hated the
mulattoes, and despised the blacks. The mulattoes hated both the whites
and the blacks; and--"

"And," interposed Euphrosyne, courageously, "the blacks hated neither.
They loved where they could; and where they could not love, they
forgave; and there lies the proof that this island is not hell."

"You have proved nothing, my dear, but that you do not know what has
happened, even since you were born. Any white will tell you what the
negroes did, so late as the year ninety-one--how they killed their
masters by inches--how they murdered infants--how they carried off
ladies into the woods--"

A sign from the abbess availed to stop Madame Oge, even in the midst of
a subject on which none usually dared to interrupt her. Euphrosyne, in
some agitation, replied, "I am aware of all that you say: but every one
allows that the most ignorant and cruel of the negroes did over again
exactly what they had seen the whites do to their race. But these
revengeful blacks were few, very few, in comparison with the numbers who
spared their masters, helped and comforted them, and are now working on
their estates--friends with all who will be friends with them. The
place is not hell where thousands of men forgot the insults of a
lifetime, and bind up the wounds of their oppressors."

"I cannot doubt," said the abbess, "that ever since there was a
Christian in the island, there have been angels of God at hand, to
sanctify the evil which they were not commissioned to prevent. Violence
is open to the day. Patience is hidden in the heart. Revenge has
shouted his battle-cry at noon, while Forgiveness breathes her lowly
prayer at midnight. Spirits from hell may have raged along our high
roads; but I trust that in the fiercest times, the very temper of Christ
may have dwelt in a thousand homes, in a thousand nooks of our valleys
and our woods."

"Besides," sister Benoite ventured to say, "our worst troubles were so
long ago! For ten years now we have been under the holy rule of a
devout man; and, for the most part, at peace."

"Peace!" exclaimed Madame Oge, contemptuously.

"There have been disputes among the rulers, as Father Gabriel says there
are among all the rulers in the world; but he says (and no one knows
better than Father Gabriel) that the body of the people have not been
troubled by these disputes, and are not even aware of them."

"Does not Father Gabriel tell you that t