e to read
or write, a schoolhouse dotted every hillside, and the State provided
education for rich and poor, for white and black alike. Let us lay at
least this token upon the grave of the carpet-baggers. The evil they did
lives after them, and the statute of limitations does not seem to run
against it. It is but just that we should not forget the good.

Long, however, before the work of political reconstruction had begun, a
brigade of Yankee schoolmasters and schoolma'ams had invaded Dixie, and
one of the latter had opened a Freedman's Bureau School in the town of
Patesville, about four miles from Needham Green's cabin on the
neighboring sandhills.

It had been quite a surprise to Miss Chandler's Boston friends when she
had announced her intention of going South to teach the freedmen. Rich,
accomplished, beautiful, and a social favorite, she was giving up the
comforts and luxuries of Northern life to go among hostile strangers,
where her associates would be mostly ignorant negroes. Perhaps she might
meet occasionally an officer of some Federal garrison, or a traveler
from the North; but to all intents and purposes her friends considered
her as going into voluntary exile. But heroism was not rare in those
days, and Martha Chandler was only one of the great multitude whose
hearts went out toward an oppressed race, and who freely poured out
their talents, their money, their lives,--whatever God had given
them,--in the sublime and not unfruitful effort to transform three
millions of slaves into intelligent freemen. Miss Chandler's friends
knew, too, that she had met a great sorrow, and more than suspected that
out of it had grown her determination to go South.

When Cicely Green heard that a school for colored people had been
opened at Patesville she combed her hair, put on her Sunday frock and
such bits of finery as she possessed, and set out for town early the
next Monday morning.

There were many who came to learn the new gospel of education, which was
to be the cure for all the freedmen's ills. The old and gray-haired, the
full-grown man and woman, the toddling infant,--they came to acquire the
new and wonderful learning that was to make them the equals of the white
people. It was the teacher's task, by no means an easy one, to select
from this incongruous mass the most promising material, and to
distribute among them the second-hand books and clothing that were sent,
largely by her Boston friends, to aid her in he