m."

"Why, how did that happen?" asked the Bishop.

Aunt Maria's eyes kindled: "It's t'arrable, but it's true--last week
Parson Shadrack deserts his own wife an' runs off with Sis Tilly. It
looked lak he mouter tuck me, too, an' kept the fold together as
Abraham did when he went into the Land of the Philistines. But thank
God, if I am all that's lef', one thing is mighty consolin'--I can
have a meetin' of Zion wherever I is. If I sets down in a cheer to
meditate I sez to myself--'Be keerful, Maria, for the church is in
session.' When I drink, it is communion--when I bathes, it is
baptism, when I walks, I sez to myself: 'Keep a straight gait, Maria,
you are carryin' the tabbernackle of all goodness.' Aunt Tilly got
the preacher, but thank God, I got Zion."

"But I mus' go. Come on, Lily," she said to the little girl,--"let
ole Zion fix up yo' curls."

She took her charge and curtsied out, and the Bishop knew she would
die either for Zion or the little girl.

The old man sat thinking--Helen had gone in and was practising a love
song.

"Ned," said the Bishop, "I tell you a man ain't altogether friendless
when he's got in his home a creature as faithful as she is. She'd die
for that child. That one ole faithful 'oman makes me feel like
liftin' my hat to the whole nigger race. I tell you when I get to
heaven an' fail to see ole Mammy settin' around the River of Life,
I'll think somethin' is wrong."

The Bishop was silent a while, and then he asked: "Ned, it can't be
true that you are goin' to put them girls in the factory?"

"It's all I can do," said Conway, surlily--"I'll be turned out of
home soon--out in the public road. Everything I've got has been sold.
I've no'where to go, an' but for Carpenter's offer from the Company
of the cottage, I'd not have even a home for them. The only condition
I could go on was that--"

"That you sell your daughters into slavery," said the Bishop quietly.

"You don't seem to think it hurts your's," said Conway bluntly.

"If I had my way they'd not work there a day,"--the old man replied
hastily. "But it's different with me, an' you know it. My people take
to it naturally. I am a po' white, an underling by breedin' an'
birth, an' if my people build, they must build up. But you--you are
tearing down when you do that. Po' as I am, I'd rather starve than to
see little children worked to death in that trap, but Tabitha sees it
different, and she is the one bein' in the world I don't