ch people to teaching them. What do they need with education? It will
only make them unfit for work."

"They're free now, mother, and perhaps they'll work better if they're
taught something. Besides, it's only a business arrangement, and doesn't
involve any closer contact than we have with our servants."

"Well, I should say not!" sniffed the old lady. "Not one of them will
ever dare to presume on your position to take any liberties with us.
I'll see to that."

Miss Myrover began her work as a teacher in the autumn, at the opening
of the school year. It was a novel experience at first. Though there
always had been negro servants in the house, and though on the streets
colored people were more numerous than her own people, and though she
was so familiar with their dialect that she might almost be said to
speak it, barring certain characteristic grammatical inaccuracies, she
had never been brought in personal contact with so many of them at once
as when she confronted the fifty or sixty faces--of colors ranging
from a white almost as clear as her own to the darkest livery of the
sun--which were gathered in the schoolroom on the morning when she began
her duties. Some of the inherited prejudice of her caste, too, made
itself felt, though she tried to repress any outward sign of it; and she
could perceive that the children were not altogether responsive;
they, likewise, were not entirely free from antagonism. The work was
unfamiliar to her. She was not physically very strong, and at the close
of the first day she went home with a splitting headache. If she could
have resigned then and there without causing comment or annoyance to
others, she would have felt it a privilege to do so. But a night's rest
banished her headache and improved her spirits, and the next morning she
went to her work with renewed vigor, fortified by the experience of the
first day.

Miss Myrover's second day was more satisfactory. She had some natural
talent for organization, though she had never known it, and in the
course of the day she got her classes formed and lessons under way. In a
week or two she began to classify her pupils in her own mind, as bright
or stupid, mischievous or well behaved, lazy or industrious, as the case
might be, and to regulate her discipline accordingly. That she had come
of a long line of ancestors who had exercised authority and mastership
was perhaps not without its effect upon her character, and enabled her
more re