over four
hundred pounds. I did not owe him over twenty-five dollars. A man may
work there from Monday morning to Saturday night, and be as economical
as he pleases, and he will come out in debt. I am a close man, and I
work hard. I want to be honest in getting through the world. I came away
and left a crop of corn and cotton growing up. I left it because I did
not want to work twelve months for nothing. I have been trying it for
fifteen years, thinking every year that it would get better, and it gets
worse." Said still another: "I learned about Kansas from the newspapers
that I got hold of. They were Southern papers. I got a map, and found
out where Kansas was; and I got a History of the United States, and read
about it."

[Footnote 1: See _Negro Exodus_ (Report of Colonel Frank H. Fletcher).]

Query: Was it genuine statesmanship that permitted these people to feel
that they must leave the South?

* * * * *

5. _A Postscript on the War and Reconstruction_

Of all of the stories of these epoch-making years we have chosen one--an
idyl of a woman with an alabaster box, of one who had a clear conception
of the human problem presented and who gave her life in the endeavor to
meet it.

In the fall of 1862 a young woman who was destined to be a great
missionary entered the Seminary at Rockford, Illinois. There was little
to distinguish her from the other students except that she was very
plainly dressed and seemed forced to spend most of her spare time at
work. Yes, there was one other difference. She was older than most of
the girls--already thirty, and rich in experience. When not yet fifteen
she had taught a country school in Pennsylvania. At twenty she was
considered capable of managing an unusually turbulent crowd of boys and
girls. When she was twenty-seven her father died, leaving upon her very
largely the care of her mother. At twenty-eight she already looked back
upon fourteen years as a teacher, upon some work for Christ incidentally
accomplished, but also upon a fading youth of wasted hopes and
unfulfilled desires.

Then came a great decision--not the first, not the last, but one of the
most important that marked her long career. Her education was by no
means complete, and, at whatever cost, she would go to school. That she
had no money, that her clothes were shabby, that her mother needed her,
made no difference; now or never she would realize her ambition. She
would do anyt