of that body. The African Methodist-Episcopal
Conference, Bishop Turner presiding, ordained Miss Sarah A.
Hughes of Raleigh, a bright mulatto girl, as deacon in the
church. Shortly after the close of the late war, my husband being
then incapacitated for work by wounds received in the Mexican and
the civil war, and my sons under age, I applied to Governor
Jonathan Worth for the position of State librarian. Though
cordially acknowledging my fitness, intellectually, for the
office, and admitting that my sex did not legally disqualify me
to hold it, he positively refused to appoint me or any other
woman to any office in his gift. Public sentiment then sustained
him, but it would not now do so; so many ladies of culture,
refinement and social position have been, since the war, forced
to work or starve, that it is now nothing remarkable to see them
and their daughters doing work which twenty years ago they would
have been ostracised for undertaking.

In a letter to the Boston _Index_, published August, 1885, the
venerable Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, who is now a resident of
this State, truthfully says,

The women of the North can have little conception of the
hindrances which their sisters of the South encounter in
their efforts to accept new and progressive ideas. The other
sex, in a blind sort of way, hold fast to an absolute kind
of chivalry akin to that of the renowned Don Quixote, by
which they try to hold women in the background as a kind of
porcelain liable to crack and breakage unless daintily
handled. Women here see the spirit of the age and the need
of change far more clearly than the men, and act up to this
light, but with a flexible grace that disarms opposition.
They see the necessity of work and are turning their
attention to methods for remunerative labor, far more
difficult to obtain at the South than at the North.

I cordially endorse this extract. The Southern man does not wish
his "women folks" to be self-supporting, not because he is
jealous of their rivaling him, but because he feels it is his
duty to be the bread-winner. But the much sneered at "chivalry"
of the South, while rendering it harder for a woman to break
through old customs, most cordially and