self
at her teacher's feet, crying, "Have pity on me, Miss ----!"

"My poor Leontine," replied the teacher, "what can I do? There are good
'colored' schools in the city; would it not have been wiser for your
father to send you to one of them?"

But the girl rose up and answered:

"Must I go to school with my own servants to escape an unmerited disdain?"
And the teacher was silent, while the confusion increased.

"The shame of it will kill me!" cried gentle Eugenie L----. And thereupon,
at last, a teacher, commonly one of the sternest in discipline, exclaimed:

"If Eugenie goes, Marcelline shall go, if I have to put her out myself!
Spanish, indeed! And Eugenie a pearl by the side of her!"

Just then Eugenie's father came. He had forced his way through the press
in the street, and now stood bidding his child have courage and return
with him the way he had come.

"Tie your veil close, Eugenie," said the teacher, "and they will not know
you." And so they went, the father and the daughter. But they went alone.
None followed. This roused the crowd to noisy anger.

"Why don't the rest come?" it howled. But the teachers tried in vain to
inspire the panic-stricken girls with courage to face the mob, and were in
despair, when a school official arrived, and with calm and confident
authority bade the expelled girls gather in ranks and follow him through
the crowd. So they went out through the iron gates, the great leaves of
which closed after them with a rasping of their key and shooting of their
bolts, while a teacher said:

"Come; the reporters will soon be here. Let us go and see after
Marguerite."

They found her in the room of the janitress, shut in and fast asleep.

"Do you think," one asked of the janitress, "that mere fright and the loss
of that comb made this strong girl ill?"

"No. I think she must have guessed those men's errand, and her eye met the
eye of some one who knew her."

"But what of that?"

"She is 'colored.'"

"Impossible!"

"I tell you, yes!"

"Why, I thought her as pure German as her name."

"No, the mixture is there; though the only trace of it is on her lips. Her
mother--she is dead now--was a beautiful quadroon. A German sea-captain
loved her. The law stood between them. He opened a vein in his arm, forced
in some of her blood, went to court, swore he had African blood, got his
license, and married her. Marguerite is engaged to be married to a white
man, a gentleman who does not kn