the
sense of rest after the days of sorrowful turmoil, the nearness of their
grief, kept them for some time bereft of words. It was Ellen who first
took up the thought in all their minds.

"We shall have to leave the home here now," she said. "There's no one
but me left, and I've a position waiting for me any moment that I say
I'll go."

"Where?" Hertha asked, startled.

"In Georgia. Augusta Fairfax, you remember Augusta, don't you, Hertha?
She was in the class below me. Such a bright girl! She's started a
school by herself and wants me to join her. It's in the most godforsaken
spot in the United States, not a bit like this, one of those places
where the whites hate schools and want to keep the Negroes always
ignorant. They make everything as difficult as possible for Augusta, but
she has more pluck than all the white folks in the county. Her scholars
are all ages, she says, from four to forty. They're ignorant of
everything that they need to know and their knowledge of the things they
ought not to know is prodigious; but they've the one thing essential, a
desire to improve. Augusta is bound to succeed if the whites only give
her time."

"They may lynch her first," Tom suggested.

"They don't often lynch women," was Ellen's answer.

"You aren't going to a place like that?" There was alarm in Hertha's
voice.

"Why not? Life isn't worth much to black people unless they're doing
hard, absorbing work. Tom was saying just now that we ought all to stay
children, but there are some of us who have to grow up."

"I wasn't just thinking of colored folks," Tom struck in. "I was
thinking of everybody."

"I reckon I know what you were thinking of, that picture in our old
Bible with the little child leading the wolf and the lamb, the leopard
and the kid, the calf and the young lion. You used to love that picture.
Well, I hope for that day; but in the meantime here are all these
Americans making laws to keep colored children so that they won't know
enough to do anything but lie down and be eaten. The prophet didn't mean
to have the lamb stay with the wolf if the wolf was only prepared to
gobble him up!"

Ellen laughed at her own conceit. "Augusta and I aren't lambs," she
announced, "or kids either; and we're both from the South and have a
little sense in our heads. She's made a start, but she needs some one
with her for she's dying of loneliness. I've often thought I'd go there
when I was no longer needed at home."

"C