eholds were left unto them desolate. Let the blacks
take care of themselves.

So, all alone, down came David King, with such aid and instruction as
the Freedman's Bureau could give him, to this little settlement among
the pines, where the freedmen had built some cabins in a careless way,
and then seated themselves to wait for fortune. Freedmen! Yes; a
glorious idea! But how will it work its way out into practical life?
What are you going to do with tens of thousands of ignorant, childish,
irresponsible souls thrown suddenly upon your hands; souls that will not
long stay childish, and that have in them also all the capacities for
evil that you yourselves have--you with your safeguards of generations
of conscious responsibility and self-government, and yet--so many
lapses! This is what David King thought. He did not see his way exactly;
no, nor the nation's way. But he said to himself: "I can at least begin;
if I am wrong, I shall find it out in time. But now it seems to me that
our first duty is to educate them." So he began at "a, b, and c"; "You
must not steal"; "You must not fight"; "You must wash your faces"; which
may be called, I think, the first working out of the emancipation
problem.

Jubilee Town was the name of the settlement; and when the schoolmaster
announced his own, David King, the title struck the imitative minds of
the scholars, and, turning it around, they made "King David" of it, and
kept it so. Delighted with the novelty, the Jubilee freedmen came to
school in such numbers that the master was obliged to classify them;
boys and men in the mornings and afternoons; the old people in the
evenings; the young women and girls by themselves for an hour in the
early morning. "I can not do full justice to all," he thought, "and in
the men lies the danger, in the boys the hope; the women can not vote.
Would to God the men could not either, until they have learned to read
and to write, and to maintain themselves respectably!" For, abolitionist
as he was, David King would have given years of his life for the power
to restrict the suffrage. Not having this power, however, he worked at
the problem in the only way left open: "Take two apples from four
apples, Julius--how many will be left?" "What is this I hear, Caesar,
about stolen bacon?"

On this day the master went home, tired and dispirited; the novelty was
over on both sides. He had been five months at Jubilee, and his
scholars were more of a puzzle to him