in which they treated mother and each other, and asked how they could expect the servants to behave in any other way when they had such examples continually before them, and queried in which such conduct was most culpable.  Eliza always admits what I say to be true, but, as I tell her, never profits by it....  Sister Mary is somewhat different; she will not condemn herself....  She will acknowledge the sad state of the family, but seems to think mother is altogether to blame.  And dear mother seems to resist all I say:  she will neither acknowledge the state of the family nor her own faults, and always is angry when I speak to her....  Sometimes when I look back to the first years of my religious life, and remember how unremittingly I labored with mother, though in a very wrong spirit, being alienated from her and destitute of the spirit of love and forbearance, my heart is very sore.”

This unfortunate state of things prevailed until the children were grown, and with more or less amelioration after that time.  Sarah’s natural tenderness, and the sense of justice which, as she grew to womanhood, was so conspicuous in Angelina, drew their mother nearer to them than to her other children, though Thomas always wrote of her affectionately and respectfully.  She, however, with her rigid orthodox beliefs, could never understand her “alien daughters,” as she called them; and she never ceased to wonder how such strange fledglings could have come from her nest.  It was only when they had proved by years of self-sacrifice the earnestness of their peculiar views that she learned to respect them; and, though they never succeeded in converting her from her inherited opinions, she was towards the last years of her life brought into something like affectionate sympathy with them.

CHAPTER II.

It was quite the custom in the last century and the beginning of the present one for cultivated people to keep diaries, in which the incidents of each day were jotted down, accompanied by the expression of private opinions and feelings.  Women, especially, found this diary a pleasant sort of confessional, a confidante to whose pages they could entrust their most secret thoughts without fear of rebuke or betrayal.  Sarah Grimke’s diary, covering over five hundred pages of closely written manuscript, though not begun until 1821, gives many reminiscences of her youth, and describes with painful conscientiousness her religious experiences.  She also repeatedly regrets the fact that her education, though what was considered at that time a good one, was entirely superficial, embracing only that kind of knowledge which is acquired for display.  What useful information she received she owed to the conversations of her father and her brother Thomas, her “beloved companion and friend.”