There were parts of the lecturer’s discourse that grated a little on a white Southern ear, but it was lost and forgiven in the genuine earnestness and profound good sense with which the woman spoke to her kind in words of sound advice.

On the whole, we are very glad we accepted the Zion’s invitation.  It gave us much food for new thought.  It reminded us, perhaps, of neglected duties to these people, and it impressed strongly on our minds that these people are getting along, getting onward, and progress was a star becoming familiar to their gaze and their desires.  Whatever the negroes have done in the path of advancement, they have done largely without white aid.  But politics and white pride have kept the white people aloof from offering that earnest and moral assistance which would be so useful to a people just starting from infancy into a life of self-dependence.

In writing from Columbiana and Demopolis, Alabama, about the first of March, 1871, Mrs. Harper painted the state of affairs in her usually graphic manner, and diligently was she endeavoring to inspire the people with hope and encouragement.

“Oh, what a field there is here in this region!  Let me give you a short account of this week’s work.  Sunday I addressed a Sunday-school in Taladega; on Monday afternoon a day-school.  On Monday I rode several miles to a meeting; addressed it, and came back the same night.  Got back about or after twelve o’clock.  The next day I had a meeting of women and addressed them, and then lectured in the evening in the Court-House to both colored and white.  Last night I spoke again, about ten miles from where I am now stopping, and returned the same night, and to-morrow evening probably I shall speak again.  I grow quite tired part of the time. * * * And now let me give you an anecdote or two of some of our new citizens.  While in Taladega I was entertained and well entertained, at the house of one of our new citizens.  He is living in the house of his former master.  He is a brick-maker by trade, and I rather think mason also.  He was worth to his owner, it was reckoned, fifteen hundred or about that a year.  He worked with him seven years; and in that seven years he remembers receiving from him fifty cents.  Now mark the contrast!  That man is now free, owns the home of his former master, has I think more than sixty acres of land, and his master is in the poor-house.  I heard of another such case not long since:  A woman was cruelly treated once, or more than once.  She escaped and ran naked into town.  The villain in whose clutch she found herself was trying to drag her downward to his own low level of impurity, and at last she fell.  She was poorly fed, so that she was tempted to sell her person.  Even scraps thrown to the dog she was hunger-bitten enough to aim for.  Poor thing, was there anything in the future for her?  Had not hunger