and cruelty and prostitution done their work, and left her an entire wreck for life?  It seems not.  Freedom came, and with it dawned a new era upon that poor, overshadowed, and sin-darkened life.  Freedom brought opportunity for work and wages combined.  She went to work, and got ten dollars a month.  She has contrived to get some education, and has since been teaching school.  While her former mistress has been to her for help.

“Do not the mills of God grind exceedingly fine?  And she has helped that mistress, and so has the colored man given money, from what I heard, to his former master.  After all, friend, do we not belong to one of the best branches of the human race?  And yet, how have our people been murdered in the South, and their bones scattered at the grave’s mouth!  Oh, when will we have a government strong enough to make human life safe?  Only yesterday I heard of a murder committed on a man for an old grudge of several years’ standing.  I had visited the place, but had just got away.  Last summer a Mr. Luke was hung, and several other men also, I heard.”

While surrounded with this state of affairs, an appeal reached her through the columns of the National Standard, setting forth a state of very great suffering and want, especially on the part of the old, blind and decrepit Freedmen of the District of Columbia.  After expressing deep pity for these unfortunates, she added:  “Please send ten dollars to Josephine Griffing for me for the suffering poor of the District of Columbia.  Just send it by mail, and charge to my account.”

Many more letters written by Mrs. Harper are before us, containing highly interesting information from Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, and even poor little Delaware.  Through all these States she has traveled and labored extensively, as has been already stated; but our space in this volume will admit of only one more letter: 

“I have been traveling the best part of the day. * * * Can you spare a little time from your book to just take a peep at some of our Alabama people?  If you would see some instances of apparent poverty and ignorance that I have seen perhaps you would not wonder very much at the conservative voting in the State.  A few days since I was about to pay a woman a dollar and a quarter for some washing in ten cent (currency) notes, when she informed me that she could not count it; she must trust to my honesty—­she could count forty cents.  Since I left Eufaula I have seen something of plantation life.  The first plantation I visited was about five or six miles from Eufaula, and I should think that the improvement in some of the cabins was not very much in advance of what it was in Slavery.  The cabins are made with doors, but not, to my recollection, a single window pane or speck of plastering; and yet even in some of those lowly homes I met with hospitality.  A room to myself