“I don’t see why we haint thought out sooner,” said Aunt Hildy; “you see folks are ready, waitin’, only they don’t know whar to begin such work, and now there’s Jane North, I’ll be bound she’d a gone deeper and deeper into tattlin’, ef the right one hadn’t teched her in a tender spot, and now she’s jest sot her heart into the work, and as true as you live, she’s growin’ handsome in doin’ it.  I’m ashamed of myself to think I have wasted so much time.  Oh, ef I’d got my eyes open thirty years ago.”

“Better late than never,” said Aunt Phebe; “live and learn; it takes one life to teach us how to prize it, but the days to come will be full of fruit to our children, I hope.”

“Wall ef we sow the wind we reap the whirlwind sure, Miss Dayton.”

Aunt Phebe was very desirous that John should see Mr. Dayton, which he did, and an offer to study with him the higher mathematics was gladly accepted, and between these two men sprang a friendship which was enduring.

Uncle Dayton had helped many a one through the tangled maze of Euclid problems and their like, and when John walked along by his side in ease and pleasure, Mr. Dayton was delighted; and when he came to see us, he said: 

“The fellow is a man, he’s a man clear through.

“Why,” said he, “I was just the one to carry him along all right.  I was the first man to take a colored boy into a private school, and I did it under protest, losing some of the white boys, whose parents would not let them stay; not much of a loss either,” he added, “though they behaved nearly as well as the colored boys I took.  I belonged at the time to the Baptist Church; the colored woman, whose two sons I received into my school, was a member of the same church; three boys, whose parents were my brothers and sisters in the faith, were withdrawn, and the minister who had baptized us all, and declared us to be one in the name of the humble Nazarene, also withdrew his son from my school, being unwilling to have him recite in the class with these two boys, whose skin was almost as white as his own.  The natural inference was, that he considered himself of more consequence than the Almighty, for he certainly had given us all to him, and I had verily thought the man meant to help God do part of his work, but this proved conclusively that the Lord had it all to do—­at any rate that which was not nice enough for the parson—­and it took a large piece of comfort out of my heart.  I was honest in trying to do my duty, and it grieved me to think he was not.  Another young colored boy whom I took, is a physician in our city to-day, and another who came to my house to be instructed has been graduated at the Normal School of our State with high honors, being chosen as the valedictorian of the class, and he is to-day principal of a Philadelphia school.

“I tell you this truth has always been before me, and I have run the risk of my life almost daily in practising upon it.  My school was really injured for a time, and dwindled down to a few scholars, but I kept right along, and the seed which was self-sowing, sprang up around me, and to-day I have more than I can do, and the people know I am right.”