of hope and energy. She could have sold a negro or two, but there were only a dozen of them, big and little, and they were all members of one family. The older ones had grown up with their mistress, and the younger ones she had nursed and attended through many an hour's sickness. She would have parted with her right hand sooner than sell one of them. She took her little boys from school—the youngest was ten and the oldest fourteen—and put them to work in the fields with the negroes for one year. At the end of that period she began to see daylight, as it were, and then the boys went back to school, but their vacations for several years afterward were spent behind the plough. She was as uncompromising in her business as in her religion. In one she stickled for the last thrip that was her due; in the other she believed in the final perseverance of the saints.
It is enough to say that she succeeded. She transacted her own business. She did it well at the very beginning, and thereafter with an aptitude that was constantly growing. She paid the estate out of debt, and added to it, and when her oldest son graduated at Princeton, she had the finest and
