of a noisy, victorious enemy, and received into her arms the child which was born an orphan. Orphanage, my mother, is what a child never outgrows; it is what God himself cannot remedy." His voice took intonations unknown before to him. "The nurse, a slave no longer, since she had flown with the infant to this city in the possession of the emancipationists, took the child to herself and nursed it,—nursed it as the Virgin Mary must have nursed her Heaven-sent babe; nursed it on her knees, in abnegation, in adoration; lodging it in her room, which became, not a room, but a sanctuary; couching it in her own bed, which became an altar; feeding it, tending it, as imagination can conceive a passionate heart in a black skin tending a white child under the ghostly supervision of dead parents. When the child grew to intelligence of its surroundings, when memory began, day by day, to weave together frail bits of history, then a fiction arose as if by incantation out of the rude, ignorant, determined mind of the nurse. She placed the child at a school, that the child's memory could not antedate. She gave the child a responsible white guardian,
