The young teacher married soon after a rich Northern woman with kindred tastes to his own, and they both betook themselves imegiatly after their marriage to a part of the South a little less ardent in hatred to the Freedmen’s Bureau, where they are doin’ a good work still in teachin’ a colored school.
But the next time Felix made a start in life he commenced it in a Northern city.
There the best thing he could get in the way of a home for his wife and child wuz a room way up on the top of a crazy old tenement-house tenanted by noisy, drunken, profane men and women.
For drunkenness, and brawls, and sickenin’ horrors are not confined to Southern soil; they are also indigenous to the North.
FELIX AND THE TEACHER.
And the gaunt wolves of Sin and Want howl to the moon under the Northern skies as well as Southern.
And stayin’ there—not livin’—workin’ hard as he did through the day, and uninvitin’ as his home wuz after his labor wuz over, he could set down for a few minutes with Hester, only to have their quiet broken by drunken brawls, and oaths, and fights, and all sounds and sights of woe and squalor.
In such circumstances as these the teachings and importunate words of Victor about colonization fell upon a willin’ ear.
For the seeds that had laid in Victor’s heart, waitin’ only the warm sun to bring them to life, had sprung up into full vigor and bloom under the influence of Genieve’s prophetic words, and afterwards by his own observation and study.