EVERY-DAY LIFE.
MRS. A.W. CURTIS.
Put on your best glasses, dear friends, and take a peep at the regular, every-day life of some of the workers among the colored people South.
Rap, rap, rap.
"Come in!"
It is a toil-worn, sad-faced woman, with hard, bony hands, and that look of patient endurance that is so pathetic. She is poorly clad, with only a thin bit of an old shawl around her shoulders, and a hat so disreputable that she instantly removes it, and drops it behind her on the floor. After a few kindly words of greeting, she tells her story. A sickly husband, deranged for the last nine years of his life, whom she had to support and care for; a daughter who married a wretch who treated her so cruelly that she, too, lost her mind, when he left her entirely, with their child. She kept the daughter confined to bed or chair, while she worked out as cook, to support them all. She had several other children. Finally the crazy daughter got away, and she does not know whether she is dead or alive.
What had she come to us for? Money, old clothes, help of some kind?
No, indeed. She came to see if we would take her grand-daughter and her own daughter, both about twelve years old, into our school. She had never been able to make them fit to go to any school, so they could not even read, but she would do her very best, if we would take them now. I wish Mr. Hand could have seen her shining face and tearful eyes, when we told her of the kind friend who had provided so grandly for just such cases as these.
A patter of small feet, a hasty rap at the door.