was often present to the consciousness of the
people who bore its results. There was less impulse of gaiety among all
classes; there was a graver trend of thought than ever before, and there
was the recognition of past peril and present loss. These changes
affected the women more than the men. The latter indeed felt but little
of the detrimental consequences of the war, for the most part taking up
their lives where they had temporarily put them aside to spend
themselves in the service of their country. The women, however, where
they felt the stress at all, felt it severely. Aside from their stricken
hearts, there were problems of everyday life presented to them which
clamored for solution, if that life were not to be made worse than a
burden. In far better case than their sisters of the South, they yet had
sufficient cause for gravity of thought and call of courage. Many were
the fortunes that had been made during the war by Northern men who
battened upon the needs of their country; but the more diffused loss of
sustenance more than overbalanced even these fortunes and swayed the
scale to the side of loss instead of gain in the totality of result.

Before considering the results which accrued from these conditions,
North and South, it may be interesting to turn aside for a moment to
make record of one of the most picturesque figures among American
womanhood of that day, even though her fame was but local. About 1815
there was born in the city of Baltimore, of Irish parentage, an infant
who was named Margaret Gaffney. She married young, and in 1836 went with
her husband, whose name was Haughery, to New Orleans. Left a penniless
widow in less than a year, she entered into the service of the city
orphan asylum as a domestic, and when the second building was erected
the Sisters, finding her faithful and intelligent, placed her in charge
of the large dairy which was a part of the establishment. Soon she
became associated with all the labors of the Sisters and by her efforts
materially contributed to free the establishment from debt. When this
had been done she opened a dairy on her own account, and in 1866 added a
bakery to her business. She made money with a rapidity which was
accountable only by the wide celebrity which she had gained by her
labors in the cause of the orphans, for she was known far and wide as
"Margaret, the Orphans' Friend." She retained the simplicity of her
thought and life throughout, herself driving t