riffing's signs.' It reminded me of
another crowd of impotent folk, lame, halt, and blind, which
filled the loveliest space in Jerusalem, and was a _sign_ of joy
and charity in the place. Queer, tender, wistful faces, so
earnest one forgets their grotesque character and ragged, faded
forms, cluster in the porch; such a set as one might once have
seen put up at auction as a 'refuse lot' of plantation negroes.
The men wear old army cloaks, while the women, with dresses in
every stage of decay, are so comic, one struggles between the
ludicrous and the pitiful.... The faith of this class seems to be
fastened nowhere so strongly as upon Mrs. Griffing. Salutations
follow her along the streets, enough to satisfy the proudest
Pharisee, and it provokes one between a smile and a tear, to see
the women waiting timidly, yet eagerly, for a word from her, to
set their faces all aglow. They used to say, persistently, 'We
belongs to you,' and no efforts could induce them to change that
phrase. 'Who has we but the Lord and you?' was the simple
argument which stayed protest from the kind, proud woman who was
their benefactress. A few words from her will draw out histories
simple, funny, and sad beyond question."

Our friend had a strong belief that the able in body could sustain
themselves if labor were provided, which it could not be there, so she
urged them to go to the North, which greatly needed laborers to fill
the places of Northern men in the army. Woman's help, too, was as much
in demand, for in many places large farms were wholly managed by women
in the absence of husbands and sons; but it was learned by Mrs.
Griffing and daughters through repeated testimony, that the life-long
teaching of the slaves had been, that no good could come from
Northern people,[28] and this led the many in their pitiable ignorance
to believe that, somewhere in the North, the monsters surely lived who
were waiting to destroy them, and that the kind few whom they had met
were of a different race; that "the North" was beyond the sea, and
they could never return, nor hear from their friends left behind; so
persistent argument was needed to convince the most ignorant of their
false notions, and many of them never were, until some had gone and
returned with good tidings. The first company prepared to go numbered
sixty persons, for whom Mrs. Griffing procured Gover