colored children of Patesville for fifteen years.
When the Freedmen's Bureau, after the military occupation of North
Carolina, had called for volunteers to teach the children of the
freedmen, Henrietta Nobel had offered her services. Brought up in a New
England household by parents who taught her to fear God and love her
fellow-men, she had seen her father's body brought home from a Southern
battle-field and laid to rest in the village cemetery; and a short six
months later she had buried her mother by his side. Henrietta had no
brothers or sisters, and her nearest relatives were cousins living in
the far West. The only human being in whom she felt any special personal
interest was a certain captain in her father's regiment, who had paid
her some attention. She had loved this man deeply, in a maidenly, modest
way; but he had gone away without speaking, and had not since written.
He had escaped the fate of many others, and at the close of the war was
alive and well, stationed in some Southern garrison.

When her mother died, Henrietta had found herself possessed only of the
house where she lived and the furniture it contained, neither being of
much value, and she was thrown upon her own resources for a livelihood.
She had a fair education and had read many good books. It was not
easy to find employment such as she desired. She wrote to her Western
cousins, and they advised her to come to them, as they thought they
could do something for her if she were there. She had almost decided
to accept their offer, when the demand arose for teachers in the South.
Whether impelled by some strain of adventurous blood from a Pilgrim
ancestry, or by a sensitive pride that shrank from dependence, or by
some dim and unacknowledged hope that she might sometime, somewhere,
somehow meet Captain Carey--whether from one of these motives or a
combination of them all, joined to something of the missionary spirit,
she decided to go South, and wrote to her cousins declining their
friendly offer.

She had come to Patesville when the children were mostly a mob of dirty
little beggars. She had distributed among them the cast-off clothing
that came from their friends in the North; she had taught them to wash
their faces and to comb their hair; and patiently, year after year, she
had labored to instruct them in the rudiments of learning and the first
principles of religion and morality. And she had not wrought in vain.
Other agencies, it is true, had