beyond this vale of tears,
for God does preserve all that He has planted on this earth.

No subject can surely be a more delightful study than the history of a
slave girl, and the many things that are linked to this life that man
may search and research in the ages to come, and I do not think there
ever can be found any that should fill the mind as this book.

This is a perfect representation of things as I can remember them, and
to think how wonderful are these most beneficent streams of God's
providence to all those of our race that have prayed that their loving
children might feel the warm streams of an education flowing through
every child. Tens of thousands of miles, North, South, West and East,
God has thrown His mantle of love all around us, and it is that which
should make us love and fear Him, who is able to destroy both soul and
body; for His searching eye rests on all of the negro race, to see what
use they are going to make of their time and talent, and I hope that
nature will teach them that all of our talent belongs to the great God
who gave us our being.

Nature awakens in our being a feeling that we must lay at His feet that
we may get the blessed approval, for we are so changeable, but God is
unchanging. He is omnipotent, and all else is transition. Yet God rules
the oceans, the mountains, the valleys, and all that walks the broad
earth.

Well, now I shall tell you something more of my working in the City of
Brooklyn. I lived with the Bailey family the first year, and when they
went away in the summer, as all of the rich used to do, I stayed in the
house for the summer and they went across the ocean and were away for
some time. The next year I did not like to stay in the house alone, so
Mrs. Bailey got me a place with a nice friend of hers, and when she came
home, thought that she was going to have me to come back to live with
her but I stayed with her friend as there were but three in the family
and the work was not hard, and it gave me more time to study, and Mrs.
Stafford's son, Willie, was so glad to have me as his pupil that I had
not any trouble to get my lessons ready for him. He went to school every
day and he could not get through his head how it was that I could not go
to school every day as he did. His mother told him how it was and his
eyes would fill with tears and he would ask his mother and father to let
him stay at home on Sundays to read the Bible to me while I should get
the dinne