dressing and going into company, you won’t have time. See here!” she added, “these jewels I’m going to give you when you come out. I wore them to my first ball. I can tell you, Eva, I made a sensation.”

Eva took the jewel-case, and lifted from it a diamond necklace. Her large, thoughtful eyes rested on them, but it was plain her thoughts were elsewhere.

“How sober you look child!” said Marie.

“Are these worth a great deal of money, mamma?”

“To be sure, they are. Father sent to France for them. They are worth a small fortune.”

“I wish I had them,” said Eva, “to do what I pleased with!”

“What would you do with them?”

“I’d sell them, and buy a place in the free states, and take all our people there, and hire teachers, to teach them to read and write.”

Eva was cut short by her mother’s laughing.

“Set up a boarding-school! Wouldn’t you teach them to play on the piano, and paint on velvet?”

“I’d teach them to read their own Bible, and write their own letters, and read letters that are written to them,” said Eva, steadily. “I know, mamma, it does come very hard on them that they can’t do these things. Tom feels it—Mammy does,—a great many of them do. I think it’s wrong.”

“Come, come, Eva; you are only a child! You don’t know anything about these things,” said Marie; “besides, your talking makes my head ache.”

Marie always had a headache on hand for any conversation that did not exactly suit her.

Eva stole away; but after that, she assiduously gave Mammy reading lessons.