Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/132

Rh different kind to those of the whites, and no schools or institutions of learning will ever bring them to the same point; nor do I know why they should be so brought. The merits of the whites are accompanied by the faults of the whites.

Among the few coloured people, as they like to be called, whom I saw here, I was most interested by a young mulatto woman, Sarah Douglas, a charming girl, with a remarkably intelligent countenance. She was the teacher in a school of about sixty children, negroes and mulattoes, and she praised them for their facility in learning, but said that they forgot equally fast, and that it was difficult to bring them beyond a certain point. She herself was one of the most beautiful examples of true cultivation among the coloured people.

I have also again paid a visit to dear Mary Townsend, that beautiful child of the Inner Light, with those supernaturally beaming eyes. I now knew for the first time that these beaming eyes could scarcely bear the light of day, that she was not able to read nor to write a page without extreme suffering, and that her work on “Insect Life” was dictated with bandaged eyes. Thus lay she immovable and blind, as she prepared the winged life of the children of nature, “thankful,” writes she in her preface, “if my little book may be a means of preventing the cruelty to insects which children are so prone to.” “It has enabled me at times to forget,” says she further, “that I was confined within the four walls of my chamber. It has taken me out into the fields and into the roads, and renewed my admiration of the wonderful works of the Creator.”

Thus lies she, as it were, fettered and blind till the day when the deliverer Death shall release the angel's wings. Fettered and blind, and yet nevertheless how keen eyed and winged in comparison with many! The effect of that inner light! She is called in the family