Page:The Story of the Jubilee Singers (7th).djvu/40

 All this time they were living, as the old phrase has it, from hand to mouth—depending on the proceeds of one concert to pay the next morning's hotel charges and buy their railway-tickets to the next appointment. Any special collapse in an evening's receipts left them helpless till some friend stepped forward—as there was almost always some friend in such an emergency who did—and paid hall and hotel bills.

But the great trial was that no light had dawned on their mission. They would have done better to stay at home if they were to make nothing above expenses. So scantily clad were they that Miss Sheppard was obliged to travel one rainy day with no protection for her feet but cloth slippers. It was not until some time after the biting weather of the Northern winter, to whose severity they were quite unused, had fully set in that Mr. White was able, by borrowing $5 that had been given to Minnie Tate, and picking up $19 in other ways, to purchase overcoats for two of the young men, who had really been suffering for want of them.

In one way and another a comfortable outfit had been secured for the young women; but such were the varieties of style represented that it was not uncommon for Ella Sheppard to be asked if Minnie Tate was her daughter—the former being twenty and the latter fourteen. And Jennie Jackson, who was nineteen, was sometimes taken to be the mother of Eliza Walker, who was fourteen.

The coolness, amounting often to indifference and sometimes to suspicion, with which even many of