"We had no reason to suppose," said she, quietly, "that you cared for the coöperation of our white people. You acted independently of us; you did not advise with us or show desire for affiliation. We would have been forcing ourselves upon you. I will be as frank as you have been. Had you started this work in a proper spirit and manner, my husband for one would have responded to the limit of his power to any call you made upon him." They dragged in the social equality business and found her adamant. When they charged "race prejudice," she said promptly: "Were I to visit relatives in Boston, the nice people there would, I doubt not, show me pleasant attentions. Were I to put myself on equal terms with their domestics, I could hardly expect it. The question is not altogether one of race prejudice, but of fitness of things." "But we are missionaries, not social visitors." "We do not feel that you benefit negroes by teaching them presumption and to despise and neglect work and to distrust and hate us." A garrulous negress was entertaining one of these women with hair-raising accounts of cruelties practiced upon her by whites when, as a slave, she cooked for them. The schoolmarm asked: "Why didn't you black people poison all the whites and get your freedom that way? You're the most patient people on earth or you would have done so." A "mammy" who overheard administered a stinging rebuke: "Dat would ha' been a sin even ef our white folks wuz ez mean ez Sukey Ann been tellin'. Mine wuz good tuh me. Sukey Ann jes been tellin' you dem tales tuh see how she kin wuk you up." Perhaps the school-teacher had not meant to be taken more literally than Sukey Ann deserved to be. Until freedom, white and black children could hardly be kept apart. Boys ran off fishing and rabbit-hunting together; girls played dolls in the garret of the great house or in a sunny corner of the woodpile. They rarely quarrelled. The black's adoration of the white, the white's desire to be allowed to play with the black, stood in the way of conflict. An early result of the social equality doctrine was war between children of the races. Such strife was confined almost wholly to white and black schools in towns, where black and white children were soon ready to "rock" each other. A spirit of dislike and opposition to blacks, which their elders could hardly understand, having never experienced it, began to take possession of white children. The following story will give some idea of these dawning manifestations of race prejudice: