I wish I could add that the result met her fond expectations. While the design was inchoate, her example served as a stock and animating illustration of the wisdom of those who urged upon Virginia slaveholders the duty of returning the blacks to the land from which their fathers were stolen. Colonization was boldly advocated in public and in private, and the old lady was a fervent convert. In the fulness of time she sent out five families, strong and healthy, as well-educated as the average Northern farmer and mechanic. She sold Rice Hill and well-nigh impoverished herself in her old age to fit out the colony with clothes and household goods, and went to spend the few remaining years of her life in the home of her sister. The great labor of her dreams and hope accomplished, she chanted a happy “Nunc Dimittis” to sympathizer and to doubter. She had solved the Dark Problem that baffled the world’s most astute statesmen. If all who hearkened unto her would do likewise, the muttering of the hell that was already moving from its depth under the feet of the nation, would be silenced forever. The competent colonists had hardly had time to send back to their emancipated mistress news of their safe arrival in the Promised Land, when they found themselves in grievous straits. These, duly reported to Aunt Rice, were African fevers that exhausted their strength and consumed their stock of ready money; the difficulty of earning a livelihood while they were ignorant of the language and customs of the natives; lack of suitable clothing; scarcity of provisions, and a waiting-list of etceteras that rent the tender heart of the benefactress with unavailing pity. She was importuned for money, for clothes, for groceries—even that she would, for the love of Heaven and the sake of old times, send them a barrel of rice—which, infidels to her faith in colonization did not fail to remind her, was to be had in Liberia for the raising. The stout-hearted liberator never owned in word her disappointment at the outcome of long years of patient preparation and personal privation, or gave any sign of appreciation of the truth that her grand solution of the Dark Problem was the song of the drunkard and a by-word and a hissing in the mouth of the unbeliever. But she ceased long before her death, in 1858, to tax her listeners’ patience by setting forth the beauties of colonization as the practical abolition of negro slavery in America. If her ancestors had sinned in bringing the race into bondage, and her teeth were thereby set on edge, she hid her hurt. This significant silence was the only token by which her best friends divined her consciousness of the humiliating revelation which had fallen into the evening of a well-spent life. She had exchanged for the five families born and reared in her home, dependence, comfort, and happiness, for freedom, pauperism, and discontent. The cherished bud had been passing sweet. The fruit was as bitter as gall.