“’Tain’t the work,” said Sally; “they’d do that at home, and not feel a mite degraded; and ’tain’t the wages, for ’twouldn’t degrade ‘em to earn that behind a counter. Nor ’tain’t _sass_, though there’s many a lady as talks to her help like I wouldn’t to a dog. Only way I can explain it, Mr. Metzerott, it must be the Constitution of the United States. You see _that_ makes every man as good as anybody else; but it ain’t lived up to, and the girls feel it, and that’s what riles ‘em. Worse than that, they feel they _ain’t_ as good as the young ladies they wait on, not so pretty, nor so educated, nor so refined; but they might have been if they’d had the same advantages; they might have had just such little white hands and soft voices and pretty ways, that keep the young men a-bendin’ over their chairs all the evenin’. Don’t you s’pose many a girl sees the difference between her farmer beau and the young city doctor or lawyer that comes to the country for his holiday?” (Poor Sally! perhaps she spoke from some past bitter experience of her own!) “And so I think it’s _that_, Mr. Metzerott, that keeps girls from hirin’ out. They won’t take a menial position where they feel, if they had their rights, they’d be equals,—real equals, I mean, not constitutional or sassy ones. Now, your German girls ain’t taught about equality; they are used to counts and barons and dukes, and all of them people, from their cradles; they ain’t got freedom in the blood, like us Americans.” “But we breathe it in,” said Metzerott, with gleaming eyes; “and then the remembrance of past wrongs, and the sight of present ones, makes us desperate. We shall teach you Americans, some day, to live up to your own principles.” “But you won’t get us to fire a gun,” said Sally tersely. “till we can see the whites of their eyes.” CHAPTER IX. FORS FORTUNA. The very next day, Louis, by what his father and Dr. Richards would have agreed to call “blind chance,” found a silver quarter lying in the gutter before his own door. Yet it was certainly not blind chance, but sheer hard work, that had worn a hole in Frau Anna’s thimble. Louis had been wishing very much that he could buy her another, for she had said that it was almost impossible to use the old one. Once the needle had slipped in through the hole, and run up under her nail, which had hurt her very much indeed; and the necessity of keeping it away from the worn place hindered her work. Louis and George had talked the matter over very seriously, with many wishes that they were as big as Franz and Bruno, the pastor’s sons, and could earn money by chopping wood and shovelling snow. And now here was a whole silver quarter, which would surely buy many things beside a thimble.