It has been acknowledged on all sides that the benefits, at that time were not only on one side. It was not only the rough factory-girls who came to learn, but also the delicate ladies who gave up time and comfort and their best energies to teach, who profited by the intercourse. In the sad and degrading spectacle of the spring of 1878, the sweet lessons learned and taught in that bitter season of 1862 seem almost to have been forgotten and obliterated. Many a benighted girl--many an uneducated, ignorant matron, roused to her toil at half-past five in the morning, and prevented by its long monotony from acquiring any domestic grace, learnt almost her first notions of making home happy and comfortable in the schools that were set up in the ‘panic.’ Then, in the woe of the poor, and the sympathy of the rich, it almost seemed as if the great black frowning barriers of caste had been overthrown; but the division of classes, the opposition between master and man, is a plant of sturdy growth, and strikes its roots deep and far under the earth. Now, sixteen years later, comes a strike almost without parallel for bitterness and unyielding stubbornness on either side--a strike accompanied by rioting and mob-rule, broken windows, houses sacked, men assaulted, women and children threatened; and the necessity for a strong military force to preserve even the outward semblance of order; and this, on the identical ground where, during the cotton famine, the sore distress was most nobly borne and most generously relieved. These things make a riddle hard to read. Adrienne and Helena found both their mental and physical energies taxed to the utmost by the work they had undertaken, but neither had any thought of giving up. With Adrienne it was a labour of calm, affectionate duty; she went to it with an enlightened sense of her own responsibilities, and a full comprehension of the gravity of the crisis. With Helena it was something quite different; she worked eagerly, till she was wearied, and scarcely knew why she did it. Of course she was sorry for the poor people, and pitied them in their present condition, and was anxious to help them, strained every nerve to do her work; but she thought more about Adrienne Blisset and Sebastian Mallory than about all the poor people in Thanshope.