But while in tatters and gaunt with hunger, most of them were utterly unwilling to work. They regarded manual labor as a disgrace. They had been taught in the school of slavery that honest toil was servile and ignoble. The notion quite generally prevailed among them that since they had fled from rebeldom, the government was under obligation to feed and clothe them, while they sat down in idleness and glumly received its gifts. What charity added to government supplies they thoughtlessly consumed, and then stretched out empty, thriftless hands for more. An incident or two will present in concrete form their aristocratic notions concerning labor. James E. Yeatman, President of the Western Sanitary Commission, became deeply interested in a girl of sixteen, belonging to a refugee family from Arkansas. With considerable personal effort he secured for her the position of nurse-girl in a household where her highest good, in every way, would have been sought. Rejoicing in doing a benevolent deed, though a very busy man, with great responsibilities weighing on mind and heart, he drove more than two miles to apprise her mother of his success. The family were living on government rations, and every article of their dress showed their extreme poverty; but the mother met this offer of a place for her half-starved child by exclaiming: “W’at, my darter a sarvant and work like a niggah! no, sah! she’ll rot fust!” “Very well, madam,” with righteous indignation replied Mr. Yeatman, “let her rot;” and jumping into his buggy, drove hurriedly back to his office in the city. I visited a family of this class at the Virginia Hotel, an old hostelry, which was used as an asylum for freedmen and white refugees. The room adjoining one occupied by a family of refugees had been assigned to a negro. These refugees were clothed in rags and were barefooted. The unkempt hair of the wife and mother was a mass of matted tangles. In their cheerless apartment there was neither stove nor bed. They slept on straw and ate from the hand of charity. While I was taking in the situation and speaking an encouraging word, a benevolent lady stepped in to relieve their pressing wants, but, strange to tell, found their pride sorely mortified, not by their personal appearance nor by the litter and filth in which they were living, but because there was a negro in the next room. The mother voiced the complaint of that poverty-stricken household, by saying, in a peculiar drawl: “I say now, we’uns doan think that ah sooperintend ort to put that niggah in thah; we’uns doan like that ah purty wal.”