I stepped into the adjoining apartment that I might see what had so offended these aristocratic paupers, and found that the negro, a contraband or fugitive from bondage, had entered his room at the same time that the white refugees had entered theirs. But he had found an old broom and had swept his room, an old stove and had put it up; had gathered some soft coal to burn in it; had gotten somewhere a rickety bedstead and set it up and had put on it a tick filled with straw. He had procured a wash-basin, a cracked looking-glass, and something to eat. While his room was bare and poor enough, he had made it look in some measure homelike. At all events he greatly distanced his squalid white neighbors, who felt degraded by his presence. Most of the white refugees were illiterates. Their ignorance was so dense that we are in no danger of exaggerating it. I once sat down by the side of a sick boy of this class, who lay on a dirty blanket spread on the floor. His mother, also ill, lay near him. She was afraid that he would die. They had fled from Batesville, Arkansas, and exposure to cold and rain, while on their journey, had brought on fever. She could not read and knew very little of the world outside of the neighborhood where, up to that time, she had spent her life. Her sick son was fifteen years old. She wished me to talk with him, which I was glad to do. I told him of Christ, who came into the world to save sinners, and was ready to save him. He listened eagerly, but soon said: “If you mean by sin _cussin_, I never done that.” When I told him of Jesus he looked intently into my face, and said: “I never heard of him before.” I felt myself to be a real missionary, sent to tell one poor, sick boy, a stranger in a strange city, of the Saviour, who then and there was ready to receive him as his child. But these cases were not rare among poor whites. The few that could read formed the exceptional class. Moreover, a large part of them were discouraged, downhearted, often utterly hopeless. Very many of them also were ill. For a considerable period about fifty per cent. of the poor white refugees, when they reached our city, were sent to hospitals. It was extremely difficult to care for them. Unaccustomed to the ordinary comforts of intelligent and thrifty communities, they had little or no appreciation of the things offered to them by the benevolent to alleviate their sufferings. The delicacies usually so highly prized by the sick were manifestly repulsive to many of them. Some Christian women, anxious to do what they could to help and cheer them, carried to the hospital preserved fruits and jellies. Rejoicing in doing good to those in distress, they personally offered them these tempting delicacies, prepared by their own hands. But the wretched sufferers, having never seen nor tasted such food, said to the angels of mercy that urged them to partake, “We’uns don’t want that ah; bring us clabber and cawn cakes, that’s what we’uns like.”