But the kind of meetings she took greatest interest in were meetings called exclusively for women. In this attitude she could pour out her sympathies to them as she could not do before a mixed audience; and indeed she felt their needs were far more pressing than any other class. And now I am prepared to most fully indorse her story. I doubt whether she could, if she had tried ever so much, have hit upon a subject so well adapted to reach a large number of her friends and the public with both entertaining and instructive matter as successfully as she has done in this volume. The grand and...

-That is poor Agnes' baby.- -Agnes' baby? Why, I didn't know that Agnes had a baby. Do let me see it?- Tenderly the grandmother unfolded the wrappings, and presented the little stranger. He was a beautiful babe, whose golden hair, bright blue eyes and fair complexion showed no trace of the outcast blood in his veins. -Oh, how beautiful - said Camilla; -surely this can't be Agnes' baby. He is just as white as I am, and his eyes-what a beautiful blue-and his hair, why it is really lovely.- -He is very pretty, Miss, but after all he is only a slave.- A slave.

Set to the backdrop of the Civil War, the story revolves around Iola Leroy, daughter of a wealthy slaveholder who emancipated and married a young slave called Marie after she nursed him through an illness. The children's African ancestry was hidden from then until the death of their father, after which point Marie and her children were once agai...