Page:The Story of the Jubilee Singers (7th).djvu/112

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scan the passengers who got off the trains, to see if there was any one among them who answered her mother's description of her missing sister. But no such person ever appeared.

One day, when Maggie was alone at home, a woman came to the door inquiring for her mother, who was out at work. Maggie had been instructed to let no strangers in when she was thus left in charge of the house, and the visitor was refused admittance. When she at last declared she was her sister from Mississippi, Maggie would not believe her. And even her mother, when she met her, did not recognise her, she had changed so much in these years of absence. It was such a disappointment to the sister that she soon returned to Mississippi, and it was some time before she could get over the chill of this reception enough to come and make her home with her mother.

After the war her father was persuaded to try his fortunes with a company of freedmen going to Liberia. From the day he left, no word ever came back from him. On the first visit of the Singers to Great Britain, Maggie obtained the address of officials in Liberia who would be most likely to be able to find some clue to his fate, but they could learn nothing about him.

For two years Maggie was constant in her attendance at Fisk. Then when a call came from the Board of Education for teachers for country schools, Maggie, though scarcely fifteen, offered her services. She passed the required examination, and was appointed to a school at Bellevue, seventeen miles