Page:Women of distinction.djvu/199

Strange to say, at this time none of the cities and towns adjacent to Boston made any discrimination on account of color in the schools; so the next four years of the girl’s life were spent in the schools of Charlestown and Salem, Mass.; then after two more years under private teachers in New York, she returned to her home just in time to celebrate the triumphant termination of the untiring efforts of the loyal men and women of Boston (white and colored) to blot out from the book the obnoxious law of a State whose founders were supposed to be nothing if not just. And so it came about that the child who had helped to bury the old law was on hand at the birth of the new order, and led the delegation of waiting girls who entered "old Bowdoin on the hill," when her doors swung open to all and the glorious reign of the now truly free common schools of Massachusetts began. Before she was sixteen Josephine St. Pierce was married to George L. Ruffin, who, at the time, was a recent graduate of the Chapman Hall School. The high-spirited young couple, with a keen appreciation of the pains and penalties of being "colored" in slavery-cursed America, decided that they would not begin their married life in the miscalled "land of the free," so they went straight from the altar to New York, and from thence sailed away to England. After five months of foreign travel and observation Mr. and Mrs. Ruffin returned to America, satisfied that, with all her advantages, America was the one place for young people with more ambition than money; then, too, at that day every person was needed to take his place and go down into