🚀 go-pugleaf

of nothing else
but of the day when, having served long enough to buy her freedom,
she will be granted it by her master or mistress, and then she can be
honorably married. But unless her freedom is purchased for her by some
lover, the cases are rare, indeed, that a girl is allowed to earn her
own freedom, though they are kept submissive by constant promises that
the goal is just ahead of them. A few days after the Oakland papers
had triumphantly asserted that it had been demonstrated that there was
not a single slave girl in Chinatown--a statement that everyone
who had any intelligence on the subject, including the newspapers
themselves, knew to be false--a lady in mission work received a
cautious hint in a round-about way that one of the girls she had seen
when the rounds were made desired to be set at liberty. "How did you
learn this?" we eagerly and quite naturally asked the missionary.
She replied that on no account could she tell a human being how the
intelligence was conveyed to her, as it might cost others very dearly,
even to the sacrifice of life, if the knowledge leaked out. "But," she
said, "I will show you the girl and you may talk with her yourselves."
We gathered from the girl that she was a respectable widow, the mother
of two children, living with her parents not far from Hong Kong on the
mainland. As they were very poor, she went to Hong Kong to work at
sewing to help support the family. An acquaintance there told her
that she could earn as much as thirty dollars a month at sewing in
California, and he could secure her passage for her at economical
cost.