The first articles of food entered on the teacher's book to the credit of her patrons were two eggs, one can of syrup, one half-pound bacon, one quart meal, one can buttermilk. The teacher cooked her meals on her oven in the fireplace, did her work, and taught school in her cabin. The first day brought fifteen boys and girls. Ten of the fathers and mothers, eager to learn how to read and write, came to the night school. For two years the teacher struggled. Her patrons helped her with larder, and grew—measuring up to the standards of true living.

In spite of frequent patchings, the teacher's cabin became almost unfit for use. There came a time when umbrellas were indispensable in the cabin during a heavy downpour. In 1898 a way opened for the purchase of ten acres of woodland. A two-room cottage was built for the teacher on a clearing. No prouder workers could be found than the teacher and her pupils in clearing the land for possible crops. Beginning with 1900, the average annual yield was as follows: Two bales of cotton, forty bushels of corn, seventy-five bushels sweet potatoes, twenty bushels peanuts, twenty bushels pease, four loads shucks and fodder, greens, cabbage, and other vegetable products.

Two years ago a kitchen was added to the cottage, and the cooking classes of the school arose to the dignity of having a real stove and other necessaries. Sewing, cooking, gardening, and housekeeping classes have succeeded wonderfully. The boys of the settlement have received first prizes from Tuskegee Institute Agricultural Fair for their products put on exhibition.

One of the first fruits of the settlement work has been the promotion of a boy from that school to Tuskegee Institute. He has stood the test of four years in his classes, industrial and academic, and is now most promising.

The second step to place the work on a hopeful basis has been the purchase of ten more acres of land. A two-room cottage has been built recently, and the mother of the first settlement boy to come to the front, and one of our pioneer workers in the venture, has been given a chance to not only earn her living, but to serve as a native object-lesson of neatness in her home and surroundings. Eight years of constant work teaching old and young how to live has resulted in better built homes on the plantation. Owner has replaced one-room log cabins with two-room cottages.

House to house visits and the object-lesson of the settlement work have told for good in the matter of cleanliness. The marriage tie is respected. It is the exception rather than the rule to find unmarried mothers living with their children's fathers without even a sense of shame.

The barefoot boys and girls, men and women, who first attended the settlement Sunday School eight years ago, come neatly dressed. Men and women who could not read or write in the beginning of the work can read their Sunday School lessons and write a presentable note in a matter of business.

The Mothers' Union has brought the mothers to see the deep necessity of exerting their influence for good of home and people. The penny savings bank held by the teacher represents stockholders that mean to be owners of their own homes.

In the night school, the grown people, who are employed during the day, are taught the simple lessons which were neglected in their youth. At first many of them were ashamed to admit their ignorance. One young man, whom Mrs. Washington noticed during one of her visits as being particularly sullen when asked to join the class, has turned out to be one of the most ambitious pupils. "At first I was almost afraid to speak to him," she said, "but after I talked to him a little while, he broke down quite suddenly, and exclaimed:

"Oh, Mis' Washington! I'se so ashamed, I don't even know my letters." But it is the classes in cooking and cleaning and sewing which have been most successful, and these are responsible more than anything else for the change in the women.

From the outset, the white planters who employ most of the coloured families of the settlement have aided in the work. When Mrs. Washington first sent for permission to carry on some missionary work among his tenants, he sent a boy on a mule with a fat turkey, and a message for me to "come and do anything I liked." What seemed to be a discouragement at first was that occasionally a family moved away, thus causing the teacher to begin all over again, with a newcomer, the work which had been scarce finished with the old. Later she came to see that those who migrated served to spread the influence into other neighbourhoods, thus broadening the teachings far beyond her own limitations.

CHAPTER XI The Tillers of the Ground

There is held at the Tuskegee Institute every year a remarkable conference of Negro workers, mostly farmers, who are to work out their salvation by the sweat of their brows in tilling the soil of the South. The purpose of these gatherings is severely practical—to encourage those who have not had the advantages of training and instruction, and to give them a chance to learn from the success of others as handicapped as they what are their own possibilities. As I have said many times, it is my conviction that the great body of the Negro population must live in the future as they have done in the past, by the cultivation of the soil, and the most hopeful service now to be done is to enable the race to follow agriculture with intelligence and diligence.

I have just finished reading a little pamphlet written by Mr. George W. Carver, Director of the Agricultural Department at Tuskegee, giving the results of some of his experiments in raising sweet potatoes for one year. This coloured man has shown in plain, simple language, based on scientific principles, how he has raised two hundred and sixty-six bushels of sweet potatoes on a single acre of common land, and made a net profit of one hundred and twenty-one dollars. The average yield of sweet potatoes to the acre, in the part of the South where this experiment was tried, is thirty-seven bushels per acre. This coloured man is now preparing to make this same land produce five hundred bushels of potatoes.

I have watched this experiment with a great deal of pleasure. The deep interest shown by the neighbouring white farmers has been most gratifying. I do not believe that a single white farmer who visited the field to see the unusual yield ever thought of having any prejudice or feeling against this coloured man because his education had enabled him to make a marked success of raising sweet potatoes. There were, on the other hand, many evidences of respect for this coloured man and of gratitude for the information which he had furnished.

If we had a hundred such coloured men in each county in the South, who could make their education felt in meeting the world's needs, there would be no race problem. But in order to get such men, those interested in the education of the Negro must begin to look facts and conditions in the face. Too great a gap has been left between the Negro's real condition and the position for which we have tried to fit him through the medium of our text-books. We have overlooked in many cases the fact that long years of experience and discipline are necessary for any race before it can get the greatest amount of good out of the text-books. Much that the Negro has studied presupposes conditions that do not, for him, exist.

The weak point in the past has been that no attempt has been made to bridge the gap between the Negro's educated brain and his opportunity for supplying the wants of an awakened mind. There has been almost no thought of connecting the educated brain with the educated hand. It is almost a crime to take young men from the farm, or from farming districts, and educate them, as is too often done, in everything except agriculture, the one subject with which they should be most familiar. The result is that the young man, instead of being educated to love agriculture, is educated out of sympathy with it; and instead of returning to his father's farm after leaving college, to show him how to produce more with less labour, the young man is often tempted to go into the city or town to live by his wits.

The purpose of the Tuskegee Negro Conference is to help the farmers who are too old, or too bound down by their responsibilities, to attend schools or institutes; to do for them, in a small way, what Tuskegee and other agencies seek to do for the younger generation. Coloured men and women make long and expensive journeys to be present, coming from all the Southern and several of the Northern states. They have found that their money is not wasted, for they learn much by seeing what has been done at the school, from the advice of experts, but more especially by the exchange of opinions and by comparing experiences in their own field of work. These meetings are not for whining or complaints. Their keynote is hopeful courage. To look up and not down, forward and not backward, to be cheerful and mutually helpful, is the golden rule of the conference.

It was decided from the first to confine the proceedings to matters which the race had closely within its own control, and to positive, aggressive effort, rather than to mere negative criticisms and recitations of wrongs. I wanted these coloured farmers and their wives to consult about the methods and means of securing homes, of freeing themselves from debt, of encouraging intelligent production, of paying their taxes, of cultivating habits of thrift, honesty and virtue, of building school-houses, and securing education and high Christian character, of cementing the friendships between the races.

In these conventions, as in other ways, we have tried to keep alive the feeling of hope and encouragement. We have seen darker days than these, and no race that is patient, long-suffering, industrious, economical, and virtuous, no race that is persistent in efforts that make for progress, no race that cultivates a spirit of good-will toward all mankind, is left without reward.

The Farmers' Conference each year adopts a declaration of principles, which sum up its objects in such words as these:

"Our object shall be to promote the moral, material, and educational progress of this entire community. Believing, as we do, that we are our own worst enemies, we pledge, here and now, from this time forth, to use every effort—

"To abolish and do away with the mortgage system just as rapidly as possible.

"To raise our food supplies, such as corn, potatoes, syrup, pease, hogs, chickens, etc., at home rather than to go in debt for them at the store.

"To stop throwing away our time and money on Saturdays by standing around towns, drinking and disgracing ourselves in many other ways.

"To oppose, at all times, the excursion and camp-meeting, and to try earnestly to secure better schools, better teachers, and better preachers.

"To try to buy homes, to urge upon all Negroes the necessity of owning homes and farms, and not only to own them, but to beautify and improve them.

"Since the greater number of us are engaged in agriculture, we urge the importance of stock and poultry raising, the teaching of agriculture in the country schools, the thorough cultivation of a small acreage, rather than the poor cultivation of a large one, attention to farm-work in winter, and getting rid of the habit of living in one-room houses.

"We urge more protection to life and property, better homes for tenants, and that home life in the country be made more attractive, all this with the view of keeping such great numbers of our people out of the large cities.

"In connection with the better schools and churches, we emphasise the need of careful attention to the morals of our ministers and teachers, and all others acting in the capacity of leaders.

"Prosperity and peace are dependent upon friendly relations between the races, and to this end we urge a spirit of manly forbearance and mutual interest."

What these conferences are doing, and what sort of people are coming to them every year, may be gathered from some of their experiences as they have told them themselves during their visit to Tuskegee. Some of the best things are said by men and women who have succeeded in working their way up from abject poverty to comfortable independence. There is no better antidote for the foolish talk so often heard about the inevitable shiftlessness of the Negro race than these short and pithy narratives of sacrifice, struggle and achievement. A Florida man said that he had six dollars when he married. He now owns two hundred acres and a home of seven rooms. "I did without most everything until I got it paid for," he explained. He has fifty-seven head of cattle, six work horses, and five colts, all raised by himself. Is it dangerous to give the ballot to that kind of a citizen? Will he be apt to use it to promote extravagant taxation?

An Alabama farmer said:

"I own sixty-seven acres of land. I got it by working hard and living close. I did not eat at any big tables. I often lived on bread and milk. I have five rooms to my house. I started with one, and that was made of logs. I add a room every year. I was lucky in marrying a woman whose father gave her a cow. I ain't got no fine clock or organ. I did once own a buggy, but it was a shabby one, and now we ride in a wagon, or I go horse-back on a horse I raised that is worth two hundred and fifty dollars. I have seven children in school."

"I started plowing with my pants rolled up and barefoot," said a Georgia man. "I saved five hundred dollars and bought a home in Albany, Georgia. I bought two hundred acres for seven dollars an acre, and paid for it in three years. I made that pay for two hundred acres more. After awhile I bought thirteen hundred acres. I live on it, and it is all paid for. I have twenty-five buildings and they all came out of my pocketbook. That land is now worth twenty-five dollars an acre. For a distance of four or five miles from my settlement, there has not been a man in the chain-gang for years. I work forty-seven head of mules. The only way we will ever be a race is by getting homes and living a virtuous life. I don't give mortgages. I take mortgages on black and white. I have put the first bale of cotton on the market in Georgia every year for eight years."

A widow from Alabama told her story, which shows among other things how a dog may be useful:

"There are three in my family, and I am the boss. I save about a hundred dollars a year. I give no mortgages. I plant everything that a farmer can plant. I raise my own syrup, meat, pease, corn, and everything we need to eat. I have three cows. You have got to go low down to get up high. I traded a little puppy with my brother for a pig. From this one pig I raised eight pigs, and for seven years I have not bought a pound of meat. I am living on the strength of that little puppy yet. I own forty acres, and sometimes rent more land."

A coloured minister from Alabama said that he farmed as well as preached. He was a renter for seven years. In nine years he paid for four hundred acres, and now owns ten hundred and fifteen acres. He raises horses, cows, mules, and hogs and has fifty persons dependent upon him. He owns the land where he used to live as a renter, and lives in the house of the man from whom he rented. There are few white people in his neighbourhood. Most of the coloured people own their own homes, and they have lengthened the annual school term two months at their own expense. This man said that, when he first bought land, he split rails to fence it during the day and carried them around at night, and his wife built the fence.

A South Carolinian, who was never before so far from home, said that he was a slave for twenty years. "I used to work six days for my master, and Sunday for myself," he said. "God introduced ten commandments, but our people have added another, 'Thou shalt not work Saturdays or Sundays, either.' I stick to the Ten Commandments and put in six days a week, and in that way have bought three hundred acres and paid for it. I have a large house for my own family of ten, and fourteen other buildings on the place, six of them rented. No man is a farmer excepting the man who lives on the produce of his farm."

A visitor from Louisiana told how he had borrowed two hundred and fifty dollars from his father and bought twenty-five acres of land in 1877. He used to begin work at four o'clock in the morning. For a year his wife ground all their meal, three ears at a time, in a small hand-mill. Now he owns three hundred acres of sugar land, worth a hundred dollars an acre, and has twenty-seven white and forty-eight coloured people working for him.

"I would like to set a big table for you," said one of these farmers whom I visited at his home, "but, professor, you-all is teachin' us to 'conermise an' save, an' dats what I'se tryin' to do." When you remember how anxious the good farmers and their wives are always to set a good table for the visiting "professors" and "revrums," this man had a good deal of courage in departing from old customs.

I say to the farmers: "If feeding the 'brutherins' is a strain on you, feed no more of them. Cut down on all expenses that can be trimmed without injury to yourself."

One woman from Bullock County, Alabama, carried away the true spirit of the conference. Not long ago, one of our agents saw a deed to a valuable piece of farm land, bought with money she had saved by selling cows. She said that she had never thought of any such plan until she had visited the Farmers' Conference and heard others tell how they had bought land. An unusual feature of this case was that the woman did not live in the town in which she had invested her money. She had made herself interested enough to seek a chance to invest her earnings in the purchase of property several miles from her home settlement. She said that it required a mighty sight of will-power to keep from buying fine clothes with the money, but she was determined to get hold of some land, and she did it without any assistance from her husband.

"Yes, of course I'll be at the next Negro Conference," wrote another farmer, "I want you to give me a chance to talk, too. I want to show Mr. Washington a turnip I raised in my own garden, and have been saving for the Conference, and I want to tell him how much I have raised and eaten out of my own garden, and how much I have saved as the result of these teachings at the annual meetings."

Another wrote recently:

"I have to buy very little to eat, for I raise with one horse all I want to eat, and a little more besides. Last year I raised nine bales of cotton, plenty of corn, sugar cane, pease, and potatoes, and many other things. Besides this, my wife raised twenty hogs, and a yard full of chickens, geese and turkeys. The only way for the farmer to get out of debt and keep out of debt is to buy a home, raise what he eats, and pay at once for what he gets out of the store."

A pilgrim from Georgia thus expressed himself:

"I came here to get my keg full of good news and glad tidings to carry back to Georgia, and I have got it. I began working for myself when I was eighteen years old. My father and mother died when I was a child. I first worked for eight dollars and fifty cents a month and my board, and cleared eighty-three dollars the first year. Then I worked on shares for a while, then I bought a mule on credit, using my money to support myself while raising a crop. Now I own fifteen hundred acres of land, all paid for. I have six rooms in my house. I don't give any mortgages. I have twenty-three plows, and a bank account. I haul on my drays about ten thousand bales of cotton every year for the planters in my county. I have another patch of fifty acres near Fort Gaines on which there is a six-room house."

"We come here to learn wisdom and knowledge," said a man from Macon County, Alabama. "I had a part of the slavery time, and I've had all of the freedom time. When I was in my eighteenth year I wanted to marry the worst way. I did it somehow, and then we tried every plan to get ahead in the world. I worked Sunday as well as Monday. I even hitched myself to the plow, and my wife plowed me. Now I have got horses, mules, corn, and plenty of everything to do me, but I have not got any home. Next year when I come here I am going to own a place of my own instead of renting it."

Scores of similar illustrations could be quoted to show that the Negro farmer is fighting his own battles, and that in his annual visits to Tuskegee he preaches, both to the students and to his fellow toilers, the gospel of work with the hands as the pathway to freedom. The kind of practical advice distributed among these farmers is illustrated in the following specimen of the leaflets issued by our "Bureau of Nature Study for Schools." This one on Hints and Suggestions for Farmers has to do with the ever-vital question of "Mortgage Lifting":

"Farmers all over the Cotton Belt are now finishing their plans for the growing of this year's crop. All sorts of financial plans have been made. Perhaps the most common among our farmers is the credit plan or crop mortgage. In this the farmer binds himself and family to make a crop, usually cotton, for any one who will 'advance' him what he must buy while growing the crop. He agrees to pay interest, ranging from ten to thirty-five per cent. on the cost of the things furnished. Thus a pair of shoes which would sell for $1.50 in cash would cost about $2 in the fall. If allowed to run until the next Fall, it would cost him about $2.50. If allowed to run three years, it would take $3.15 to pay for a $1.50 pair of shoes. If carried the fourth year, it would take $4, and one year more would call for $5.

"Too many farmers are paying $5 for shoes which would have cost them only $1.50 if they had managed their business properly. Too many times the $5 shoes are never paid for, leaving an unkindly feeling between the 'advancer' and the one 'advanced,' causing the landlord and tenant, and very often the merchant, to suffer.

"Yet the farmer must have clothing. He must have plows, hoes, wagons, etc. No man who tills the soil should have to suffer for something to eat. Perhaps no one will question the farmer's right to make the crop mortgage. He must and ought to have plenty of good, wholesome food to make it possible for him to do his work well. But for his own good, the good of his family, for the good of the landlord, and the community in which he lives, we do dispute his right to manage business as many of our farmers do. He should not make a mortgage he cannot easily lift.

"If it requires $150 to supply a farmer for a season, at the end of that season his debt will be about $180—an extra $30, the average value of a bale of cotton, to do a credit business. If it requires $75 to carry him, he will owe about $90, costing him half a bale of cotton to do a credit business. Now, do you note that the smaller the amount borrowed, the smaller the amount of interest, and the easier it becomes for the farmer to lift the whole thing? Don't load so heavily. Put two thousand pounds on a thousand-pound wagon and see what becomes of you, your load, and your wagon. One man tries by main strength to lift a large load. He fails and gives up in despair. Another man gets a long pole, or lever, and with the greatest ease raises and places the load where it is wanted. The first uses only muscle, while the last mixes muscle with brains.

"Could we not say the same thing of the unsuccessful and the successful mortgage lifter? If you will use your head and go at that debt in the right way, you will be surprised with what great ease you can get it out of the way. Well, how can this be done, one man asks? What would you advise? A wise man listens to advice. If he thinks it good, he will try to follow it. The farmer who is in debt must—

"Not make bad bargains. He must work all day and sometimes part of the night, and buy only what he is compelled to have. He should raise everything he eats and a little more, and then cultivate as much cotton as he can.

"Some of the farmers buy shoddy goods at fair prices. They allow the boys and girls to buy cheap jewelry. They buy a sewing machine on credit for fifty or sixty dollars, and when they get it paid for, if they ever do, it has cost about a hundred dollars. They pay ten and fifteen dollars for a washstand and bureau when an upholstered box would do for the present. The industrious farmer works from sunrise to sunset every day in the week. If there is some light work he can do by putting in two or three hours during the long winter nights, you find him at it. It takes this to lift the mortgage.

"The sensible farmer will not buy five hundred pounds of bacon if there is any way to get along with two hundred and fifty. If he must buy it on credit, he will eat butter, drink milk, raise and eat eggs and chickens, kill a young beef when he can, and dry or pickle it, so as to supply his wants from his own produce as long as possible.

"The farmer who wants to get out of debt will have large patches of greens, his garden will have something growing in it the year round. His table will be loaded with wild fruits, such as blackberries, huckleberries, plums, etc. His potatoes will keep him from buying so much corn meal and flour on credit. He plans to raise more than enough corn, oats, and wheat to do him another year. Then he makes that cotton crop count. He gathers every lock of it as fast as it opens and tries to sell it for every cent it is worth. He walks up like a man and pays every cent he owes when it falls due. Then his neighbours, both white and coloured, learn to respect him because he is an honest man, he owes nobody, his store-house, smoke-house, and barn are loaded with fruits, and home-made produce. He is a happy man because that mortgage is lifted."

CHAPTER XII Pleasure and Profit of Work in the Soil

I have always been intensely fond of outdoor life. Perhaps the explanation for this lies partly in the fact that I was born nearly out-of-doors. I have also, from my earliest childhood, been very fond of animals and fowls. When I was but a child, and a slave, I had many close and interesting acquaintances with animals.

During my childhood days, as a slave, I did not see very much of my mother, as she was obliged to leave her children very early in the morning to begin her day's work. Her early departure often made the matter of my securing breakfast uncertain. This led to my first intimate acquaintance with animals.

In those days it was the custom upon the plantation to boil the Indian corn that was fed to the cows and pigs. At times, when I had failed to get any other breakfast, I used to go to the places where the cows and pigs were fed, and share their breakfast with them, or else go to the place where it was the custom to boil the corn, and get my morning meal there before it was taken to the animals.

If I was not there at the exact moment of feeding, I could still find enough corn scattered around the fence or the trough to satisfy me. Some people may think that this was a pretty bad way to get one's food, but, leaving out the name and the associations, there was nothing very bad about it. Any one who has eaten hard boiled corn knows that it has a delicious taste. I never pass a pot of boiled corn now without yielding to the temptation to eat a few grains.

Another thing that assisted in developing my fondness for animals was my contact with the best breeds of fowls and animals when I was a student at the Hampton Institute. Notwithstanding that my work there was not directly connected with the stock, the mere fact that I saw the best kinds of animals and fowls day after day increased my love for them, and made me resolve that when I went out into the world I would have some as nearly like those as possible.

I think that I owe a great deal of my present strength and capacity for hard work to my love of outdoor life. It is true that the amount of time that I can spend in the open air is now very limited. Taken on an average, it is perhaps not more than an hour a day, but I make the most of that hour. In addition to this, I get much pleasure out of looking forward to and planning for that hour.

I do not believe that any one who has not worked in a garden can begin to understand how much pleasure and strength of body and mind and soul can be derived from one's garden, no matter how small it may be, and often the smaller it is the better. If the garden be ever so limited in area, one may still have the gratifying experience of learning how much can be produced on a little plot carefully laid out, thoroughly fertilised, and intelligently cultivated. And then, though the garden may be small, if the flowers and vegetables prosper, there springs up a feeling of kinship between the man and his plants, as he tends and watches the growth of each individual fruition from day to day. Every morning brings some fresh development, born of the rain, the dew, and the sunshine.

The letter or the address you began writing the day before never grows until you return and take up the work where it was left off; not so with the plant. Some change has taken place during the night, in the appearance of bud, or blossom, or fruit. This sense of newness, of expectancy, brings to me a daily inspiration whose sympathetic significance it is impossible to convey in words.

It is not only a pleasure to grow vegetables for one's table, but I find much satisfaction, also, in sending selections of the best specimens to some neighbour whose garden is backward, or to one who has not learned the art of raising the finest or the earliest varieties, and who is therefore surprised to receive new potatoes two weeks in advance of any one else.

When I am at my home in Tuskegee, I am able, by rising early in the morning, to spend at least half an hour in my garden, or with my fowls, pigs, or cows. Whenever I can take the time, I like to hunt for the new eggs each morning myself, and when at home I am selfish enough to permit no one else to make these discoveries. As with the growing plants, there is a sense of freshness and restfulness in the finding and handling of newly laid eggs that is delightful to me. Both the anticipation and the realisation are most pleasing. I begin the day by seeing how many eggs I can find, or how many little chickens are just beginning to peep through the shells.

Speaking of little chickens coming into life reminds me that one of our students called my attention to a fact connected with the chickens owned by the school which I had not previously known. When some of the first little chickens came out of their shells, they began almost immediately to help others, not so forward, to break their way out. It was delightful to me to hear that the chickens raised at the school had, so early in life, caught the Tuskegee spirit of helpfulness toward others.

I am deeply interested in the different kinds of fowls, and, aside from the large number grown by the school in its poultry house and yards, I grow at my own home common chickens, Plymouth Rocks, Buff Cochins, and Brahmas, Peking ducks, and fantailed pigeons.

The pig, I think, is my favourite animal. In addition to some common-bred pigs, I keep a few Berkshires and some Poland Chinas; and it is a pleasure to me to watch their development and increase from month to month. Practically all the pork used in my family is of my own raising.

I heard not long ago a story of one of our graduates which delighted me as an illustration of the real Tuskegee spirit. A man had occasion to go to the village of Benton, Alabama, in which Mr. A. J. Wood, one of our graduates, had settled ten years before, and gone into business as a general merchant. In this time he has built up a good trade and has obtained for himself a reputation as one of the best and most reliable business men in the place. While the visitor was there, he happened to step to the open back door of the store, and stood looking out into a little yard behind the building. The merchant joining him there, began to call, "Ho, Boy. Ho, Boy," and finally, in response to this calling, there came crawling out from beneath the store, with much grunting, because he was altogether too big to get comfortably from under the building, an enormous black hog.

"You see that hog," the man said. "That's my hog. I raise one like that every year as an object-lesson to the coloured farmers around here who come to the store to trade. About all I feed him is the waste from the store. When the farmers come in here, I show them my hog, and I tell them that if they would shut their pigs up in a pen of rails, and have the children pick up acorns in the woods to feed them on, they might have just such hogs as I do, instead of their razor-backs running around wild in the woods.

"Perhaps I can't teach a school here," the man added, "but if I can't do that, I can at least teach the men around here how to raise hogs as I learned to raise them at Tuskegee."

In securing the best breeds of fowls and animals at Tuskegee, I have the added satisfaction of seeing a better grade of stock being gradually introduced among the farmers who live near the school.

After I have gathered my eggs, and have at least said "Good morning" to my pigs, cows, and horse, the next morning duty—no, I will not say duty, but delight—is to gather the vegetables for the family dinner. No pease, no turnips, radishes nor salads taste so good as those which one has raised and gathered with his own hands in his own garden. In comparison with these all the high-sounding dishes found in the most expensive restaurants seem flavourless. One feels, when eating his own fresh vegetables, that he is getting near to the heart of nature; not a second-hand stale imitation, but the genuine thing. How delightful the change, after one has spent weeks eating in restaurants or hotels, and has had a bill of fare pushed before his eyes three times a day, or has heard the familiar sound for a month from a waiter's lips: "Steak, pork chops, fried eggs, and potatoes."

My own experience in outdoor life leads me to hope that the time will soon come when there will be a revolution in our methods of educating children, especially in the schools of the smaller towns and rural districts. I consider it almost a sin to take a number of children whose homes are on farms, and whose parents earn their living by farming, and cage them up, as if they were so many wild beasts, for six or seven hours during the day, in a close room where the air is often impure.

I have known teachers to go so far as to frost the windows in a school-room, or have them made high up in the wall, or keep the window curtains down, so that the children could not even see the wonderful world without. For six hours the life of these children is an artificial one. The apparatus which they use is, as a rule, artificial, and they are taught in an artificial manner about artificial things. Even to whisper about the song of a mocking-bird or the chirp of a squirrel in a near-by tree, or to point to a stalk of corn or a wild flower, or to speak about a cow and her calf, or a little colt and its mother grazing in an adjoining field, are sins for which they must be speedily and often severely punished. I have seen teachers keep children caged up on a beautiful, bright day in June, when all Nature was at her best, making them learn—or try to learn—a lesson about hills, or mountains, or lakes, or islands, by means of a map or globe, when the land surrounding the school-house was alive and beautiful with the images of these things. I have seen a teacher work for an hour with children, trying to impress upon them the meaning of the words lake, island, peninsula, when a brook not a quarter of a mile away would have afforded the little ones an opportunity to pull off their shoes and stockings and wade through the water, and find, not one artificial island or lake, on an artificial globe, but dozens of real islands, peninsulas, and bays. Besides the delight of wading through the water, and of being out in the pure bracing air, they would learn by this method more about these natural divisions of the earth in five minutes than they could learn in an hour in books. A reading lesson taught out on the green grass under a spreading oak tree is a lesson needing little effort to hold a boy's attention, to say nothing of the sense of delight and relief which comes to the teacher.

I have seen teachers compel students to puzzle for hours over the problem of the working of the pulley, when not a block from the school-house were workmen with pulleys in actual operation, hoisting bricks for the walls of a new building.

I believe that the time is not far distant when every school in the rural districts and in the small towns will be surrounded by a garden, and that one of the objects of the course of study will be to teach the child something about real country life, and about country occupations.

I am glad to say that at the Tuskegee Institute we erected a school-house in and about which the little children of the town and vicinity are given a knowledge, not only of books, but of the real things which they will be called upon to use in their homes. Since Tuskegee is surrounded by people who earn their living by agriculture, we have near this school-house three acres of ground on which the children are taught to cultivate flowers, shrubbery, vegetables, grains, cotton, and other crops. They are also taught cooking, laundering, sewing, sweeping, and dusting, how to set a table, and how to make a bed—the employments of their daily lives. I have referred to this building as a "school-house," but we do not call it that, because the name is too formal. We have named it "The Children's House." And this principle holds true, for children of a larger growth, and is especially true of the training of the Negro minister who serves the people of the smaller towns and country districts.

In this, as in too many other educational fields, the Negro minister is trained to meet conditions which exist in New York or in Chicago—in a word, it is too often taken for granted that there is no difference between the work to be done by Negro ministers among our people after only thirty-five years of freedom, and that to be done among the white people who have had the advantages of centuries of freedom and development.

The Negro ministers, except those sent to the large cities, go among an agricultural people, a people who lead an outdoor life. They are poor, without homes or ownership in farms, without proper knowledge of agriculture. They are able to pay their minister so small and uncertain a salary that he can not live on it honestly and pay his bills promptly.

During the three or four years that the minister has spent in the theological class room, scarcely a single subject that concerns the every-day life of his future people has been discussed. He is taught more about the soil of the valley of the Nile, or of the valley of the river Jordan, than about the soil of the State in which the people of his church are to live and to work.

What I urge is that the Negro minister should be taught something about the outdoor life of the people whom he is to lead. More than that, it would help the problem immensely if in some more practical and direct manner this minister could be taught to get the larger portion of his own living from the soil—to love outdoor work, and to make his garden, his farm, and his farm-house object-lessons for his people.

The Negro minister who earns a large part of his living on the farm is independent, and can reprove and rebuke the people when they do wrong. This is not true of him who is wholly dependent upon his congregation for his bread. What is equally important, an interest in agricultural production and a love for work tend to keep a minister from that idleness which may prove a source of temptation.

At least once a week, when I am in the South, I make it a practice to spend an hour or more among the people of Tuskegee and vicinity—among the merchants and farmers, white and black. In these talks with the real people I can get at the actual needs and conditions of those for whom our institution is at work.

When talking to a farmer, I feel that I am talking with a real man and not an artificial one—one who can keep me in close touch with the real things. From a simple, honest cultivator of the soil, I am sure of getting first-hand, original information. I have secured more useful illustrations for addresses in a half-hour's talk with some white or coloured farmer than from hours of reading books.

If I were a minister, I think I should make a point of spending a day in each week in close, unconventional touch with the masses of the people. A vacation employed in visiting farmers, it seems to me, would often prepare one as thoroughly for his winter's work as a vacation spent in visiting the cities of Europe.

CHAPTER XIII On the Experimental Farm

The purpose most eagerly sought by the Agricultural Department of the Tuskegee Institute is to demonstrate to the farmers of Alabama, first of all, that with right methods their acres can be made to yield unfailing profit, and that they can win in the fight against the deadly mortgage system. In many of the Western and Northwestern States cheese-making has led the one-crop, wheat-growing farmers to independence. The South has felt that this industry was beyond its reach, and has set small store by the dairy business. At Tuskegee, not only has it been demonstrated that cows can be made to yield from 50 to 150 per cent. on the money invested, but also that every farmer can, at moderate cost, make his own cheese, with a good supply for the market. Not long ago, the graduate of the Institute who is directly in charge of the cheese and butter departments, sent to my home specimens of six kinds of cheese made at the school—Tuskegee Cream, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, Neufchatel, Cottage, Club-house, and Cheddar. These were as fine grades of cheese as can be found in any other creamery.

To find out what corn, grasses, pease, millet, etc., are best suited to the Southern climate and soil is the work of several years of earnest labour. At present experiments are in progress with ten varieties of corn, with vetch, clovers, cassava, sugar beet, Cuban sugar cane, eight kinds of millet, the Persian and Arabian beans, and many other food and forage plants. Fifty-five acres of peach orchard are sowed in pease, besides three hundred acres of corn land utilised for this second or auxiliary crop. The vegetable garden covers fifty acres, and there is hardly a day when this garden fails to help pay the table expenses of the school.

Stock raising is carried on more extensively each year. To get the best hog, sheep, cow, and horse for this region of the country is the chief aim. We cannot quit cotton, but we must raise our stock and our meat. The hen and the bee are great wealth-producers, but not more than one in three hundred Macon County families raise bees, and few of them give any special care to poultry. Therefore the school trustees spend a large sum of money each year in teaching the practical lessons of these industries.