EMERSON INSTITUTE.
BY MISS EMMA CAUGHEY, MOBILE, ALA.
The accompanying cut of Emerson Institute presents it in its new and enlarged proportions. Oct 3d, 1882, with much joy and thanksgiving, we dedicated its new walls, “Pro Christo et Humanitate.” It is a fine substantial building, well adapted to our school work. A basement play-room under the entire building furnishes protection to the children on rainy days. The first floor contains three pleasant school-rooms, four halls and a library. Four stair-ways lead to the play-room, and the same number lead up to the second floor, where are three more cheery, well ventilated school-rooms, separated from each other by uplifting sash doors, by which the entire upper story may be thrown into one large hall. Here we assemble for morning devotions, hold our public rhetoricals and evening socials. Contributions from friends at the North have enabled us to place a reading table in one corner of the normal room, furnished with the best weeklies and monthlies, a handsome clock and some tasteful mottoes on the wall, each of which we may hope is a little rill flowing into that stream of silent influences which serves not only to brighten the lives of the pupils but to help them to a nobler manhood and a purer womanhood. We have enrolled during the year three hundred and twenty-one different pupils under the care of six teachers. We have an industrial department connected with our school, in which sewing and fancy work are taught. We meet for two hours each Friday evening at the close of the regular session of school. This evening hour is a happy climax to the week for the girls, but is a great tension upon the nervous force of the teachers at the end of the week’s wear and tear. We close this department of our school with a fair, where the articles made by the girls are offered for sale, the proceeds of which are to be divided between foreign missions and our own worthy poor.
EMERSON INSTITUTE, MOBILE, ALA.