For "ready money," however, they must depend on what they receive from home, which is a small proportion of the total bank deposits, and upon what they are able to earn out of working hours. Many of them act as agents on commission for mail-order houses, which supply clothing, shoes, underwear, and a variety of necessaries and a few luxuries. In the summer a large number of young men go from Tuskegee to work in the Southern States, many of them in the Alabama coal fields, to earn money to pay the expenses of their education through the next school year. They save these earnings and bring them back to deposit in the Institute bank.
But these savings are not in dollars for the most part, but in quarters, dimes, and even pennies. In looking over the books of the bank recently, the individual ledger accounts attracted my notice. There was a whole page given the account of one girl, whose individual deposits did not average more than ten cents. There were several of three cents, and one of two cents. It seemed to me that this girl student was worth watching in after life. If she was willing to walk across the grounds and back, a round trip of perhaps half a mile, from her dormitory or work-shop, to make a deposit of three cents in the savings bank, and to continue her deposits, although she was never able to save more than a few cents at a time, she was fast learning the value of small things, and was already far along the path of practical usefulness.
IN THE MODEL DINING-ROOM
One thousand students assemble three times a day in the main dining-hall. They take their seats without confusion or noise. A line of young men and women face each other at each table, and over them presides a student host and a hostess. The young women are seated first, and then the young men march in. But no conversation is allowed until all are seated, and until after a simple grace is chanted by this chorus of a thousand voices.
The meal is something more than a necessary consumption of food. The deference which a young man should always pay to woman is taught, without demonstration, by the manner of assembling. Self-restraint is taught the girls by waiting five minutes in their seats before they begin to eat and to talk. Their meeting at table inculcates good manners. The boys are on their mettle to act like gentlemen, and the host and hostess feel a personal responsibility for enforcing the little details of courtesy and good breeding.
The corps of teachers assembles for meals in another dining-room. They are not needed to preserve order or enforce discipline, as the students have that matter largely in their own hands. Inspectors see that their clothes have been brushed, their faces and hands cleaned of the stains of the farm and work shops, as the army enters the dining-hall. But behaviour takes care of itself. It is not long since I read of riotous scenes in the "commons" of certain Northern universities, in which students were guilty of throwing bread and crockery around the room. This has never happened at Tuskegee, and this kind of disorder in our dining-hall is quite beyond my imagination.
Once in a while, when tired of office work, I walk across the school grounds and drop into one of the dormitories to talk with the boys or girls in their rooms, and see for myself how they are living and what they are doing to make their rooms, not only spotlessly neat, but livable and attractive. Not long ago I went into a room in one of the girls' halls, which was clean but utterly cheerless. She said in explanation that she had been told that, if she could not keep the photographs and all the other bric-a-brac that finds its way into a girl's room dustless and in order, she should store the superfluous articles away. I told her that the result of this misguided endeavour was a room that looked as much like a barn as it did a home. She told me how much she had spent during the term in buying chocolate to make "fudge." For the same outlay she could have had pretty framed prints on her walls, and other simple adornment in good taste and without "clutter." That evening I said, while talking to the students in chapel: