There is no more exceptional educational institution in America than the Berry School for mountain whites, near Rome, Ga., and yet the whole work grew out of a little Sunday-school that Miss Martha Berry established in the mountains near Possum Trot, Ga., less than ten years ago. At that time Miss Berry was residing on an estate which was all that was left of the fortune of the Southern family to which she belonged. In taking her walks she was imprest by the desolate condition of the mountain children. Their parents were too poor to supply them with anything more than the barest necessities of life, and they were growing up in utter indifference to everything pertaining to education. To remedy this to a small degree, she invited a number of them to meet her every Sunday at a little cabin she owned, and there undertook to teach them a few of the things they most needed to know. At the time Miss Berry had no thought of establishing a permanent school. Instead of being a temporary affair, however, the school soon made itself an institution, practically without any effort on her part. So far as the children of the “poor whites” were concerned, they not only crowded her cabin to more than its full capacity every Sunday, but they finally came to her with the request that a day-school be added. For a time it looked as if the movement had come to a point beyond which it could not go, but finally Miss Berry screwed up sufficient courage to make a trip to the North that she might tell some of the rich philanthropists about her “poor white” boys and her mountain school. It was an interesting story that she had to tell, and she told it so well that she went back to her pupils with funds sufficient not only to maintain the school, but to enlarge it. To-day the school has one thousand acres of land, much of it under cultivation, and several fine buildings, in which fifteen teachers are kept busy instructing the one hundred and fifty pupils, not only in the studies of the ordinary school, but in the useful trades as well.—Human Life.
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NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE CULTURE
The lesson of the following poem, by T. Berry Smith, is that if we cultivate the good diligently the evil will thereby be weeded out:
Two fields lay side by side. Only a hedge
Which ran athwart the plain dissevered them.
In one my title lay, and he who owned
The other was my brother. Each alike
Had generous part of one ancestral lot,
And each alike due diligence displayed