TOUGALOO, MISS.
MISS K. K. KOONS.
The year opens full of promise to us. The school is not only much larger than at the same time last year, but larger than at the same time in any previous year except the first few, before the zeal of this people on the subject of education had had time to abate. Though Strieby Hall is not yet finished, the lower floor, chapel and recitation rooms lack but the finishing touches and furniture, the first of which it is rapidly receiving, the last of which we look for daily.
We held our opening exercises in the chapel, fitted up with temporary seats. Our overcrowded Girl’s Hall and dining-room of last year prepared us thoroughly to enjoy the room which the enlargement to the building affords. Though neither building is completed, the work is being rapidly pushed forward. A number of our students, who came expecting to enter school at once, were glad of the opportunity to help themselves, and are putting in a month of work upon the buildings before entering, thus somewhat lessening the number enrolled at the opening.
Reports of the summer’s work given by our student teachers at our weekly prayer meeting were very encouraging indeed. It has been an unusually hard summer for many of them. Delay in finding vacant schools, the failure of people to keep engagements made with teachers, and hard fare, were very common. But though these things came to us in our letters from them during the summer, they were scarcely referred to in their reports. Interest in their work and the people with whom they labored entirely overshadowed the hardships. The disposition to take a cheerful view of things, and cheerfully and earnestly to meet and work against difficulties and discouragements, is becoming more manifest. Perhaps this is one of the good results to be wrought in them by the sacrifice and self-denial so bravely made after the burning of our chapel last spring.
The interest in the Sabbath-school work is greater. Fewer signers to the pledge are reported than in previous years. The temperance work is the “pons asinorum” of our young people. And well may it be, in view of the almost universal habit of drinking and using snuff and tobacco. In this work they do grow greatly “disencouraged.” But the number of signers to the pledge is, after all, no criterion by which to measure the quiet work done in the line of temperance.
The number enrolled at the opening last year was 46, this year 74. The number of day scholars taught by our twenty student teachers was 1,539; Sabbath-school scholars, 795; signers to pledge, 160; conversions, 32.
FISK UNIVERSITY, NASHVILLE, TENN.
BY REV. H. S. BENNETT.