More and more highly is the department of musical training esteemed by those who understand the work. All receive training in vocal music as a part of their daily school work, and would there were more with means to take instrumental lessons!
The best of music is taught, from the primary grades upward; and it is an inspiring thing to hear almost everybody who is at work or play, not at books, singing and chanting the most beautiful compositions; the girls from attic chamber to basement laundry, may be chanting, "Thou who leddest Joseph like a flock," while the carpenter's apprentices—perchance upon a barn-roof—may be rolling forth the temperance Marseillaise, and our ears may distinguish from the neighboring "quarters" the little children of the day and Sabbath-school singing cheerily,
"Angry words, O let them never
From the tongue unbridled slip;
May the heart's best impulse ever
Check them ere they pass the lip."
Nothing, perhaps, more commends the school to the notice of our white neighbors than its music, and greater numbers of them will come to a concert than to any other exercise.
In the Mansion are our rooms for the Normal Department, a study room and a laboratory. The primary, intermediate and grammar grades are taught in the new school-house, between the Mansion and Strieby Hall, the upper part of which is a neat and commodious chapel. The primary school is free of tuition as a practice-school for the Normal students, and brings in many little ones from the region round about.
We send forth many teachers for the public schools, and despite the shortness of the terms and the want of appliances, we see encouraging evidences of better work done there from year to year. Besides test-book teaching, these young home-missionaries labor in many lines for the moral, social and material improvement of their people, and deserve much help and cheer.