The Girl's Hall, a great three story building with seven thousand five hundred square feet of ground plan, had been slowly settling into this treacherous alluvium, which is three hundred feet deep to the first sand and gravel, until the building was in danger of falling. Southern contractors advised taking it down because it could not be safely repaired. But the American Missionary Association's force was equal to the emergency. The weight, with the resulting strains and thrusts, was calculated. Concrete footings of sufficient area were planned, brick piers and heavy timbering were skillfully placed, and the building will stand stronger than new and much improved in plan.
If these youths, who pulled on the forty-eight great "jack-screws," lifting and blocking up the building section by section, who excavated exactly to the surveyor's stakes, who mixed concrete and mortar, who framed and handled the huge "hard pine" timbers, who earnestly undertook whatever was told them—for this was new and strange work—if these youths had not been "Negroes," the outside world would have been glad to picture them in magazine and review.
The writer has had a long experience as master of a boy's boarding school in the North, situated in a village which also contained a young ladies' seminary. Had those young people been as sober and in earnest as these dusky-skinned ones, as free from midnight mischief, how many weary vigils would he have escaped!
The religious life at Tougaloo does not cease with term time. Two or three young men go out to hold Sunday services in the country cabins, the Sunday-school is full and the older ones serve as teachers, for many children come in from surrounding fields, making a school of nearly one hundred teachers and pupils. The young people's society meeting each Sunday afternoon, and the prayer meetings on Sunday and Wednesday evenings are characterized by a quiet, earnest Christianity, that would do credit to any circle in our Northern States.
FROM A TEACHER IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS.
Let me tell you of the general interest manifest in several of the counties west and north of us in attending this school. One of our students has visited many cabins over the mountains during his vacation, and finds school advantages very scarce and poor. He finds poverty and degradation, and ignorance of the world and of books. Some of the people are still using the old-time method of kindling their fires by flint and steel instead of matches. He has met many young people who are thirsting for books and school, has also found numbers who have struggled up through the darkness and have become teachers in their own neighborhood, "the blind leading the blind." Such almost invariably wish to come to our school and say they shall be here as soon as their schools close. Many are too poor to come. This is true of a number of young girls who would come if they could work their board or in any possible way pay for it. Whoever will provide funds to meet the expenses of these neglected girls, and place them in our school and prepare them for the future duties of life, will be doing an angelic work, and in the end will do the greatest good that can be done to this people. Very much of the money spent for this mountain people will be the same as thrown away if this effort is not made to educate the girls.
The natives are having their big yearly meetings and lively times shouting and actually chasing each other in and around their log churches to pull them to the "mourner's bench," and, in their wild efforts, they upset stove pipes and benches. It is so much like a circus that everybody runs to the big meetings.