FISK'S FINISHED PRODUCT.
Gen. Fisk, the brilliant soldier and ardent philanthropist, lent invaluable aid and consented to have the institution, so problematical in its existence, bear his name. Governor Brownlow and the pioneer educator of colored youth, Professor John Ogden, added the weight of their words and helpful deeds, and Fisk had come into being.
Romance attended the early life of the University.—Nearly four years had passed, when the Professor of music started out with a band of colored youth, who had been named the Jubilee Singers. That they could sing with incomparable sweetness he knew. That the songs they were to sing had incomparable pathos no one who heard them doubted. But nothing short of sublimest faith could have sent forth this band of friendless youth on their mission. They often were penniless as they went from town to town. They arrived at Oberlin and were permitted to sing before the National Council, then in session at that stronghold of the colored man. The tide turned. It rose with rapidity. Plymouth, Brooklyn, and other churches were opened to them. The entire North gave them welcome. They crossed the Atlantic; that gracious friend of humanity Queen Victoria, gave them audience. Her incomparable prime minister, Gladstone, made them his guests at Hawarden. Germany and France heard them. At the end of seven years they returned to Nashville and laid at the feet of the University the munificent sum of $150,000, a large part of which was devoted to the erection of Jubilee Hall and the remainder to the paying for the campus of thirty-five acres, once a slave plantation, now the most commanding location in the Athens of the South, as Nashville, the seat of four universities, is justly called.
A BAND OF KING'S DAUGHTERS.
There has been romance in all its life. Never for a year has the hard work, the distasteful drudgery, the, at the time, apparently fruitless toil been undertaken on the basis of cold calculating judgment; from its birth to the present hour, ideals that to most men would have seemed dreams and wild fancies, have animated the leaders of this enterprise—such ideals as have underlain the world's greatest achievements and have given heart to the world's victors.
LIVINGSTONE HALL.
A gift mainly from Mrs. Valeria G. Stone.
Wisdom and Painstaking attention to the material interests of the University, that have challenged the admiration of those who have watched its growth, have been coupled with all this romance. The ideal has been made actual. This has not been due to one man, nor one sex, nor one race. For a quarter of a century and more, have men and women, white and black, worked with an unanimity rarely equaled, with patience and self-sacrifice. As the outcome there is