What of the human life at Tougaloo?  College is out; the teachers are in the far North.  Miss Emerson, Preceptress of the Girl’s Hall; Mr. Hitchcock, Treasurer; Mr. Klein, Superintendent of the Farm; and Mr. Kennedy, Superintendent of Carpentry; and Mr. McKibban, borrowed from Macon school, are present to supervise the necessary work, for Tougaloo cannot be closed a day.  With its farm and forest and its shops, it is to become for the Southwest what Hampton is for the Eastern South.  May the Lord prompt some of his stewards to make investments here which will bring in a ten-fold interest for the nation and for heaven!

The dining-hall shows a number of tables well filled at meal times.  Most interesting are the ten little girls whom Miss Emerson has taken to bring up to womanhood with habits of industry and economy, and with characters pure and joyous.  Each day has its routine for them; the bedroom, the dining-room, the kitchen, the sewing-room, the lesson hour, the play time and the period for personal advice and religious instruction, have their appropriate but never-forgotten place.

There are a dozen of the large girls, young women who do the washing, “clean house,” cook the daily meals and can fruit from the garden and orchard for the Sunday-night dish of sauce during the coming year.  Part of these are girls in the regular domestic course, a few are kept to work for their board and instruction rather than have them obliged to go into the cotton fields at home under unscrupulous overseers.  These girls have a long, busy day, for the work needed to keep any one of the great boarding schools in efficient operation would surprise any one of our contributing friends who has never been “thro’ the mill.”

The boys—­little fellows some of them only seventy-two inches tall in their bare feet—­comprise the regular students in the industrial courses; the baker, the butcher or meat boy, the irrepressible John boy of all work about the kitchen; then the stock, the farm, the carpenter and blacksmith apprentices, together with several kept for general help, for work of an unusual magnitude was to be undertaken this vacation.

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.