Strieby Hall has accommodations for nearly a hundred young men, besides a teacher’s family or two.  It is kept in scrupulous neatness by the young men under their matron’s eye.  She teaches them to nurse one another in sickness; she also instructs them in the care of their clothing and requires them to mend when the weekly wash comes in.  One young man became so proud of his skill in this line that he wanted to put his darned old socks—­old darned socks would sound better, perhaps—­into our industrial exhibit for the New Orleans Exposition, among the chains and wheels from the blacksmith and wagon shops, the brackets, step-ladders, etc., from the carpenter shop, the cups and coffee-pots from the tinshop, and the girls’ plain sewing and fancy-work.

There are regular apprentices to all the trades named, and all the boys of certain grades have lessons, one hour daily, in the several shops, to get the use of tools and simple work; there is also a course of industrial drawing running through the school grades for boys and girls alike.

The school is upon a plantation of five hundred acres, worked by the young men under the direction of the farm superintendent, a graduate of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, who gives them “talks,” as he terms his lectures, upon practical themes pertaining to general farming, fruit-growing, and the care of stock.

As we walk up from the station through, first a wood of water-oak, sweet-gum and hickory, then an open glade with scattering persimmon trees upon it, and lastly, a fine park of postoaks draped with Spanish moss, we approach the old southern “Mansion,” which was the only building of any account upon the ground when the Association purchased it in 1869, and which is still the handsomest one.  It has a little romance of its own, having been made spacious and beautiful for a bride who never came into it; but, notwithstanding this disappointment of its builder, it has in God’s providence been greatly connected with home-building.

Here live the President’s family and some of the other teachers.  Here are business offices, a pleasant reading-room with an open fire upon its hearth, and a small library adjoining.  In this house is a guest-chamber where all friends of the school are made welcome, and here are the music-rooms, one containing a piano and one a cabinet organ.

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,