and many a day in his shoemaker’s shop, as I sat and kept the fire going, he would teach me and carry me as far as he could; and he put into me the idea of getting an education.  At fifteen he told me I might have my own time.  At that age I had advanced far enough to pass the examination of the district school, and, having passed, I made my way to Fisk University.  I had not known that there was such an institution in the land, or such a thing as the Missionary Association; but going once into an adjoining county, I happened to fall in with some Christian young men from Fisk, and they told me about that school.  I had always had a great desire to be educated, and so I went down there.  When I arrived there, I thought it was a strange place.  I was familiar with white people, but I think I had never up to that time had one of them shake hands with me.  When I found what they were doing there, and that it was an earnest Christian school, my whole soul was uplifted, and I determined to seek for better things.  I thought I was pretty well educated, but when I found myself down stairs among those learning grammar and arithmetic, and that there were nine years before me, I concluded that after all I was not very well educated, but I set out to go through that long course of study.

During all those years of study I taught school every summer.  For nine years I was not out of the school room a month in the year.  I was either a pupil or a teacher.  Wherever I was teaching, I would try to set up a little Fisk University of my own.  You know that the school teacher who goes out into these country places is everybody and everything.  He is law and gospel, and he must know everything—­at least, he must not let people know that he does not know everything.  So I was not only school teacher, but I organized a Sunday-school, and preached, also.  Especially in Mississippi I did that kind of work, where there was much need of it.  This is the way that hundreds of young men have gone through Fisk University and other institutions.  We get our education sometimes at great cost, and at great hardships.  Sometimes we break down under this constant strain of teaching.  Many a time in Mississippi swamps I have waded up to my knees in water going to school, and many a time have I taught lying sick on my back; but the money had to be made.  This is the way we get through, and not only the young men but the girls.  There are two things which it teaches us:  It teaches us how to be men, and it teaches us how to work.  We are forced to do it for the money’s sake, and it is not only for the money’s sake, because we are sure that these young men and young ladies go out with a Christian desire to do good, and a young man, whether he is a Christian or not, feels that he must do Christian work when he is teaching in the summer.  He is hardly respectable if he does not do that sort of thing during his service as a teacher.  In that way the great masses of the people are being reached by Christian students going out among them.