sewing-room.  In it are nearly a score, perhaps more, of cheerful, busy girls.  The rapid ticking of the machine is heard, and the merry laugh followed by gentle whispers gives life to the room.  These young girls are the future wives and mothers; and the large majority of them will be married to poor men.  In the kitchen, the laundry, and the sewing-room, they are acquiring a knowledge and habits of industry that will save their husbands’ pennies, and thus keep them from living from hand to mouth, making an everlasting struggle to save their nose from the grindstone.  In the schoolroom, they are gathering up those intellectual treasures, which will make them in a double sense helpmeets unto their husbands.

Standing in the carpenter and paint shops, and in the saw mill, and seeing Negro youths engaged in the most delicate kind of work, learning valuable and useful trades, I could not help from feeling that this is an excellent institution, and that I would like to have my boys spend three years here, from fourteen to seventeen, grow strong in the love for work, and educated to feel the dignity of labor, and get a trade:  then if they have the capacity and desire to qualify for a “top round in the ladder,” for leadership in the “world’s broad field of battle,” it will be time enough to think of Harvard and Yale and Edinburgh, or perhaps similar African institutions.

Mr. George H. Corliss, of Rhode Island, presented to the school in 1879 a sixty-horse power Corliss engine.  Soon after Mr. C.P.  Huntington, of the Missouri & Pacific R.R., gave a saw mill, and as a result of these gifts large industrial operations were begun.  The saw mill is certainly an extensive enterprise.  Logs are brought up from the Carolinas, and boards are sawn out, and in the turning department fancy fixtures are made for houses, piazzas, etc.

There are two farms.  The Normal School farm, and the Hemenway farm, which is four miles from the Institute.  On the former seventy tons of hay and about one hundred and twenty tons of ensilaged fodder-corn were raised last year, besides potatoes, corn, rye, oats, asparagus, and early vegetables.  Five hundred thousand bricks were also made.  The Hemenway farm, of five hundred acres, is in charge of a graduate and his wife.  Its receipts reach nearly three thousand dollars a year, and the farm promises to do invaluable service in time towards sustaining this gigantic work.  All of the industries do not pay.  For example, the deficit in the printing office last year was about seven hundred dollars.  This is due to the employment and training of student labor.  The primary aim is not the making of money but the advancement of the student.  After they learn, they are good, profitable workmen; but they then leave the Institute to engage in the outside world in the battle of life.  On the farm is a large number of stock, milch cows and calves, beef cattle, horses and colts, mules,