intensified. Soon it became
impossible to continue in attendance at the day school, and he had to be
content with attending an evening class after completing the day's toil.
Under the most favourable circumstances this was exhausting; and his
experience proved still more trying when he was removed from the salt
works to serve in a coal mine, which supplied the furnaces with fuel.
Booker Washington has very vivid recollections of the horrors and even
constant dangers attending such subterranean work. The darkness alone
was almost such as might be felt; and the mishaps, through taking a
wrong path, through falling coal, or a candle getting extinguished, were
ever threatening those engaged in the works. It was in such an
atmosphere and amid such surroundings, however, that the dawn of a new
era sent its beams across his chequered pathway. It was there that he
heard for the first time of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural
Institute, which was destined to shape for him his life-course. The
institution in question is near to the small town and bathing resort of
Hampton, in Virginia, and the channel, commanded by Fortress Monroe, was
the scene of some lively naval fights during the Civil War. The
institution was founded in 1868 by General S. C. Armstrong, and two
years later was incorporated by the State of Virginia. Its object is
stated to be "to train young men and women of the negro and Indian races
to become teachers among their own people." Booker Washington happened
to overhear two men in the coal mine conversing together about this
school, and he resolved to find out everything possible about it. The
revelation had for him something more than passing interest; strange new
hopes had been kindled in his soul. If he had asked, Who was Samuel
Chapman Armstrong? he might have learned that he was an officer who had
served in the Civil War, and that he was born in the Hawaiian Islands in
1839. The General was a genuine, warm-hearted friend of the coloured
races, and as he became to Booker Washington an exemplar, or even
something like an apostle, who did more than any other human teacher to
mark out his pathway of life, some reference may be made to the
pressing needs of the freed negroes in the years which immediately
followed the close of the Civil War. There are now some ten million
coloured people in the Southern States, but at the time in question
there were less than half of this number. Nevertheless, the crisis was
suf