they were very anxious that their children should be in the same
institution. For that reason, as it meant a good deal out of the
family purse to board three or four children in such an institution as
that, eight or nine years ago the family moved from a little town in
the northern part of Kentucky to Nashville. We were reared in a quiet
Christian home and early placed in Fisk University.

I did not have an opportunity to come into personal contact with the
class of colored people who make up the great mass in the South until
after I had left school and gone to a little town in western Tennessee
to teach. There I was placed in charge of the young women in the
boarding department, and I sought to come most intimately in contact
with their lives. Many of these young women came straight from the
cotton plantations, and, although they could not sing and play as well
as we who had been at Fisk, many of them boasted that they could
handle a plow as well as a man. We undertook mission work in
connection with the circle of King's Daughters which I organized among
the girls, and the condition of the people as we found it in the two
years I was there among the poor negroes of the city was very painful
to me. Very often I came in from my visits in the poorer districts and
closed the door of my room, feeling that I must leave it all to the
Saviour, it seemed so discouraging and so much more than we could do.
We found, among other things, that we needed to teach the women the
most common and necessary habits of life, how to put the children to
bed, how to feed and clothe them. Yet I would say that it is through
the students of such schools as Fisk University that the Northern
teachers whom you send to us can hope to reach the masses of our
colored people. We get the life from our Northern teachers and then
the great mass of the colored people look to us for it, for we can get
into the home and into the life of the people as they cannot. And we
begin to feel the responsibility; we begin to realize how much the
race depends upon the mother and the sister and the wife. We begin to
realize that we as negro women must be especially alive to the
quickening influence of all that is noble and grand and true. We
realize that we are indeed

"Living in a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling,
To be living is sublime."

* * * * *

EXTRACT FROM ADDRESS OF MRS. WOODBURY.

Our eyes and