ows a number of tables well filled at meal times. Most
interesting are the ten little girls whom Miss Emerson has taken to
bring up to womanhood with habits of industry and economy, and with
characters pure and joyous. Each day has its routine for them; the
bedroom, the dining-room, the kitchen, the sewing-room, the lesson hour,
the play time and the period for personal advice and religious
instruction, have their appropriate but never-forgotten place.

There are a dozen of the large girls, young women who do the washing,
"clean house," cook the daily meals and can fruit from the garden and
orchard for the Sunday-night dish of sauce during the coming year. Part
of these are girls in the regular domestic course, a few are kept to
work for their board and instruction rather than have them obliged to go
into the cotton fields at home under unscrupulous overseers. These girls
have a long, busy day, for the work needed to keep any one of the great
boarding schools in efficient operation would surprise any one of our
contributing friends who has never been "thro' the mill."

The boys--_little_ fellows some of them only seventy-two inches tall in
their bare feet--comprise the regular students in the industrial
courses; the baker, the butcher or meat boy, the irrepressible John boy
of all work about the kitchen; then the stock, the farm, the carpenter
and blacksmith apprentices, together with several kept for general help,
for work of an unusual magnitude was to be undertaken this vacation.

The Girl's Hall, a great three story building with seven thousand five
hundred square feet of ground plan, had been slowly settling into this
treacherous alluvium, which is three hundred feet deep to the first sand
and gravel, until the building was in danger of falling. Southern
contractors advised taking it down because it could not be safely
repaired. But the American Missionary Association's force was equal to
the emergency. The weight, with the resulting strains and thrusts, was
calculated. Concrete footings of sufficient area were planned, brick
piers and heavy timbering were skillfully placed, and the building will
stand stronger than new and much improved in plan.

If these youths, who pulled on the forty-eight great "jack-screws,"
lifting and blocking up the building section by section, who excavated
exactly to the surveyor's stakes, who mixed concrete and mortar, who
framed and handled the huge "hard pine" timbers, who earnestly