the girls were required to take
cooking twice a week and 209 of the girls in the normal classes took
basketry.

As the trades were the great attraction in the school curriculum, it was
deemed necessary to separate the school into two divisions, that
students might have an opportunity to receive instruction equally in the
Academic and Industrial Departments. This year this scheme worked
successfully by an arrangement that placed one division in the Academic
Department on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, while the other was at
work, and the other division in the Trades Department on Thursdays,
Fridays, and Saturdays, while the other was in school, and so on
regularly.

Girl life at Tuskegee is strenuous. Though study and work are constantly
to the fore, character is effectively developed with brain and muscle,
and the well-earned recreation-hour comes just frequently enough to lend
the highest source of pleasure. Though the girl usually comes with a
hazy conception of what the days in school will really mean for the
ripening of those powers that she earnestly intends to use for the best
development of herself, there is always a spirit of learning, that she
may be of service to others. That is what counts in the school-days of
the average girl in her struggle for more light.

The girl, coming a stranger from her home in the city or country, is
lost in a crowd of girls new to dormitory life. New surroundings and new
conditions are everywhere. New emotions, new purposes, new resolutions
chase one another in her thoughts, and she becomes a stranger to herself
only to find her bearings first in her own room. Here Maine and
California, far-away Washington and Central America, meet on common
ground. Alabama and Georgia alone feel kinship from geographical
propinquity.

Beds, one double and one single, chairs, a table, mirror, bookcase,
wardrobe, wash-stand, and screen, all manufactured on the grounds,
compose the simple furniture of the room. But a few pictures, a strip of
carpet before each bed, a bright table-covering, soon give the room the
appearance of home, and the untried life has begun. The duty-list
assigns to each girl her work, and perhaps the first lessons in order
and system will be fairly instituted.

How many and varied are the associations that cluster about the life of
the girl in her room, that refuge from a day of discouragement in
schoolroom or workshop, and a haven of peace during the quiet hours of