on to stay, and to stay put."

Yes, they were thinking of that roof; had to, because it leaked like a
market basket, and they needed the place right now, what with the many
colored Methodists who had come to town and had no home--only rooms in
the little houses of the colored settlement that had been too small for
comfort even before the exodus. But the place would be worth a lot to
their work when they got it.

"About how much do you think of spending, Mr. Driver?" J.W. asked.
Knowing the limited means of Saint Marks, he expected to supply the
cheapest roofing the Farwell Hardware Company had in stock, but Pastor
Driver had a surprise for him.

"Why," he said, "we want the best there is. That building was a barn,
I'll admit, but it is strongly built, and we expect to fix it pretty
thoroughly. We have a gift from the Board of Home Missions and Church
Extension, and we match that with as much again of our own money, enough
in all to swing the building around off the alley, put it on a new
foundation next to the church, and remodel it for our needs."

"That's news to me," said J.W., "though of course I'm glad to hear it.
But I didn't know that the Board put money into such work as this.
Somehow I supposed you were under the Board of Education for Negroes."

"No, not for this sort of church work," the colored pastor answered. "I
was 'under' the Board of Education for Negroes, as you put it, for a
long time myself, in the days when it was called the Freedmen's Aid
Society. And so was my wife. But now we're doing missionary work, and
that's the other Board's job."

"Oh, yes," J.W. assented. "I might have known that. And you mean that
you were under the Freedmen's Aid Society when you were going to
school--is that it?"

"That's it," said Pastor Driver, with a gleaming smile. "I was in two of
the schools. Philander Smith College, at Little Rock, Arkansas, and
Clark University, at Atlanta, Georgia. Then I got my theological course
at Gammon, on the same campus as Clark."

"You say your wife was in school too?"

"Yes"--with an even brighter smile--"she was at Clark when I met her.
Like me, she attended two schools on that campus. The other was Thayer
Home, a girls' dormitory, supported by the Woman's Home Missionary
Society."

"A home? Then how could it be a school?" J.W. asked.

"That's just it, Mr. Farwell," the minister explained. "It was a school
of home life, not only cooking and sewing and scrubbing, and what