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 undertook
whatever was told them--for this was new and strange work--if these
youths had not been "Negroes," the outside world would have been glad to
picture them in magazine and review.

The writer has had a long experience as master of a boy's boarding
school in the North, situated in a village which also contained a young
ladies' seminary. Had those young people been as sober and in earnest as
these dusky-skinned ones, as free from midnight mischief, how many weary
vigils would he have escaped!

The religious life at Tougaloo does not cease with term time. Two or
three young men go out to hold Sunday services in the country cabins,
the Sunday-school is full and the older ones serve as teachers, for many
children come in from surrounding fields, making a school of nearly one