lf. The matter does not end in mere talk and advice. The
women teachers go right into the cabins of the people and show them how
to keep them clean, how to dust, sweep, and cook.

When William Edwards left this community a few years ago for the
Tuskegee school, he left the larger proportion in debt, mortgaging their
crops every year for the food on which to live. Most of them were living
on rented land in small one-room log cabins, and attempting to pay an
enormous rate of interest on the value of their food advances. As one
old colored man expressed it, "I ain't got but six feet of land, and I
is got to die to git dat." The little school taught in a cabin lasted
only three or four months in the year. The religion was largely a matter
of the emotions, with almost no practical ideas of morality. It was the
white man for himself and the negro for himself, each in too many cases
trying to take advantage of the other. The situation was pretty well
described by a black man who said to me: "I tells you how we votes.
We always watches de white man, and we keeps watchin' de white man.
De nearer it gits to 'lection-time de more we watches de white man. We
keeps watchin' de white man till we find out which way he gwine to vote;
den we votes 'zactly de odder way. Den we knows we is right."

Now how changed is all at Snow Hill, and how it is gradually changing
each year! Instead of the hopelessness and dejection that were there a
few years ago, there are now light and buoyancy in the countenances and
movements of the people. The negroes are getting out of debt and buying
land, ceasing to mortgage their crops, building houses with two or three
rooms, and a higher moral and religious standard has been established.

Last May, on the day that the school had its closing exercises, there
were present, besides the hundreds of colored-people, about fifty of the
leading white men and women of the county, and these white people seemed
as much interested in the work of the school as the people of my own
race.

Only a few years ago in the State of Alabama the law in reference to the
education of the negro read as follows: "Any person or persons who shall
attempt to teach any free person of color or slave to spell, read, or
write shall, upon conviction thereof by indictment, be fined in a sum
not less than two hundred and fifty dollars nor more than five hundred
dollars."

Within half a dozen years I have heard Dr. J. L. M. Curry, a brave,