of me. He gladly
consented to come to Tuskegee and hold the Thanksgiving service. It was
the first service of the kind that the coloured people there had ever
observed, and what a deep interest they manifested in it! The sight
of the new building made it a day of Thanksgiving for them never to be
forgotten.

Mr. Bedford consented to become one of the trustees of the school, and
in that capacity, and as a worker for it, he has been connected with it
for eighteen years. During this time he has borne the school upon his
heart night and day, and is never so happy as when he is performing some
service, no matter how humble, for it. He completely obliterates himself
in everything, and looks only for permission to serve where service is
most disagreeable, and where others would not be attracted. In all my
relations with him he has seemed to me to approach as nearly to the
spirit of the Master as almost any man I ever met.

A little later there came into the service of the school another man,
quite young at the time, and fresh from Hampton, without whose service
the school never could have become what it is. This was Mr. Warren
Logan, who now for seventeen years has been the treasurer of the
Institute, and the acting principal during my absence. He has always
shown a degree of unselfishness and an amount of business tact, coupled
with a clear judgment, that has kept the school in good condition no
matter how long I have been absent from it. During all the financial
stress through which the school has passed, his patience and faith in
our ultimate success have not left him.

As soon as our first building was near enough to completion so that we
could occupy a portion of it--which was near the middle of the second
year of the school--we opened a boarding department. Students had begun
coming from quite a distance, and in such increasing numbers that we
felt more and more that we were merely skimming over the surface, in
that we were not getting hold of the students in their home life.

We had nothing but the students and their appetites with which to begin
a boarding department. No provision had been made in the new building
for a kitchen and dining room; but we discovered that by digging out a
large amount of earth from under the building we could make a partially
lighted basement room that could be used for a kitchen and dining room.
Again I called on the students to volunteer for work, this time to
assist in digging out th