he taxed himself more heavily and drove
himself harder than he did any one else. Like other strong men, he had
the weaknesses of his strength, and probably his most serious
weakness was driving himself and his subordinates beyond his and their
strength.

His eye was daily upon every part of the great machine which he had
built up through an exhaustive system of daily reports. These reports
were placed on his desk each morning when at the Institute and mailed
to him each morning when away. They showed him the number of students
in the hospital with the name, diagnosis, and progress of each case.
From the poultry yard came reports giving the number of eggs in the
incubators, the number hatched since the day before, the number of
chickens which had died, the number of eggs and chickens sold, etc.
Similarly daily reports came from the swine herd, the dairy herd, and
all the other groups of live stock.

He received also each morning a report from the savings department
giving the number of new depositors, the amounts of money deposited
and withdrawn, and the condition of the bank at the close of the
previous day. There was, too, a list of the requisitions approved by
the Business Committee the previous day giving articles, prices,
divisions, or departments in which each was to be used and totals for
different classes of requisitions.

[Illustration: Mr. Washington was a great believer in the sweet
potato. He personally supervised the work of preparing for sweet
potato planting.]

The Boarding Department head would report just what had been served
the students at the three meals of the day before. In running over
these menus he would give a contemptuous snort if he came upon any
instance of what he called "feeding the students out of the barrel."
By this he meant buying food which could as well or better have been
raised on the Institute farms. He objected to this practice not
only because it was more expensive, but because it eliminated the work
of raising, preparing, and serving the foods which he regarded as a
valuable exercise in civilization. He also insisted that everything
raised on the farms should in one way or another be used by the
students. Besides serving to the students every variety of Southern
vegetable from the Institute's extensive truck gardens, he always
insisted that their own corn be ground into meal and that they make
their own preserves out of their own peaches, blackberries, and other
fruits. In