Tuskegee, because Tuskegee has started in so many communities the spark
of true life and real civilization; in the impetus and inspiration it
has given, so beautiful and so perfect a consummation of the prophetic
vision of Hampton's founder.

Can the relations between the two institutions be better stated than in
the words of their two founders? After a visit to Tuskegee, General
Armstrong said: "The Tuskegee school is a wonderful work and Mr.
Washington is a remarkable man. He has carried out the idea of training
the head, hand, and heart in a wonderfully complete and perfect way.
This school is very much like the one at Hampton, and any one can
recognize the similarity, but he has made many improvements. It is not
merely an imitation. It is the Hampton Idea adapted and worked into a
most sensible and efficient application to the needs of the Alabama
Negroes." In the same memorial address at General Armstrong's funeral
from which I quoted at the beginning of this paper, Mr. Washington said,
"The rose I place on his grave is _his_ work at Tuskegee."

Hampton and Tuskegee, striving along common lines for common ends,
intimate in relationship, interdependent, each frankly criticizing and
freely advising, each profiting by the failures of the other, each
benefiting by the successes of the other, are both working as best they
may toward that "far-off divine event to which the whole creation
moves."

_PART II_

_AUTOBIOGRAPHIES BY GRADUATES OF THE SCHOOL_

I

A COLLEGE PRESIDENT'S STORY

BY ISAAC FISHER

I was born January 18, 1877, on a plantation called Perry's place, in
East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, and was the sixteenth and last child of
my parents. My early childhood was uneventful, save during the year
1882, when, by reason of the breaking of the Mississippi River levee
near my home, I was compelled, together with my parents, to live six
months in the plantation cotton-gin, fed by the Federal Government and
by the determination never to live so close to the "Big Muddy" again;
and during 1886, in which year my mother died.

Up to this latter year my life had been nothing more than that of the
average Negro boy on a cotton-farm. While I had been too young to feel
the burden of farm-life toil, I had not been spared a realization of the
narrowness and the dwarfing tendencies of the lives which the Negro
farmers and their families were living, and, in my heart, I cursed the
farm and all its envir