wanted things done promptly and systematically, and at the
bottom of everything she wanted absolute honesty and frankness. Nothing
must be sloven or slipshod; every door, every fence, must be kept in
repair.

I cannot now recall how long I lived with Mrs. Ruffner before going to
Hampton, but I think it must have been a year and a half. At any rate, I
here repeat what I have said more than once before, that the lessons that I
learned in the home of Mrs. Ruffner were as valuable to me as any education
I have ever gotten anywhere since. Even to this day I never see bits of
paper scattered around a house or in the street that I do not want to pick
them up at once. I never see a filthy yard that I do not want to clean it,
a paling off of a fence that I do not want to put it on, an unpainted or
unwhitewashed house that I do not want to paint or whitewash it, or a
button off one's clothes, or a grease-spot on them or on a floor, that I do
not want to call attention to it.

From fearing Mrs. Ruffner I soon learned to look upon her as one of my best
friends. When she found that she could trust me she did so implicitly.
During the one or two winters that I was with her she gave me an
opportunity to go to school for an hour in the day during a portion of the
winter months, but most of my studying was done at night, sometimes alone,
sometimes under someone whom I could hire to teach me. Mrs. Ruffner always
encouraged and sympathized with me in all my efforts to get an education.
It was while living with her that I began to get together my first library.
I secured a dry-goods box, knocked out one side of it, put some shelves in
it, and began putting into it every kind of book that I could get my hands
upon, and called it my "library."

Notwithstanding my success at Mrs. Ruffner's I did not give up the idea of
going to the Hampton Institute. In the fall of 1872 I determined to make an
effort to get there, although, as I have stated, I had no definite idea of
the direction in which Hampton was, or of what it would cost to go there. I
do not think that any one thoroughly sympathized with me in my ambition to
go to Hampton unless it was my mother, and she was troubled with a grave
fear that I was starting out on a "wild-goose chase." At any rate, I got
only a half-hearted consent from her that I might start. The small amount
of money that I had earned had been consumed by my stepfather and the
remainder of the family, with the excepti