the rear porch, looking out across the lawn, the family sometimes have their meals in summer. The interior is designed with all the ingenuity and taste. that have made modern houses models of comfort and convenience, and is at once large enough to be airy, and snug enough to be warm. Mr. Lewis is extremely fond of old furniture, and he has many trophies to show for his prowls among the antiquaries. I might mention also that in the library and study, which is the place which he regards as particularly his own, Mr. Lewis has a good collection of the books which concern the history of his race, and other races, and the walls are hung with the portraits of the men, both black and white, who have distinguished themselves by service to the Negro race. Mr. Lewis was born in Virginia thirty-nine years ago. Both his father and mother had been slaves, and he got his early education in the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, a school for colored youth. As a boy he peddled matches along the wharves at Portsmouth, Virginia, and in one way or another he made his way until he was able to enter Amherst College. While he was in Amherst he was captain of the foot-ball team. He won the Hardy Prize Debate and the Hardy Prize Oration, and at his graduation, in 1892, was chosen class orator. He was graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1895. During all this time he made his own way, working at various occupations which chance offered. He worked for a time, during this period, as a waiter in Young's Hotel, Boston. After his graduation he began the practice of law. He was three times chosen representative from Cambridge to the legislature, and was finally appointed, in 1903, to the position of United States District Attorney. Such, in brief, is the history of one of the more successful of those who are sometimes referred to in the South as the "new issue."

The limits of this article will not permit me to describe at the same length the homes of Dr. Samuel G. Elbert of Wilmington, Delaware; of Professor William S. Scarborough of Wilberforce, Ohio; nor that of A. D. Langston of St. Louis, Missouri, all of whom are, like Mr. Lewis, men of scholarly attainments,

whose homes reflect the best influence of modern American life.

Dr. Elbert, who was graduated from the Harvard Medical School in 1891, and after several years' experience, first as interne, and then as assistant resident physician, at the Freedman's Hospital in Washington, completed his medical education by a three years' graduate course at the Medical School at the University of Pennsylvania, is still a zealous student, and has collected a private library of some 5000 volumes. Professor W. S. Scarborough, who is the head of the department of Greek at the Wilberforce University, is author of a Greek textbook and a member of a number of learned societies to whose proceedings he is a valuable contributor. Mr. A. D. Langston, who is the son of the Hon. John Mercer Langston, the only colored man ever chosen from the State of Virginia as United States representative, is, as his father was before him, a graduate of Oberlin College. He has been for the larger part of his life a teacher, and is at present the head of the Dumas School at St. Louis, Missouri, where he is doing valuable work for the education of his

race.

A Negro home very different from any of these is that of Paul Chretien, who owns a large plantation of 360 acres two miles from St. Martinsville, in St. Martin's Parish, Louisiana. Mr. Chretien's father was a Creole Negro who made a fortune before the war raising cattle on the low and swampy prairies of southwestern Louisiana. When he died, he left each of his children, three boys and two girls, 360 acres of land, and to Paul he gave the quaint and beautiful country place in which he lived. It was a vast, roomy structure of brick and wood, with a wide gallery across the front, and a porch set into the building at the back. The house stands in the midst of a large garden in which flowers and fruits blossom and bear in tropical profusion. Side by side with such fruits as Northern people are familiar with, grow oranges and figs, which lend an air of luxuriance to eyes accustomed to soberer Northern landscapes.

Among the other Negro homes that I have visited, which have preserved either in their exterior or interior something of

the quality of the old Southern mansion, I might mention those of Bishop Elias Cottrell at Holly Springs, Mississippi; A. J. Wilborn of Tuskegee, Alabama; John Sunday of Pensacola, Florida; G. E. Davis of Charlotte, North Carolina; and that of Nicholas Chiles of Topeka, Kansas.

Bishop Cottrell, who will be remembered among the Negroes of Mississippi for the useful and courageous work he has done and is doing for Negro education in that State, has served the Colored Methodist Church of Mississippi in one capacity or another since 1875, and has been a bishop since 1894. A. J. Wilborn, a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute, is a merchant in Tuskegee, where he was born a year before the breaking out of the war. He was one of the first students of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. At the present time he owns one of the best business blocks in the town, and does a large and profitable business, particularly among the farmers in the surrounding country.

Professor G. E. Davis has been for twenty-one years a teacher in Biddle University at Charlotte, North Carolina. I quote the following passage from a letter from Mr. Davis because it illustrates ene of the curious family traditionswhere there were family traditions—that have been handed down to the new generation from the days of slavery.

His

My mother's father was born free. father, a native Scotchman, was a man of means, and left my maternal grandfather considerable wealth, entirely in gold coins, in strong iron chests. My maternal grandfather's wife, and consequently his children, were slaves, with a kind master. The father and husband hired the entire time of his wife and all his children, ten in number, and gave his sons the trade which he followed-mason and plasterer - and the girls the refining influence of a Christian home.

I might add that the struggle for freedom which his ancestors began, Mr. Davis has faithfully and honorably continued, adding to the hard-won freedom his father gained that other freedom that comes of economic independence, knowledge, and discipline.

John Sunday was a wheelwright before the war; then he became a soldier,

and was afterward a member of the Florida legislature. Since then he has been in business. He tells me that in 1906 his total taxes amounted to $1079.45. He has eight sons and two daughters, all of whom he educated at his own expense. Three of them went to Fisk University, and two of his sons are physicians.

Nicholas Chiles conducts a newspaper in Topeka, Kansas. He made his money, however, in real estate. Turned adrift, like many Negro boys after the war, to shift for himself, after years of aimless wanderings and adventure he attracted attention some years ago by buying a house in the same block with the Governor's mansion, and making of it a beautiful home.

An interesting fact with regard to the home of W. H. Goler of Salisbury, North Carolina, is that he built it almost wholly with his own hands. Mr. Goler learned the trade of mason at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he was born. He recalls that he worked at a later period on the old Adelphi Theater Building in Boston,-afterward the store of Jordan & Marsh,-and that when the men employed there refused to work with a Negro, he organized a gang of Negro bricklayers to take the place of the men who struck on that account. It was from the money he earned as a bricklayer in Boston that he was able to pay his way through Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, which he entered in 1873 at the mature age of twenty-seven. He completed his collegiate course there in 1878, and three years later was graduated from the theological department. After two years as pastor of a church at Greensboro, North Carolina, he became a teacher at Livingston College, where, in addition to his other work, he superintended the industries of the college and, with the help of the students, made the brick and laid the walls of most of the college buildings. He is now president of that college.

J. H. Phillips was born on the "Carter Place," a few miles from Tuskegee. He studied at Hampton Institute, and went from there to the Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. He has a beautiful home in Montgomery, which, he informs me, is insured for $7500.