Mr. Phillips once said to me:

In building and furnishing our home, we may have been a little extravagant; but the homes in which we were born and reared were neither ceiled nor plastered, the walls were without pictures, our beds without springs, and the kitchen was without a stove. On the floor there was no matting, or carpet, except a burlap sack I used to stand upon on cold mornings. We are trying to make up, my wife and I, for all we missed in our childhood.

I have room to say but little of the wonderful career of Bishop Abraham Grant, who was born in an ox-cart while his mother was being carried home from the slave-market; was himself sold for $6000, Confederate currency, during the war; and has since traveled over a large part of the world-through Europe, Africa, and the West Indies-largely in the interests of his church. Bishop Grant's present residence is in Kansas City, Kansas, although his home, as he says, is in Indianapolis.

I can only mention the names of Bishop R. S. Williams of the Colored Methodist Church, whose home is in Augusta, Georgia; and Bishop G. W. Clinton of the Zion African Methodist, who lives at Charlotte, North Carolina; C. W. Hadnott, a contractor and builder of Birmingham, Alabama; and Andrew M. Monroe, who has been for many years collector for the Merchants' National Bank at Savannah, Georgia,-men whose homes, if less pretentious than some others I have named, still have about them, in a more than usual degree, the cheerful, wholesome atmosphere of a home.

One of the most imposing Negro residences of which I know is that of Dr. Seth Hills of Jacksonville, Florida. Dr. Hills is still a young man, and has been singularly favored by fortune and unusually successful in his profession. father, a very practical man, who was at the same time preacher and carpenter, set him at an early age to learning the cigar trade. It was with this trade that he supported himself for the most part during the years he studied at Walden University, and afterward at the Long Island Medical College of Brooklyn, New York. While there he was fortunate enough to make friends who helped him to complete his education there and abroad.

His home is one of the many handsome Negro residences of Jacksonville.

There are other Negro physicians whose homes attracted me; among them are Dr. C. S. Swan of Columbus, Georgia, and Dr. Richard Carey of Macon, Georgia. Dr. Carey was graduated from Howard University, studied afterward in New York, and in Vienna, Austria. Since his return from Europe he has confined his practice almost wholly to diseases of the eye, ear, nose, and throat. I might mention also the names of J. M. Hazelwood, S. W. Starks of Charleston, West Virginia, whose residences are as handsome and complete as any that I know, and Dr. Ulysses Grant Mason of Birmingham, Alabama, who, after completing his course at Meharry Medical College, Nashville, went abroad in order to take a special course in surgery at the Royal Hospital of Edinburgh. In 1895 Dr. Mason was elected to the position of assistant city physician, a post not held before that time by a colored man.

There are other Negro homes that are quite as deserving of notice as any that I have mentioned. I have written of those that have come in my way, and they have served the purpose of this article, which has been to throw some new light on the deep and silent influences that are working for the upbuilding of the Negro people in this country.

The average person who does not live in the South has the impression that the Southern white people do not like to see Negroes live in good homes. Of course there are narrow-minded white people living in the South, as well as in the North and elsewhere; but as I have gone through the South, and constantly come into contact with the members of my race, I am surprised at the large numbers who have been helped and encouraged to buy beautiful homes by the best element of white people in their communities. I think I am safe in saying that the sight of a well-kept, attractive home belonging to a Negro does not call for as much adverse comment in the South as it does in Northern States.

The fact is that human nature is pretty much the same the world over, and economy, industry, and good character always bring their rewards, whether the person concerned lives in the North or in the South.

A

DUSTY gray car, long and slim

bodied, coasted noiselessly down the trail into Main Street and swung past the Dizzy Ghost with a warning flutter of the exhaust. At the driving-wheel sat a slender figure, graceful, notwithstanding a loose linen cloak smirched with patches of the impalpable alkaline powder that every squall of the desert wind raised from the ground in thinly nebulous sheets. Nor did the masking leather goggles, caked with the soft, clinging mold, erase the impression of loveliness concealed. Beside the wraith-like figure, enshrined in dusty mystery, perched an uncommonly ugly bulldog, made grotesquely hideous by protruding eye-shields fastened above his flat snout. Secured by two flat-linked nickel chains, the dog, grimly confident of the external evidences of his ferocity, sat as tight as sculptured stone, his forelegs curving in a perpetually belligerent bow. The tonneau of the automobile was cluttered with bulging ore sacks and torn tire-shoes.

Along the uneven thoroughfare of Bullfrog straggled idle motors, worn and scratched and shabby from their tours into the alkali-flats, over flint-ribbed trails and through washes of spongy, clogging sand. Smudgy, walnut-tanned chauffeurs sat at the levers of some of them, ready, with engines drumming, to dash out again on the ceaseless quest for treasure. They, as well as the slouching miners loafing on the board sidewalks beneath the shop and saloon awnings, doffed their hats to the girl who rolled by them, the torn ends of her dusty brown veil wisping out behind and revealing a tangled mass of light chestnut hair crowned with a little red cap.

"Who's the fair one, Jonesy?" asked a sallow-cheeked young man who stood framed in the doorway of the Dizzy Ghost, smugly aware that his speckless. flannels freshened the dingy surroundings. He turned with a drowsy look of inquiry to the white-haired little man with the ruddy complexion, sitting a few feet from him at the end of the long, polished counter.

Jonesy stepped to the door and shaded his eyes from the sun's glare. He was barely in time to see the graceful automobile twist into a narrow lane, making a sharp turn about a huddled group of little shacks.

"That's Betty, the Widow's daughter," he said softly, dropping his hand, and backing into the shade. "That 's her new bubble, the Silver Fox, one of those six-cylinder, fifty horse-power distanceeaters. She makes the trip about every other week to the Red Hawk, just beyond Funeral Range-Bashful Bob Robley's little mint, you know."

"No, I don't know," said the young man, peevishly. "Bashful Bob Robley? The Widow? Betty? That's all Piute to me. You oracles of the desert take it for granted that a tenderfoot should know the history of every tank-tender, miner, and millionaire from Buffalo Meadows to Skidoo."

"That 's so," mused the boyish little veteran of a thousand booms, lighting his skull-bowled pipe with the crystal eyes that he detested to smoke, but delighted to display. "It 's becoming mighty difficult to keep track of you downy youths in these benzine-buggy days, with clouds of prospectors flitting over the Nevada wastes in goggles and dusters, looking

more like the dismal goblins we see in dreams than men. Still, I don't understand how you missed hearing about Bashful Bob Robley and the Red Hawk on your journey down from Reno. Why, he 's Betty's husband, and Betty is the Widow's daughter."

"Oh," muttered the tenderfoot, with an unconscious sigh; "she 's married, then. That sort of quashes the thrill. I'll say this much, though," he added with some animation: "from the movingpicture glimpse I had, she seemed a rare bloom for this arid wilderness. This Robley person has more than a bonanza to congratulate himself on."

Jonesy regarded his fantastic little pipe with dreamy admiration for a moment, pushed back his panama so as to reveal a scanty thatch of white above a broad, crinkled forehead, and fixed the attention of the blasé young man with the remark:

"Usually, when I reveal that she is kin of the Widow Buckley, the reply is, 'Nough said.' It does not require any supplementary discourse to cause Nevada folk to sit up and take notice. The

Widow would have made Barnum's petrified giant rise up on his toes and salute, had the whim developed."

"But you must make allowances for the colossal ignorance of a tenderfoot, a totally new tenderfoot," smiled the young man. "But let the oracle relate."

Surreptitiously exchanging the skullbowled pipe for a more satisfying dudeen, Jonesy began:

"From 'way back in my dim school-boy days I recall a remark anent Cæsar, something like 'wine, widy, wichy! Well, you can lay it all on the case ace that the Widow did pretty much all that. Likewise there were no Mrs. Brutuses sitting around at their knitting, waiting to trim her laurels.

"She arrived about the time Goldfield had obtained the dignity of a few shacks, creating a more or less irregular thoroughfare. Wooden edifices were succeeding tents, for the ore had begun to pan so rich and yellow that there were a few magnates among us who could afford the precious Truckee pine for humble construction work. Yes, and there was quite a bit of building going on or planned.

"Next door to the Hush-a-by saloon

LXXVI-10

Paul Wilcox was putting up quite an imposing structure, forty feet front with gingerbread work on the eaves. Paul was fresh from Nome, where he 'd promoted his fortunes some by the deft manipulation of the little ivory ball.

"He was standing outside his shack, sizing up the rich effects of red lead on the façade, and directing the artist who was painting the big sign over the door, when the stage rattled down over the hummocks on its daily run from Tonapah, drawing up before Comfort Inn, across the way, in a whirling spray of dust. The loungers in the hotel dawdled out to get a focus of the strangers and to slip the glad hand to friends. The two camp dogs scuttled down out of an alley of tents with their feeble alkali coughs that they still imagined were terrible warnings of prowess. Our population

then was about three hundred and two, counting the said dogs.

"Now, it came to pass that this arrival of the Tonapah stage was the greatest event in the history of the camp since Little Sammy struck the lead of a golden lode under a Joshua-tree. It was as big an event with us as the arrival of Eve in the Garden of Eden, though the Lord knows the scenery was more like the pit than Paradise. You see, the Widow was aboard that stage; likewise, Betty. The Widow came out of the rickety rig in one jump, firmly and solidly, as was her way. Betty followed in her way-demure as a coy kitten; and when the boys got one look at her pretty face, every man-jack of them realized for the first time in some months that there were such things as starched collars and neckties. So there were sudden, burning regrets over the recent demise of Joe the barber, who had unwisely attached himself to the staff of an inefficient sheriff.

"The Widow stopped short of the inn door, swung round on the boys with one of her rare smiles, and then exploded gustily: