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 at 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 one of the curious family traditionswhere there were family traditions-that have been handed down to the new gencration 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 phy

sicians.

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 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.

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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.

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. His 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.