Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/615

Rh de Lawd!' when the reading was finished, but my mother, bending down to where I was clinging to her dress, whispered to me that we were free."

Not long after the close of the war the Washingtons left the plantation and went to West Virginia, where, in the coal mines, work could be had which would pay money wages. At first Booker worked in the mines with his brothers, but he soon became dissatisfied with the chance for improvement which that work afforded. "The first thing that led me to study," he has said, "was seeing a young colored man slowly reading a newspaper to a group of colored people who surrounded him with open mouths and gaping eyes. He was almost a god to them." The chance to study was soon found. An energetic woman of kindly nature hired the



young colored boy to work about her house as a general chore-boy. Finding that he was anxious to learn, she offered to teach him to read in the spare minutes of his work, and did so. One day he overheard a man talking about Hampton, where General Armstrong had already begun his noble work. This, the man said, was a place where black boys could go to school, and at the same time work to pay their way. "As soon as I heard that," Mr. Washington has said, "I made up my mind that Hampton was just the place for me, and that I would go there.-I started, although I had no money and did not even know where Hampton was. I felt sure I could inquire the way as I went, and work my passage. I walked a good share of the way, begged some rides, and when I had earned