Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/616

96 any money which I could spare, paid my fare to ride on the trains. I reached Richmond, Virginia, one night too late to get any work, and I was entirely out of money. While I was walking about wondering where I would get a lodging, I happened to see a nice dry place under a stretch of plank sidewalk. Watching my chance when no one was looking, I crawled in and curled work helping to unload a vessel, and, as the job lasted several days, I came back each night to my lodging under the sidewalk, thus saving all my wages except the little required for food. In this way I was able to get money enough to carry me the rest of the way to Hampton, and leave me fifty cents when I got there,"

In these days of entrance examinations to various institutions of learning, it is interesting to read of the examination which young Washington was required to pass before he could enter Hampton. He tells us of it thus: "Of course," says he, "they knew nothing of me, and, after my long tramp, days of hard labor and nights of sleeping in barns and under sidewalks, I suppose I could not have presented a very prepossessing appearance. After looking me over in a not very encouraging manner, they gave me a broom and took me into a room, which they told me to sweep. I suppose I swept that room over three or four times before I was satisfied to call it done, when a teacher came in and took her handkerchief and wiped the walls to see if she could find any dust on them. After that they said I could come to the school. So you see I passed my examination.

"At Hampton I found the opportunity, in the way of buildings, teachers, and industries provided by the generous, to get training in the class room, and by practical touch with industrial life to learn thrift, economy, and push. I was surrounded by an atmosphere of business. Christian influence, and a spirit of self-help that seemed to have awakened every faculty within me, and caused me for the first time to realize what it meant to be a man instead of a piece of property.