Page:The Story of the Jubilee Singers (7th).djvu/107

 of the wealthy and receptions in the drawing-rooms of the nobility. But their heads were not turned by it. They may feel more at home on the concert platform than they did at first, but their manners there have remained as natural and unaffected—as free from professional "airs," as if they had never sung outside their own schoolroom.

To some of them it has been a daily regret that they had to surrender their school advantages as they did. But they have made that good as well as they could by keeping up special studies and courses of reading, so far as the disadvantages of their nomad life year after year would allow.

Every member of the company is a professing Christian, one or two having been converted in connection with the religious influences that have by God's blessing ever attended the work. The unsectarian feature of the work at Fisk could not, perhaps, be better illustrated than by the fact that the singers represent in their church-membership five different denominations—the Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and "Christian." Whenever the exigencies of hotel life or railway travel do not prevent, family worship is held each morning—a novelty to hotel servants usually, and a season of spiritual refreshment which friends who are occasionally present always refer to afterward with peculiar interest. None of the Singers use tobacco, and their English friends especially, whose kind hospitalities have been so abundant, are usually much surprised to find them all teetotallers.

At different times twenty-four persons in all have