Page:The Story of the Jubilee Singers (7th).djvu/31

 they became qualified for the work the students went out to teach—missionaries to lift up their less-favoured fellows. Many of them in this way earned the money that enabled them to return again and go on further with their own studies. In a single year as many as 10,000 children have been enrolled in the schools taught by teachers sent out from Fisk,—teachers, some of whom a little while before did not themselves know one letter from another. The school was pervaded, too, by a religious earnestness that was contagious. The conversion of new students was confidently looked for, and more earnestly sought than their progress in letters.

But along with all this success there had been a steadily increasing occasion of anxiety. The buildings, cheaply and hastily constructed, as they were, for temporary uses, were falling into decay. The site, which had been admirably adapted for the earlier work of the Institution, was found unsuited to its permanent uses. Year by year the problem of obtaining funds for a new site and new buildings grew more and more perplexing. The necessity for its solution at last became imperative, and the University treasurer, Mr. George L. White, undertook to work it out.

Mr. White was a native of Cadiz, New York, born in 1838. A village blacksmith's boy, his school privileges were limited to what he learned in the public school before the age of fourteen. Like so many other Yankee boys while waiting for their work—or while getting ready for it—he became a school teacher. He had inherited from his father