she will undertake it at all, it must be on such terms as shall remove from it all taint of servility.”

“A very natural feeling,” I remarked.

“No doubt; but not calculated to relieve the friction between the races.”

3. It is not only the child of the “poor white,” in the special Southern sense of the term, that goes to the factory. Mr. Stannard Baker, in “Following the Colour-Line,” says: “One day I visited the mill neighbourhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied by a family of mill employees. They hired a negro woman to cook for them, and while they sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her children to school!”

19

III THE NIGHTMARE OF THE SOUTH

My original plan had been to go from Washington to Hampton, Virginia, and see the great industrial school for negroes and Indians established by General Samuel Armstrong, the alma mater of Mr. Booker Washington, and consequently of Tuskegee. But I found that both the President of Hampton and the President of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville were to be at a Southern Education Conference at Memphis; so, instead of going due south into Virginia, I turned my face south-westward towards Kentucky and Tennessee. But I determined to “stop off” for a day at Virginia Hot Springs, where some friends had invited me to visit them.

Virginia Hot Springs is nothing but a huge rambling hotel, with a number of “cottage” dependencies. |A Happy Valley.| The hotel company has bought up the whole mountain-valley, and runs it like a little kingdom. It is a delightful place; the air fresh and sparkling, the hotel and cottages sufficiently 20picturesque, the basin of the valley entirely given up to the brilliant sward of the golf-course. Around the hotel runs a spacious “piazza,” with innumerable rocking-chairs. A score of buggies and saddle-horses, at the disposition of the guests, gather round the steps. Inside, every American luxury is at command. You move noiselessly on deep-piled carpets; the news-stand is heaped with the latest magazines and novels; there is a little row of shops where you can buy hats and frocks, jewellery and bric-à-brac, at fifty per cent. over Fifth-avenue prices; and—most indispensable luxury of all—there is a stock- and share-broker’s office, and there are long-distance telephones, whereby you can keep in touch with Wall Street and the various Exchanges. That curious oval 

 Prev. P 16/182 next