After the daughter, the mother. Being again in America this year (1909), I stole a few days for a run into Virginia and a visit to Hampton, the fount and origin of the whole movement for the industrial training of the coloured race. It is perhaps well to take Tuskegee before Hampton, just as, in visiting English Universities, it would be well to take Liverpool or Birmingham before Oxford or Cambridge.

Hampton is on historic ground, and looks over still more historic waters. It stands at the tip of the peninsula formed (roughly speaking) by Chesapeake Bay to the east and north and the James River to the west and south. Yet not quite at the tip; for the spit of land which Captain John Smith in 1608 named Point Comfort runs some two miles further to the southward, and forms a sort of breakwater for Hampton Roads. The spit of land, now known as Old Point Comfort, is entirely given over to two great establishments—Fortress Monroe, where Jefferson Davis was imprisoned after the war, and the 115Hotel Chamberlin, one of those huge American caravanserais which are devoted to the cultivation partly of health, partly of sport, and wholly of fashion. The Chamberlin, despite its Pompeian swimming-bath and its circular dancing-pavilion built out over the waters of the sound, is not quite so extensive or so sumptuous as the Virginia Hot Springs Hotel, to say nothing of the Ponce de Leon and other palaces of Florida; but its life has a colour of its own, due to the large infusion of artillery officers from the Fort, which is but a stone’s throw away. The coming and going of the great white river-steamers, too, lends animation to the scene. Old Point is a meeting-place for these floating hotels, hailing from New York, Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond. Moreover, there is plenty of shipping in the Roads, consisting for the most part of the great four- and five-masted schooners which still abound in these waters. Some six miles up the estuary to the westward rise the immense coal elevators of Newport News, with its navy-yard; while to the southward, on the further shore, towards Norfolk, one can dimly descry a city of towers and domes, the buildings of the Jamestown Exhibition of 1907. Altogether, despite the flatness of the coasts, this confluence of great estuaries with the Atlantic has a nobility and beauty of its own. The sky-effects are marvellous.

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Twenty minutes in the electric car carry you 116from the Chamberlin to Hampton Institute, from valetudinarianism and luxury, time-killing and life-killing,[36] to industry, frugality, character-building and—in far more than a theologic sense—soul-saving. The Institute is 

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