PROGRESS AT TILLOTSON, AUSTIN, TEXAS

MRS. A. W. PARTCH. B.A.

The twenty-fifth year of Tillotson College is marked by great prosperity. The registration is already more than the total for last year and more students will come in. We have refused a number because they were not sufficiently advanced to enter our lowest grade, or because they wished to work out one-half or more of their schooling. More boarders are in our buildings than at any time last year. Our courses of study have been strengthened throughout. Some English is now required in every year of all courses, and United States history is begun in our lowest grades. Practice-teaching, which is not given even in the colored State Normal, is just being started in our normal course. A chemical laboratory has been opened, a night school organized, and a college course actually begun.

A great many applications have come to us—some from married women—for dressmaking by chart, and for cooking. We are sorry to have to refuse all such applicants, especially as we know that colored people must learn dressmaking in schools of this sort or nowhere, as they cannot learn it from a Southern white dressmaker.

The music department has been greatly concentrated this year by putting five pianos on the third floor of Allen Hall. These pianos had been scattered through three stories. This made it hard for the music teacher, who not only teaches but also supervises all the practicing, and also extremely disconcerting for other teachers who had to conduct their recitations against the din of pianos. This concentration was made possible only by the President vacating his rooms and moving into a small cottage at one of our campus gates. A sixth piano is in the general study-room, but it is used for practice only outside of school hours.

Chemistry is required for the highest grade State teachers' examinations, for which we try to fit our students. Eight dollars, given last summer for a chemical laboratory, and about fifty dollars from the school treasury have been expended for chemicals, apparatus, and materials for desks. The desks were made by the boys in our carpenter shop, and are built on a new plan so that they may be moved from one room to another. As yet there is no " hood," and on ammonia days the halls are full of chemistry.

Three students, graduates of our normal course, have begun the college course, and one normal graduate of last year, who is teaching in the country near Austin, comes every other Saturday for private lessons. She hopes to be able to join the Freshman class regularly in early spring. This ambitious young woman recited fourteen problems in solid geometry in less than twenty minutes, one Saturday, recently. Another special college student, principal of one of the city schools, and last year President of the State Teachers' Association, comes to us for work in Latin and Greek twice a week. He has taken, elsewhere, enough work in most other subjects for a college degree. He says there are good positions which he is competent to fill but which he cannot secure- without a college diploma. He is a married man with two children. One of the regular college students is a young married man who gave up a school he was teaching at fifty dollars a month to come back to Tillotson after being out three years. His wife, one of our former students, is now teaching, and together they are trying to pay for a little home. Five town teachers are coming to us twice a week, after school, for Latin. One, a man over forty who studied Latin in the north twenty-five years ago, is trying to fit himself to teach all the Latin in the high school of a neighboring city.

All college departments in such schools as these must be small when new. Some of our colored colleges, a quarter of a century old, have only eight or twelve in their four years of college work. In college work, Tillotson has no competitor nearer than Marshall, Texas, seventeen hours distant by train. College work is as yet required by only a few of the colored race, but these few must have it.