"Arise! Shine forth, for the light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon thee!" Thus saith the Prophet, and it was now fulfilled. What a treat, to be sure, for men and women thus to learn to read the mighty word of God, many of them in their old age! Verily, the ways of the Lord are wonderful and past finding out! Much hardship was experienced at first in finding suitable buildings in which to teach the people, and many a church and school-house were burned to the ground both during the war and the first years that followed the entire collapse of the "peculiar institution," but that has not stopped the triumphal march of the education of the colored race, for who, indeed, could stop the waves of the ocean? It is indeed a joyous thing to look around us at this time and behold even now how high the sun has ascended in the heavens. If we have advanced so much in thirty-two years, how much farther shall we be in thirty-two more? Behold all the schools, colleges and places of learning of every name and nature thrown open in hundreds to our young people, both male and female! What a glorious array of splendid seminaries all over the great republic, besides hundreds belonging to the whites, to which we can obtain admission! It is true that there are others still barred against us on account of the prejudice still obtaining here and there owing to the color of the skin, but that will give way in due time, for there is nothing incapable of change but the Great Creator Himself. By way of illustrating the results of the great Civil War, let us look back a little over twenty years, when Fisk University, at Nashville, Tennessee, sent forth Miss Ella Shephard and the rest of the "Jubilee Minstrels" to astonish the North with what even those who had been in slavery could do, when once their God-given talents were brought to the front. For the benefit of Fisk University they sang an immense sum of money out of the country, and covered themselves with unfading glory for all coming time. And where would those poor girls have been if it had not been for their own fathers who assisted white men in the war to knock off the chains of slavery? Why, to be sure, instead of being the "Jubilee Minstrels" in the North, they would have been toiling among the cotton, the sugar-cane and the rice fields of the South, wearing their young lives away down there. [Illustration: _A SCENE ON THE JACKSON PLANTATION._] But the glories of the "Jubilee Singers" were by no means over. More money was still needed, and those devoted people again took to the road, and this time, with most laudable ambition; they even crossed the North Atlantic, and sang with the most abundant success before the crowned heads and grandees of Europe. These crowned heads and grandees knew full well that if it had not been for the war for freedom and the union, the singers would at this time have been in the cane, the cotton and the rice fields singing: