'They rest from their labors, and their works do follow them.'" In 1841, when he entered, in a preliminary and informal way, upon the pastorate of the Fifteenth Street Church, he seems to have attempted to turn his seminary into a high school, limited to twenty-five or thirty pupils, exclusively for the more advanced scholars of both sexes; and his plan of studies to that end, as seen in his prospectus, evinces broad and elevated views--a desire to aid in lifting his race to higher things in education than they had yet attempted. His plans were not put into execution, in the matter of a high school, being frustrated by the circumstances that there were so few good schools in the city for the Colored people, at that period, that his old patrons would not allow him to shut off the multitude of primary scholars which were depending upon his school. His seminary, however, continued to maintain its high standard, and had an average attendance of quite 100 year after year, till he surrendered up his work in death. He raised up a large family and educated them well. The oldest of the sons, John and George, were educated at Oberlin College. The other three, being young, were in school when the father died. John and George, it will be seen, succeeded their father as teachers, continuing in the business down to the present year. Of the two daughters, the elder was a teacher till married in 1866, and the other is now a teacher in the public schools of the city. One son served through the war as sergeant in the Fortieth Colored Regiment, and another served in the navy. At the death of the father, March 21, 1855, the school fell into the hands of the son, John F. Cook, who continued it till May, 1857, when it passed to a younger son, George F. T. Cook, who moved it from its old home, the Smothers House, to the basement of the Presbyterian Church, in the spring of 1858, and maintained it till July, 1859. John F. Cook, jr., who had erected a new school-house on Sixteenth Street, in 1862, again gathered the school which the tempests of the war had dispersed, and continued it till June, 1867, when the new order of things had opened ample school facilities throughout the city, and the teacher was called to other duties. Thus ended the school which had been first gathered by Smothers nearly forty-five years before, and which, in that long period, had been continually maintained with seldom less than one hundred pupils, and for the most part with one hundred and fifty, the only suspensions being in the year of the Snow riot, and in the two years which ushered in the war.