Armstrong had been known to his associates as a man of splendid and many-sided vitality. A college classmate, Dr. John Denison, graphically describes him, "A sort of cataclysm of health, like other cyclones from the South seas"; what the Tennessee mountaineers call "plumb survigrous"; an islander, with the high courage and jollity of the tar; "a kind of mental as well as physical amphibiousness." Extraordinary in his training and versatility; able to "manage a boat in a storm, teach a school, edit a newspaper, assist in carrying on a government, take up a mechanical industry at will, understand the natives, sympathize with the missionaries, talk with profound theorists, recite well in Greek or mathematics, conduct an advanced class in geometry, and make no end of fun for little children." He had had the training of a missionary station in a Robinson Crusoe-like variety of functions. A knight-errant to the core, the atmosphere of Williams under Hopkins gave him his consecration. His comrades recognized him as an intellectual leader, essentially religious but often startlingly unconventional, "under great terrestrial headway," "the most strenuous man I ever saw." He said of himself: "missionary or pirate." Now after the sobering of three years of campaigning his immediate duties brought him face to face with the tremendous problem of the negro, and the elements of the solution already lay in his own character, experience, personality. What were the assets of the negro? He had, by inheritance and training, the capacity and instinct of labor. What an advantage that is appears by the contrast with the Indian, who is perishing for want of just that. But the negro knew labor only as the hard necessity of his lot,--it had to him no higher significance. "Education," was the watchword of the generous spirits of another race who were coming to his help. They found at first great promise in the freedman's eagerness to learn reading and writing. But it soon appeared that this was an outreaching toward some vague social advantage, and that the actual acquisition through speller and copybook carried him and his children but a little way up. It was a pressing necessity to provide teachers, and of his own race; so, rightly and naturally, were founded the normal school and the college. He needed his own educated preachers, physicians, lawyers; for these, too, there must be training. So, rightly and naturally, were planted universities,--Atlanta, Fisk, Howard. It was an unquestioned creed that the white man's training as preacher, lawyer, physician, teacher, must begin with years of Latin and Greek; so what other way for the negro? So, as almost inevitable, the early education of the race began as a copy of the white man's methods. But sadly inadequate, alas, as we begin to see, is a classical education for the typical white man of our time; and immense was the gap between the teaching of which that was the core