In the summer of 1896 I again visited Paulding, just after graduating from Tuskegee. I had to go there to move my aged mother to more comfortable quarters. She was quite ill, and died soon after I reached Florida with her. When I went to Paulding I measured the house in which I was born, and found it to be 9 feet wide, 17 feet long, 7 feet high, with no windows, with but one door, and a dirt chimney. The furnishing as I remember it was composed of a chair, a stool, a table, and my mother's bed, which was constructed in one corner of the house. The bed was made by putting a post in the ground and nailing two pieces of wood to the wall from this post, then by putting in a floor, making something like a box to hold the bedding. The children slept in a similarly constructed place, except that the mattress was on the ground and was filled with straw. Our bedding, for the most part, was what wearing apparel we possessed thrown over us at night. Outside the house was a long bench, which was kept for the accommodation of visitors. A peculiar incident in our home life happened one Sunday morning in March--one Easter Sunday. All of the smaller children were seated on the floor eating their breakfasts from pans and skillets, when a big black snake, without any regard for the children, went into a hole by the fireplace. When one of my older brothers undertook to find him and opened this hole, he found, instead of one, four black snakes that had been wintering in the side of the house. There was no church or school for us in that whole section. A white man, a Doctor Cotton, to whom I was afterward given until I should become twenty-one years of age, sent his boys to a school which required that they walk eight miles to it and return each day. When I was perhaps eight years of age I remember that my mother and all of the children went to Spring Hill to a camp-meeting; that was the first service at which I had heard a minister. They had a Sunday-school, and I was put into a class. The teacher gave us leaflets and asked us to read where we found the big letter "A." This was the first and only letter that I knew for many years. This camp-meeting was held once a year, though at times there would be prayer-meetings among the different families on the plantation.