Our food was furnished by the owner of the plantation. On many of those long, cold days, for all day, we had only a "pone" of corn bread. At the close of the year, after the owner had taken his half, and on account of bad management on the part of an older brother who had charge of affairs, my mother and her younger children received nothing for the year's work, and this, notwithstanding the fact that we made five and one-half bales of cotton and a large quantity of corn and peas. I received as my "salary" for the year's work one shirt worth thirty cents and a pair of suspenders worth about fifteen cents. I resolved to run away again. This trip was made at night, on foot, over newly laid railroad-ties, for a distance of seventeen miles. I reached Meridian, Miss., at a late hour of the night, and took refuge in a shed used for the storing of railroad iron. The next morning I overheard two colored men, who were on their way to get meat ready for the town-market two miles away, talking. I joined these men, and sought employment along with them, but they soon learned that I knew nothing of "butchering." However, the owner of the pen, who had a large garden, gave me a trial, and I remained with him for three years. After I was there a little more than a year my work was to plant and care for the small seeds. This man, Mr. Nady Sims, was a good man, and I had no cause for leaving him except that of wishing to get a place to earn more money, that I might help care for my mother and her smaller children. I went next to a brick-yard, where I received fifty cents per day. There were three boys at each "table," and we had to "off-bear" 5,500 bricks, the task for each day. This was indeed hard work. Drifting into hotel work, I soon acquired the habit of most of those who are engaged in such work: I spent all I earned for fine clothes. During my stay on the vegetable farm I boarded at the home of one of the young men previously referred to, whose sister, Mary Clinton, who has since become my wife and devoted assistant, one day heard a woman say she knew of a school in Alabama where boys and girls could work for their education, and that she was going to send her boy to that school. This thought remained in her mind for some months, and she decided to go to Tuskegee, though her brothers and sisters discouraged the idea, feeling, as they said, that if she went to this unknown place her whole life would be a failure. She reached Tuskegee in September, 1885, at a time when there was but one building. She worked in many places while there, including the laundry, the teachers' dining-room, the sewing division, with Principal Washington's family, as well as with the families of other teachers. On account of poor health, especially because of throat trouble, she was compelled to return home at the end of five years without graduating.