No one can properly appreciate or understand Fisk University who does not take into account the model school whose unique anniversary exercises occurred on Thursday p. m., preceding those of the University proper. The school is under the management of Miss Irene Gilbert, who is assisted by students from the Normal Department. The excellency of her work is not found alone in the perfection of drill which every exercise shows, but in the exquisite finish of whatever work is done. A recent graduate from Williston Seminary and of the Sheffield Scientific School, with whom I visited this school one day when it was not on exhibition, and examined the children’s work in map drawing, declared that he had never seen any work of the kind that compared with it. The exhibition given by these children made it easier to understand the uniformly excellent work apparent in all the classes of the higher grades witnessed during the three days’ examinations of the next week. Miss Gilbert trains up the child in the way he should go, and in the higher departments he does not depart from it.
The Baccalaureate sermon of President Cravath on Sunday afternoon, from Heb. xi. 27, “For he endured as seeing Him who is invisible,” was able and timely; well calculated to inspire his hearers with the faith and courage requisite for the great work which lies before them as leaders of their emancipated people through the wilderness which still surrounds and stretches out before them, after sixteen years of wanderings.
A rainy evening gave a much smaller audience to hear Dr. G. D. Pike’s missionary sermon than would otherwise have greeted him. He must be a laggard indeed who, hearing the Doctor on his favorite theme of missions, does not become inoculated with something of his divine enthusiasm.
Space cannot be given for even a full programme of the exercises, which filled to the full Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday; examinations in the mornings until 1 p. m., and exhibitions in the evenings by the Normal School, the Literary Society and the College Preparatory Class; and it would be exceedingly common-place to say, what simple truth demands should be said, that they were all excellent. One of the visitors said at the close of the Normal School exhibition on Monday, that he did not expect to hear anything better even from the graduating class; but on Thursday candidly admitted his mistake, as there was just such advance as there ought to have been to mark the advanced grade of the pupils. Perhaps, instead of giving a programme of these exercises, it will prove more profitable to state impressions derived from them.