And still, however inadequate, our anniversary exercises have been full of interest, and have revealed much to those who have visited us for the first time. The Baccalaureate sermon was preached June 12th, by our college pastor, Rev. Cyrus W. Francis, from 1st Tim. i. 19, “Holding faith and a good conscience;” and it was an earnest plea for the supremacy of the higher motives in the Christian warfare upon which the graduates were about to enter. Three days of public examinations followed, each day’s session being concluded by an exercise in music and light gymnastics. On the last day there was a display of what our girls have learned in the way of head-making. The walls of the front hall and one of the stairways were covered with specimens of the students’ drawing and map-making, indicating great progress in this department during the year. The normal work also has been making a decided advance. It is evident that those of us who teach the Greek, Latin and other higher branches will have to look well to our laurels. Fewer visitors to the school ask to hear the classics translated; more wish to see how the three R’s are taught. No exercise of the examination days riveted the attention of our friends more firmly than the exercise in teaching one of the grammar-school grades, by one of the members of the senior normal class, with following criticisms from the other members of the class. However, we classical instructors rejoice in all this, for we know that hereafter we shall have better equipped pupils for grappling with Xenophon and Cicero. It ought to be mentioned here that one of the most valuable exercises of our winter term this year was a three days’ Teachers’ Institute, in which all the teachers and scholars participated, and in which much light was thrown upon the improved methods of teaching, now attracting such wide attention. A further impetus was given to thought and effort in this direction by the visit of our friend, the Rev. A. D. Mayo, co-editor of the _Journal of Education_, whose four lectures and one sermon before our students, and whose private talk and counsel with our teachers on certain phases of our work, will not soon be forgotten.
A very large audience, as usual, packed the Friendship Baptist church on Thursday, to listen to the essays of eleven of the graduating class, and to the address of the invited orator of the day. Five young men and twelve young women received the diplomas of the school. The Commencement address was delivered by Rev. Atticus G. Haygood, D.D., President of Emory College at Oxford, in this State. Those who are now reading his recently published book, “Our Brother in Black,” will not need to be told that his address was listened to with the greatest pleasure and approval by all who were present. It was a plain, forcible and thoroughly wholesome presentation of some of the ways in which the true greatness of the State must be secured, and the relation thereto of education and of such institutions as ours. Dr. Haygood represents, most nobly, that rapidly multiplying element among the Southern people which believes in the motto, “Look up and not down, out and not in, forward and not backward, and lend a hand.” May his tribe increase.