work. With this she went to Fisk University, where she was engaged in study and in work for self-support for about two years, when she was appointed one of the teachers of instrumental music. She aided in drilling the choir with which Mr. White gave the cantata of "Esther," and out of which the Jubilee Singers were organised. As the skilful pianist of the company, she has been with it in all its campaigns.
Maggie L. Porter was born in Lebanon, Tennessee, in February, 1853. Her master was wealthy, owning some two hundred slaves, and, as her mother was a favourite house servant, she saw little of the harsher side of slavery in her childhood.
Not long before the war her master removed to Nashville, and there the President's proclamation, and the coming of the Union army, gave Maggie and her parents their freedom. When twelve years old she began to go to school. The next year she was one of the three hundred pupils that gathered in the old hospital barracks the first week the Fisk School was opened.
An older sister had been sent away to a plantation in Mississippi before the war, and it was not known what had become of her. The mother often talked of her—told how she looked, and what she did when she was with them, and speculated about her finding her way back to them in the tide of homeless freedmen that in those days ebbed and flowed through every Southern city. Day by day, as Maggie passed the railway-station on her way to school, she would
