Page:The Story of the Jubilee Singers (7th).djvu/124

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sitting in the slave-quarters at breakfast, when their young master rode up and told them they were free. They danced and sang for joy, and Tom, supposing he would have everything like his young master, decided at once what sort of a horse he would ride! They remained, however, on the plantation till 1865. Then having heard that their eldest sister was in Nashville, Tom and his brother started off to find her. While with her he learned his letters. Then he drifted about, working at one thing and another, until he became a pupil at Fisk, where he remained most of the time for several years until he went out with the Jubilee Singers, on the first organisation of the company. He has been with them steadily ever since.

Frederick J. Loudin is a native of Portage County, Ohio, where he was born in 1840. Though living in a free State, he was, from his earliest recollection, under the hateful shadow of slavery. The Northern States, though they had had the vitality to throw off the slave system earlier in their history, had still fostered the cruel prejudice in which the coloured people were held everywhere as the representatives of an enslaved race. In some respects, this ostracism was even more complete and unchristian in the free than in the slave States.

Loudin's father had accumulated some property, and had given generously, according to his means, for the endowment of a college a few miles from his home. But when he asked that one of his children might be admitted to the advantages of its prepara-