held to seek the Divine guidance in deciding should be done with the enterprise. No light was found on any other course but to go forward.
Hitherto the company had had no distinctive name. They had been mentioned in a Cincinnati paper as "a band of negro minstrels who call themselves Coloured Christian Singers." It was at Columbus, after an anxious and almost sleepless night, that Mr. White decided to name them "The Jubilee Singers." The Old Testament "year of jubilee" had always been the favourite figure of speech into which the slaves put their prayers and hopes for emancipation. Their year of jubilee had come—this little band of singers was a witness to it, an outgrowth of it. There was thus a suggestiveness and obvious fitness in the name—it had a flavour of its own. There was a musical euphony in it, too, and it "took" at once.
Only those who have made a study of catering for the public taste can realise how much there is in a name. A novelist knows that the sale of a new story depends almost as much upon its title as its plot. Those who have been most closely associated with the Singers have come to believe that Mr. White's christening of his company was the best night's work he ever did.
At Zanesville also their concert did not meet expenses. But a friend paid their hotel bill, which amounted to $27. What figure it would have reached had not the six girls been put into a single room over a shed, where the bedclothing was so offensive that they were constrained to roll the
