is a luxury that I do not always enjoy.  Still I live through it, and find life rather interesting.  The people have much to learn.  The condition of the women is not very enviable in some cases.  They have had some of them a terribly hard time in Slavery, and their subjection has not ceased in freedom. * * * One man said of some women, that a man must leave them or whip them. * * * Let me introduce you to another scene:  here is a gathering; a large fire is burning out of doors, and here are one or two boys with hats on.  Here is a little girl with her bonnet on, and there a little boy moves off and commences to climb a tree.  Do you know what the gathering means?  It is a school, and the teacher, I believe, is paid from the school fund.  He says he is from New Hampshire.  That may be.  But to look at him and to hear him teach, you would perhaps think him not very lately from the North; at least I do not think he is a model teacher.  They have a church; but somehow they have burnt a hole, I understand, in the top, and so I lectured inside, and they gathered around the fire outside.  Here is another—­what shall I call it?—­meeting-place.  It is a brush arbor.  And what pray is that?  Shall I call it an edifice or an improvised meeting-house?  Well, it is called a brush arbor.  It is a kind of brush house with seats, and a kind of covering made partly, I rather think, of branches of trees, and an humble place for pulpit.  I lectured in a place where they seemed to have no other church; but I spoke at a house.  In Glenville, a little out-of-the-way place, I spent part of a week.  There they have two unfinished churches.  One has not a single pane of glass, and the same aperture that admits the light also gives ingress to the air; and the other one, I rather think, is less finished than that.  I spoke in one, and then the white people gave me a hall, and quite a number attended....  I am now at Union Springs, where I shall probably room with three women.  But amid all this roughing it in the bush, I find a field of work where kindness and hospitality have thrown their sunshine around my way.  And Oh what a field of work is here!  How much one needs the Spirit of our dear Master to make one’s life a living, loving force to help men to higher planes of thought and action.  I am giving all my lectures with free admission; but still I get along, and the way has been opening for me almost ever since I have been South.  Oh, if some more of our young women would only consecrate their lives to the work of upbuilding the race!  Oh, if I could only see our young men and women aiming to build up a future for themselves which would grandly contrast with the past—­with its pain, ignorance and low social condition.”

It may be well to add that Mrs. Harper’s letters from which we have copied were simply private, never intended for publication; and while they bear obvious marks of truthfulness, discrimination and impartiality, it becomes us to say that a more strictly conscientious woman we have never known.