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BUREAU OF WOMAN’S WORK.

MISS D.E.  EMERSON, SECRETARY.

The Iowa Woman’s Union is working nobly toward the support of our school at Savannah, Ga., and the sympathetic bond between helpers North and helpers South shows that the money contributions open the way to warmer missionary impulse and more efficient service—­the influence acting and re-acting, adding blessings both to him that gives and him that takes.  One of their teachers writes: 

“Never have we had a more prosperous year, if we are to take numbers into account.  Every seat in school is taken, and we are obliged to dispose of about sixty more the best way we can.  But these added numbers bring to us heavier cares and responsibilities, and as never before do we turn to you this year for the help of your praying and trustful workers.  So many have come in who are professing Christians, and still it seems as though we had before us to teach them the rudiments of Christian living; and there are so many older ones with no knowledge of the Way, that the heart almost grows faint at the outlook.  The work is before us, but we are longing for the baptism of fire.  Will you not cheer us with some assurance that you with us are uniting in this petition?”

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CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE IN HUMBLE LIFE.

The reports from our field work are not all made up of statistics.  They sometimes touch the essence of genuine Christian experience and tell us how life is lived and death is met among the lowly.  The little sketches given below are of this sort.

“We are grateful for the memories of some who were with us last year, thirsting for knowledge, whom we are permitted to think of now as before the throne of God, drinking from the ‘living fountains of water.’  One was Oliver, a man in the middle age of life, a bricklayer by trade, and a lay-preacher in the Baptist church.  A part of two years he had been in school.  His progress was slow, and he could read but indifferently in the Third Reader.  His parting words to us at the close of last year were, ’I shall be at the starting of the school next year, and I will stay till I go through the course.’  His death, after an illness of two days, was the first item of news carried to us from here after we had reached our Northern homes.  We shall not soon forget how in the warm summer days, at the noon recess, he was wont to sit in the shade of the house with his open Bible in his hand.  Often we would overhear him, with painstaking repetition, studying a psalm of David, or some passage from the ‘Sermon on the Mount.’  I heard him in the pulpit once when he preached a warning discourse, his theme that of John the Baptist, ‘Repent, and be baptized!’ He was not a ‘shouter’ or a ‘ranter,’ but spoke and acted in a quiet, manly way.  His sincerity was such that he thoroughly won our respect, and we revere his memory.