During our vacation a number of our scholars went home.  One girl visited her home, a distance of about fifteen miles.  Her brother, a rough mountain boy, came for her with his “wag.”  She was a happy girl, for her love for her mother is great.  She did not return, and we thought she had left us.  To-day she appeared, bounding in and crying for joy.  ’I just struck out and walked, and I’m nigh plumb giv out.’  The change in these girls is often very encouraging.  We feel greatly our cramped room, but we have strong faith in God, and look for more room, better buildings and greater success in our work.

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TOUGALOO UNIVERSITY.

Tougaloo University, established in 1869, located at Tougaloo, Miss., on the Illinois Central Railroad, is one of the chartered schools of the American Missionary Association.  Its enrollment is now over four hundred, with seventeen teachers.  Accessible from all parts of Mississippi and adjacent States, no school of the American Missionary Association is better located for effective work among the Negroes.  In the four nearest counties, the colored population which was, in 1880, a little over 87,000, is now probably more than 100,000, none of it more than thirty-five miles from Tougaloo.  Within a radius of seventy-five miles there are not far from 450,000 Negroes.  By the last census, Mississippi’s colored population was 650,291.  The lowest estimate of the present number is 800,000.  At least seventy per cent. of this population is illiterate.  Tougaloo is thus in the very midst of America’s Africa.  Just at hand, also, is the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, into which Negroes are pouring from other States.  Here they are gaining homes and establishing communities.  Their numbers are expected continually to increase.  It will probably be as prosperous and influential a Negro section as any in the land.  Tougaloo is the nearest school of high grade to this Delta region.  From lower Arkansas, central and upper Louisiana, Tougaloo is drawing increasing numbers of pupils each year.  With such a location the only limit to the growth of Tougaloo in numbers and influence will be that set by the means which Christian beneficence provides for its support.  Tougaloo aims to give a thoroughly practical education to colored youth of both sexes.  A colored minister well expressed it when he said:  “It is the aim of the teachers of Tougaloo to enable the Negro to have the grace of God in his heart, knowledge in his head, and money in his pocket.”

Is there not in this work a rare opportunity for an investment that will return an ever increasing rate of interest?  Enlightened patriotism, philanthropy, Christianity, all urge the prompt and generous support of such a work as this.—­Tougaloo University Reporter.

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