Mrs. Woodbury, on taking the chair, said: 

The object of this meeting is well understood.  It is to decide what the women of the Congregational Churches shall do in connection with woman’s work—­that part of the Association’s work which is designed to be among women.  It is woman’s work among women.  It is designed at this time to hear from those fields in which the speakers are especially interested.  We shall hear from the Mountain Work, from the Negroes in the South, and from the work among the Indians in the West.  Like a very close man who, to the surprise of those who approached him, gave money enough to purchase a town clock, who explained by saying he liked to hear his money tick, so it is meant here this afternoon that the women shall hear the tick of their work from all these fields to which I have referred, and may the sound of it reverberate all down through the ages.

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A special meeting for ladies was held on Thursday morning, at which there was a full attendance.  Brief remarks, interspersed with song and prayer, made the occasion an enjoyable one.  Miss Plimpton, of McIntosh, Ga., gave bits of her experience among the colored people, and Miss Haynes described her work for the Indians at Santee Agency, Neb.

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The annual report made by the Secretary was given in full in our November Magazine, and is also published in leaflet form for free distribution to those desiring it.

We give below extracts from the addresses of the missionaries.

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MOUNTAIN WHITE WORK.

BY MRS. A.A.  MYERS.

In my younger days I never remember looking at the forests that skirt the horizon without an indefinable questioning as to what lay beyond.  It was easy to picture stretches of landscape and quiet homes like our own, but the query was ever the same, what is still beyond?

The first Sabbath I attended church in the mountains of Kentucky, having listened to the quaint singing before entering the rough-board building, seating myself on one of the slab benches near a box stove, which had but one length of pipe, out of which the smoke was pouring towards an opening in the roof, glancing around on the women in their sun bonnets, the babies in their little calico caps and the men in homespun, then out of the open door into a ravine where the tops of the tall trees were beneath us, I said to myself, I’ve reached “that beyond.”  The undefined has taken shape and I have reached the place of which I could never formulate a picture.  Seven years’ acquaintance in this mountain country has not changed my opinion.  We are in another world, and if I could describe that world so you could see it as it is, could feel its needs as we feel them day by day, it is all I could ask.

Philosophers might describe it as the dead centre of motion; at least it has remained seemingly unmoved, while all the world around it has been moving forward.