force, they will be taught and trained in a practical knowledge of all the duties of life, especially in those of the household.  If we educate and save the girls we are using the very lever needed to lift these hopeless and neglected thousands living at our very doors, out of their degraded life and bring them into the light of the 19th century, and qualify them to take positions among the best women of the land.

The work for which I plead is full of encouragement and hope.  It is not in Africa.  It is within one or two days’ ride of the largest and most wealthy churches of our country, those who love the Kingdom of Christ and have sent, and are still sending, their thousands of dollars to the ends of the earth, while these bright American girls are, by some strange oversight, neglected at our very doors.

The American Missionary Association has undertaken a noble work among them, and something has been accomplished, yet this good work has but just begun.  The grey dawn has only cast a few signs of daylight over the mountains.  To carry this work forward successfully in behalf of the neglected girls, there should be, in a great natural center of operations like Pleasant Hill, a spacious boarding hall with an industrial department and home, for those girls.  It should not be stinted in size, but large, well-arranged, and well-equipped in all its departments from the primary upwards, where they can be taught everything a girl ought to learn, not only in books and in a Christian life, but taught to sew, knit, darn stockings, to make good bread, and keep house with order and neatness, and do everything needed to be done in a Christian home.  If the native girls can come from their cabin homes into such an institution and be thus thoroughly trained, the axe is then laid at the very root of the tree of a squalid life of illiteracy, and a life of Christian culture and hope comes in its place, where Christian mothers throw angelic brightness over their households, and families of children are trained to act well their part in this great and growing nation.  The institution I suggest, and for which I must plead, should not only be large enough to accommodate girls near at hand, but from other neighboring States who stand in need of such a home and training.  It should be a Bethel for these immortal waifs, a house of bread, so well provided for as to take the poorest who cannot pay a cent of their own expenses.  On this base it will be doing the greatest and grandest work possible for the two millions and a half who are scattered as lost sheep over the mountains of our own land.

B. DODGE.

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RECEIPTS FOR DECEMBER, 1888.

MAINE. $371.03.

Auburn.  Sam’l J.M.  Perkins $10.00

Augusta.  Mite Boxes, Miss K. Carpenter’s
  S.S.  Class, 7.50:  S.S.  Class, Mite
  Boxes, 2, for student Aid, Talladega C. 9.50