My heart overflows with gratitude to that Christian lady whenever I think of my conversion.  There is no favor which one person can do for another so great as that of leading him to Christ.

Soon after I was converted I felt inclined to enter the ministry, and was advised to go to Talladega College and there take a theological course.  I wanted to go but did not see any way to get there, to say nothing of how I was to stay there, but a lady from the North had been visiting one of our lady teachers at Mobile, and heard me deliver an oration in a prize contest.  She said she liked it, and after she went back home she sent me $25 to help me in my education.  I had been praying that a way might open for me to go to Talladega, and I felt that the $25 came in answer to prayer.  I used up the money in getting ready and in going to Talladega.  I wrote Dr. G.W.  Andrews, who has for a number of years been instructor in theology there, that I was anxious to go and enter his department, but I had no money, and he wrote me, if I had money enough to get there, to come on.  Thank God that I went, and that a way was provided for me to stay there and finish the course of study; and now I am out in the ministry and trying to do something for Him who has so wonderfully led me and blessed me.

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THE INDIANS.

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PERILS OF MISSIONARY LIFE.

Rev. T.L.  Riggs, our missionary at Oahe, Dakota, thus describes the loss of a team and the peril of his fellow missionary, Rev. J.F.  Cross: 

“I wished to cross my team on the ice to the west side of the Missouri and keep it there for use during the breaking up of the river.  Being very busy with some writing, I asked Mr. Cross to take my team over when he started to return to the White River, sending a man with him.  Mr. Cross’s team went over safely, but mine, which Mr. Cross himself was driving, broke through and were drowned, in spite of every effort of the two men.  Mr. Cross had a narrow escape.  He managed to save the wagon, but the horses went down with harness on as they were driven.  Mr. Cross took the loss so to heart, that together with the strain and agony of the moment, it quite prostrated him.  He started for White River in a day or two after, though I felt that he was hardly fit to go.”

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FIRST FRUITS.

REV.  C.L.  HALL, FORT BERTHOLD, DAK.

In the fall of 1879, a young Gros-Ventre Indian named Dahpitsishesh, “The Bear’s Tooth,” began to attend the day school at Fort Berthold, and although he was over twenty years old and not very quick to learn, he surpassed the younger pupils by his industry.  He attended the day school, in the day time or in the evening, quite regularly during the winter, and became a help to the missionary in translating parts of Scripture into the Gros-Ventre language.