Engineering skill is bridging streams, crossing valleys, climbing mountains or piercing them through.  On every hand we see the change.  From their long sleep of a century, these valleys, these homes, this whole people are awakening.  A new life is beginning, a new future, opening.

And as a result of all this, I found a field of missionary work, which for opportunity and need has perhaps no equal in our country.  Amidst all this change, a people, startled from their long separation, find themselves suddenly called to face, to compete with, to become a part of, our life, our intellectual advancement; to move with our energy, and work with our skill.  Realizing their weakness, suddenly roused by their necessity, they are sending across their valleys and over their mountains the Macedonian cry, “Come over and help us!” Our duty to this people, whether we look at it from the standpoint of the Christian or the citizen, is beyond the measure of words.

Here, as everywhere in the South, I found that the American Missionary Association, as representative of our Northern Christian sympathy, was at work.  Its normal schools, fitting teachers to go out and displace the bare-footed, ignorant, snuff-stick-chewing school mistresses; its churches, fitting mothers and fathers to enter upon their duties conscious of their responsibility; and its missionaries, bringing in an intelligent Christian life, and driving the curse of the country—­intemperance—­out of the home, community and the county, are thus meeting the need, and answering the cry, and fulfilling the obligations.  Below is a cut of one of the buildings of the Academy at Williamsburg, Ky., recently erected among these people.

[Illustration:  WILLIAMSBURG ACADEMY, KY.]

I found one worker where the field called for a dozen; one school where we should have twenty; one church where we should have a hundred; one scholar received into an over-crowded school house, when its doors should open to scores.  I found one missionary with nine organized churches on his hands, and he the only pastor; the extremes of his parish being seventy-five miles apart.

And lastly, on returning to New York, I found an empty, a worse than empty, a debt-burdened treasury, forbidding all advancement in this field.

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Anniversary Exercises.

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FISK UNIVERSITY, NASHVILLE, TENN.

BY DISTRICT SECRETARY C.J.  RYDER.

Fisk University fills a large place in the educational institutions of the South, and commencement week occupies an important place in the college year at Fisk.