“Finding it is best for myself to ‘strike while the iron is hot,’ I sit down at once to send you a check.  The signal mercy of the Lord enables me to make my offering of dollars instead of cents, and has put so many benefits already into the fraction of the current year that it may be reckoned as a complete year.  How small an acknowledgment does even a dollar seem for a year of life, with all its escapes from peril and all its experience of good!  What a refreshing addition to the resources of the church would result if each professing Christian would give such a birthday offering of one cent for each year of life!  May the Lord fill us all with the spirit of him who gave himself unto the death for us.

“I pray earnestly that the American Missionary Association may continue to enlarge, and its work to prosper.”

* * * * *

NOTES BY THE WAY.

BY DISTRICT SECRETARY C.J.  RYDER.

White Men and Red Men.

“THE ROUND UP! 
INTERESTING HIGH SCHOOL COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES LAST NIGHT.”

The above was the characteristic heading in a Dakota paper of an editorial notice of the closing exercises of their High School.  Everything takes its color from the peculiar condition of society.  A rubber overcoat is a “slicker,” and a native pony is a “broncho.”  Not so inappropriate, either, is the term “The Round Up,” for the closing exercises of a school year.  It ought to be the round up, a complete circle or sphere of successful work and accomplishment, so far as that period of school-life is concerned.  The white men of Dakota are changing perceptibly, I think, in their feelings toward the red men among them, or among whom they are.  A sense of responsibility for their Christianization seems to have taken possession of the minds of the intelligent Christian people.  One is impressed with the abundance of church buildings in these small white settlements.  In one small village of perhaps five hundred people, I counted eight Protestant churches.  With Christian churches so numerously planted as they are in these new Western States, we may hope for large help from them in the Indian work of the Association, before many years.  They are now falling into line in this great work.  I rode on one side of the Missouri River for many miles among the white settlements.  Afterwards I rode on the other side of the river a long distance among the Indian villages, and could not help but contrast the condition of life of the two.  The Government relations differ materially.  If the supplies were withheld from the Indians, and they were compelled to take land in severally, and not hustled over the prairie every month or two weeks for meat, sugar and coffee, I think the change for the better would be perceptible in a twelvemonth.  There is general hopefulness on the part of the missionaries among the red men, now that two Christian men stand at the head of the Indian Department.