The writer has had a long experience as master of a boy’s boarding school in the North, situated in a village which also contained a young ladies’ seminary.  Had those young people been as sober and in earnest as these dusky-skinned ones, as free from midnight mischief, how many weary vigils would he have escaped!

The religious life at Tougaloo does not cease with term time.  Two or three young men go out to hold Sunday services in the country cabins, the Sunday-school is full and the older ones serve as teachers, for many children come in from surrounding fields, making a school of nearly one hundred teachers and pupils.  The young people’s society meeting each Sunday afternoon, and the prayer meetings on Sunday and Wednesday evenings are characterized by a quiet, earnest Christianity, that would do credit to any circle in our Northern States.

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FROM A TEACHER IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS.

Let me tell you of the general interest manifest in several of the counties west and north of us in attending this school.  One of our students has visited many cabins over the mountains during his vacation, and finds school advantages very scarce and poor.  He finds poverty and degradation, and ignorance of the world and of books.  Some of the people are still using the old-time method of kindling their fires by flint and steel instead of matches.  He has met many young people who are thirsting for books and school, has also found numbers who have struggled up through the darkness and have become teachers in their own neighborhood, “the blind leading the blind.”  Such almost invariably wish to come to our school and say they shall be here as soon as their schools close.  Many are too poor to come.  This is true of a number of young girls who would come if they could work their board or in any possible way pay for it.  Whoever will provide funds to meet the expenses of these neglected girls, and place them in our school and prepare them for the future duties of life, will be doing an angelic work, and in the end will do the greatest good that can be done to this people.  Very much of the money spent for this mountain people will be the same as thrown away if this effort is not made to educate the girls.

The natives are having their big yearly meetings and lively times shouting and actually chasing each other in and around their log churches to pull them to the “mourner’s bench,” and, in their wild efforts, they upset stove pipes and benches.  It is so much like a circus that everybody runs to the big meetings.

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SIGNS OF PROGRESS.

BY PRES.  R.C.  HITCHCOCK.

Every little while, some article giving ultra views of “The Problem,” gets into the papers, sometimes painting a roseate-hued picture, and again some one, who does not find people of dusky hue all angels, writes that there is no hope; that all experiments leading to intellectual and especially to moral elevation are failures; and that she (as one wrote) is ready or almost ready, “to throw away the Bible and advise the negroes to be honestly heathen.”