convention to nominate delegates to the national presidential convention. One went to the judicial convention, and two are to go to the coming state convention at Grand Forks to nominate state officers. Three of these delegates were from our Santee school, and one from Hampton.

The testimony of political leaders is that the Indian delegates made a good impression, and were not led into the self-indulgences that disgraced some whites.

Several years ago one of the older boys found it rather tiresome to study "civil government" in the mission school. Now he says to his teacher, "Civil government is all right." It always will be in the hand of intelligent people who want to do right—all colors included.

"LIGHT AND SHADE."

The title of this rambling sketch of Southern travel does not refer, as might be understood, to the wonderful picturesqueness of the Southern mountains and valleys, their ever-varying beauty of sunshine and shadow, nor to the spiritual, moral or intellectual condition of the people; but is a salutation, embodying in its brevity an invitation to the stranger to dismount from his horse, or step down from his carriage, and rest himself beneath the shade of the trees. "Light, stranger, light and shade," is the laconic, epigrammatic but cordial and hospitable greeting.

In response to such a salutation, I "lit" from the buggy one afternoon a few weeks ago in front of a one-roomed, windowless log hut in the Kentucky mountains, where lived a man, his wife and eight children. I was urged to "set by," so I went inside the house. The mother was lying on a bed in the corner, and I said to her, "Are you sick?" (You must never ask a mountaineer if he is ill, that is equivalent to asking him if he is cross.) "Yes," she said, "I'm powerful puny." "Have you been sick long?" was my next question. "I've been punying around all winter." "Has it been cold here?" "Yes, mighty cold." "Have you had any snow?" "Yes, we've had a right smart of snow twicet, and oncet it was pretty nigh shoe-mouth deep."

These people rarely admit that they are well. The most you can expect is, "I'm tolerable, only jest tolerable," while often they say, "I'm powerful puny, or nigh about plum sick." And then with an air of extreme resignation, for they seem to enjoy poor health, they add, "We're all powerful puny humans."

We had supper on the night of which I write in one of these little cabins—the young missionary of the American Missionary Association and myself. The conditions were very primitive, the fare coarse, but the welcome hearty, the hospitality bountiful. Then we had a prayer-meeting in the "church house," and between fifty and sixty people were present. The men dressed in homespun and blue jeans, the women all with full-bordered cape bonnets and home-knit woolen mitts. It is a great lack of "form" to go with the hands uncovered, but the feet are often so; and I will venture to say that the missionary and myself were the only persons in the "church house" whose mouths were not filled with tobacco, a custom very much in evidence all through the meeting.

I talked to them of our work among the Indians, and after the meeting one man came to me and shook my hand right royally, as he said, "I've never seen you before, mum, and I reckon I never shall see you again; but we've been mightily holped up by what you've been saying, and I reckon we ought to be doing something for them poor humans." In his poverty, in his need, his heart went out to those who seemed to him to be in greater destitution.

As we went to our buggy at the close of the meeting, the people gathered around to say goodbye, and many were the kindly words and the God-speeds. Many, too, were the evidences of hospitality, and one insisted that we should go home with him and spend the night. He said: "It's a mighty long ride to the school, and you'll be a mighty sight more comfortable to come back and sleep with us." We had called at his house in the afternoon. There were twelve people—father, mother and ten children—in a windowless, one-roomed cabin, in which were three beds ranged side by side. Just what sleeping accommodations they were going to give us I do not know.

Where were we? Who are these people? Right in the heart of the Midland Mountains, among our native-born American Highlanders, people who have had as great a part in forming American history as any like number of men in our country to-day, people who gave to this nation Abraham Lincoln, who also produced Jesse James—they are capable of either—who for a hundred and fifty years have been sitting in the shade of ignorance, poverty and superstition, but are now coming into the light of the school and the church as provided for them by the American Missionary Association.

And now for a moment we will run down into the rice swamps of Georgia. Come into the house of old Aunt Peggy. A bed and two boxes form all the furniture of the room. The house is a borrowed one. Aunt Peggy is having a new one built. It will cost five dollars, and when we ask her how she is going to pay for it she tells us she has a quarter saved toward it, and she has promised the man who is building it her blankets, her only bedding beside an old comforter. But the weather is growing warm, she says, and "mebbe before it done turn cold I'll be in the hebbenly mansions." One of the saddest relics of the old slavery days is these childless, friendless, companionless old people, childless because slavery separated them from their children; husbands and wives were parted, and all family life rendered impossible. Two old people in the region of McIntosh, Ga., have recently died, each alone in a little cabin, and the tragedy was not discovered until the buzzards were seen circling around the place.

Aunt Peggy's sole comfort and dependence is a little boy eleven or twelve years old, whom she picked up by the roadside where he, a tiny baby, had been left by a heartless mother. Although then at least eighty years old, she strapped him on her back as she went to her "tasses" (tasks) in the field. She named him Calvary Baker, and now he has become her dependence and support, although the light in her shadowed cabin comes from the ministrations of the teachers in Dorchester Academy; and as she put her old, gaunt, claw-like black fingers on the face of the delicate, refined academy teacher, Aunt Peggy said: "Oh, you're my Jesus mudder;" and then, turning to me, she said, while a smile lit up the old black face, "Oh, missus, I bress de Lord for the Jesus school, for if it had not been for these Jesus mudders, I reckon hunger would have carried me off."

It is a wonderful work at McIntosh, as is true of all our schools. There are great lessons to be learned there. The student of the negro problem would do well to visit this section of the country with its historic interest, to note the influence of the old Midway Church, whose members were obliged to allow their slaves to attend church, so that at one time the black membership of this church was double the white; and to learn from a careful statistician that there is a less per cent. of crime and immorality, and a greater per cent. of full-blooded negroes here, under the influence of this old religious regimé, than can be found in any like number of our colored population throughout the Black Belt, save where the Christian school has changed the life during this last generation.

We are solving the negro problem in the only way possible, in the opinion of all statesmen, all publicists and all philanthropists, by the farm and the shop, and the school and the church, and over them all the Stars and Stripes. But we are doing more than this; we are setting the solitary in families; the wilderness and the solitary places are being made glad, and