VACATION.
We congratulate our teachers who are now returning from the South on the vacation that awaits them in the hills and on the seashores of the North. They have had the unbroken toil of eight or ten months in the South, far from their homes and friends, finding little companionship except with the pupils and their parents, sometimes ostracized and scorned by the whites—and yet not always—for we rejoice to say that there are many localities in the South where the work of our teachers is appreciated and where they are themselves treated with Christian courtesy by the whites.
We need not ask their friends at the North to welcome these returned workers with that kindness that is restful, but we do ask that the facts they reveal in regard to the South may be heard and heeded. There is no set of witnesses more competent to tell of the actual situation at the South, its home life, its industries, its struggle with difficulties, than these same teachers. Sometimes the teachers have been there but a short time and their labors may have been confined to one locality, but in that narrow range their observations among the colored people have been most minute. They have watched the operations of the pupils closely from day to day, and have been brought constantly in contact with the people in their cabins, in their work, and in their trials.
But many of the teachers have been there for years and in different locations, and their representation of the state of affairs is as reliable as any that can be found from any source whatever. If the observations and experiences of this corps of teachers could be set forth, they would furnish, with all its lights and shades, the most accurate picture that could be presented of the state of affairs in the South. Pastors and churches would do well to give these returned teachers an opportunity to present in the prayer-meeting and elsewhere the exact facts as they have found them in the South.