But this sowing has in some respects given way to reaping, even in the lifetime of those who watered the ground with their tears. Now at Berea is a college in some respects unlike any other in the land. Here, three hundred in all, are seen white and colored students in about equal numbers. Here is a sort of Mecca for the colored people of the State, and a door of hope for many in the mountain region, who, though white, have had but few religious and educational privileges. Here is a college ably manned, with the confidence of the North, and growing in the regard of the South, sending forth its streams of blessing in every direction. If the tears of sorrow were many, the tears of joy and thanksgiving to God have been much more abundant.
TENNESSEE.
MISS ALICE E. CARTER, NASHVILLE.
Among the men of Tennessee, the great and crying need seems to be the very practical knowledge of some trade; the range of their individual usefulness is so often limited to gardening, grooming, rock-beating and shoveling.
The talent for gardening is a dormant one in winter; rock-beating cannot be followed in the coldest weather, and it is easy to see that the other ranks may at times be filled to overflowing, and those not fortunate enough to get in, are out of employment.
What a noble enterprise for someone to found an industrial school for colored boys, which shall draw in the bright-eyed ragged boys, now lounging on the street corners or quarreling in the alleys, learning nothing except evil, daily!
To help a few such boys, though temporarily, I hold in my room, one evening in the week, a little reception. Good stories, earnest conversation, plenty of books and papers to look over while here, are the means put forth to help those who come. When they go away they carry with them text-cards and old numbers of St. Nicholas from my very primitive “circulating library.”
My cottage Sunday-school is a very interesting undertaking. Compassion for the pitiful little street waifs, too small to find their way to the remote city Sunday-schools, led me to try to make a bright spot in their day. It was a simple thing to gain permission of a woman, with four tiny girls, to hold Sunday-school in her cottage, and the simplest matter to fill the small room with children. To walk through the alley and say “Come” to any ragged, deformed or dirty little child was all that was necessary. How well our Lord understood the willingness of the people of the “highways and hedges!”
Each Sunday the little ones come with ludicrously solemn faces and decorous manners; and sitting on the beds, or a board between two chairs, and on the hearth before the fire-place, are as happy as can be.