Many friends from the North have been generous to us this year, and we wish to acknowledge their kind donations and express our hearty appreciation of their gifts through the columns of the Missionary. The cow purchased with money received by Miss Boynton from various friends at the North, has been a great luxury and comfort to us at the Home.
One five-dollar bill given to Miss Boynton, designed especially for table use, provided us with various essential articles: jelly cups being exchanged for drinking glasses, a needed coffee-pot, tea-pot, cups, saucers, etc. A set of silver teaspoons helped to supply a deficiency. Sheets, pillowslips and towels replaced worn out articles of prime necessity. Thus, while our personal wants have been so thoughtfully provided for, other friends have generously remembered the poor and needy Freedmen among whom we labor, very many of whom are suffering for the necessities of life. Within a week two well-filled boxes of good second-hand clothing came to Rev. O. D. Crawford, forwarded to him by friends in Dubuque and Waterloo, Iowa, the distribution of which has called forth tears of gratitude, and invoked blessings on the heads of the donors from many a poverty-stricken soul. I would that space permitted me to depict some of the distressing needs of the poor right at our own door, that the generous heart of the North might be opened to relieve. I shall hope to avail myself of a future opportunity to give a more minute account of our work, its growing needs and opportunities.
MISSISSIPPI.
A Changed Home.
Miss Koons, of Tougaloo, Miss., relates the following interesting narrative:
Two of our young men, brothers, were converted last fall term. Their step-father was a hard drinker; their mother not a Christian. When they returned from their Christmas vacation, one of them, greatly troubled, told me what an unpleasant vacation they had had, so much so, that he felt as if he could not stay, but must come back to us. The step-father was drunk continually, and kept about him other drunken associates, abused the mother, and by his conduct so grieved the boys that they felt they could not endure it.
They went home in June and took charge of the farm. They held a little prayer-meeting every Wednesday evening and Sunday morning with the mother and step-father. They also went together to the house of a near neighbor—a terribly wicked man—and held a prayer-meeting with the family every Sunday afternoon. The story of the Prodigal Son was the means of the conversion of one of the brothers, and some weeks after his conversion he came in to ask where it might be found in the Bible, saying, “I have been hunting for it for two weeks, and can’t find it.” He says now, “I often read the Bible to my mother, and explained to her that story of the Prodigal Son, to the best of my knowledge.” During the summer the mother was converted, afterward the step-father, and then the neighbor for whom and with whom the boys had been praying. His face was of joy as he told of the conversion of his mother, who “could not bear the thought of her boys going one way and she another,” and he exclaimed, “Oh, Miss Koons, our home is a different place now!”
Both the boys were at work in the Sabbath-school—one at home and the other some miles from home, and neither one missed a Sabbath from June to the time of their return to us in November.
I hardly need tell you that they are not among the silent members of our weekly prayer-meetings.