When he gave me this letter, he took a promise that it should not be published until after his death. He passed away in the triumph of his sweet, but heroic faith a few months ago. He died where he had suffered and dared for Christ's sake, in the midst of this ignorance and sin.
Such stories as his ought to be told. It is cowardly timidity for those of us who know them, to keep them from the Christian public. Heroes and heroines answer to the roll-call of A.M.A. workers. I have met them and mingled with them, the past three years, and I know the sinew and fibre of their courageous faith. You, who send them out, and who support them in the field, ought to know what they endure, and hear, now and then, an incident of their heroism.
Two cases of heroic self-denial have come under my notice recently. In Macon there lives a colored woman whose husband is in an Insane Asylum. Their home was recently burned to the ground. She has four small children with her, the eldest of whom is eleven years old, who are dependent upon her for support. She earns just eight dollars per month, and yet she sends one girl, aged fifteen, to Atlanta University!
A young man, whose father was a white man and who is himself a blonde, has been urgently invited by his white grandmother to come to her home and take the position of her son's child. She is a wealthy woman, owning a large plantation. The young man's father, her son, is dead. The boy would have all the privileges of a wealthy young white man and inherit the property on his grandmother's death. The sole condition which the grandmother makes is that he shall give up all association with his octoroon mother and refuse to recognize her in any way. Thank God, the boy is too true to his gentle and loving mother to enter into any such arrangement, even though the bribe offered is thousands of dollars and a social position of great attractiveness. There is a great deal of this quiet but heroic self-sacrifice among the colored people in the South, that never finds its way into print.
THE ALABAMA ASSOCIATION.
PRESIDENT H.S. DEFOREST.
The thirteenth annual meeting of the Alabama Association was held at Salma, March 30th to April 3d, when the floods were at their highest, yet fourteen of our seventeen churches were represented. The Sunday-school Association convened a day earlier, and one afternoon the Woman's Missionary Association had a session by itself.