The annual report made by the Secretary was given in full in our November Magazine, and is also published in leaflet form for free distribution to those desiring it.
We give below extracts from the addresses of the missionaries.
MOUNTAIN WHITE WORK.
BY MRS. A.A. MYERS.
In my younger days I never remember looking at the forests that skirt the horizon without an indefinable questioning as to what lay beyond. It was easy to picture stretches of landscape and quiet homes like our own, but the query was ever the same, what is still beyond?
The first Sabbath I attended church in the mountains of Kentucky, having listened to the quaint singing before entering the rough-board building, seating myself on one of the slab benches near a box stove, which had but one length of pipe, out of which the smoke was pouring towards an opening in the roof, glancing around on the women in their sun bonnets, the babies in their little calico caps and the men in homespun, then out of the open door into a ravine where the tops of the tall trees were beneath us, I said to myself, I've reached "that beyond." The undefined has taken shape and I have reached the place of which I could never formulate a picture. Seven years' acquaintance in this mountain country has not changed my opinion. We are in another world, and if I could describe that world so you could see it as it is, could feel its needs as we feel them day by day, it is all I could ask.
Philosophers might describe it as the dead centre of motion; at least it has remained seemingly unmoved, while all the world around it has been moving forward.
Here in these mountains live over two million people, two-thirds of whom have never written nor received a letter, could not read one if printed and sent them. They take no newspapers, and the great events of nations or discoveries of science have been nothing to them. Questions of vital importance to our country have never troubled them. They knew there was a war, for contending armies met on their grounds. With few exceptions their sympathies were with the Union. Too poor to own slaves to any extent, they had no motive for seceding, and many of them joined our army and were faithful soldiers.