s have been sitting in the
shade of ignorance, poverty and superstition, but are now coming into
the light of the school and the church as provided for them by the
American Missionary Association.

And now for a moment we will run down into the rice swamps of
Georgia. Come into the house of old Aunt Peggy. A bed and two boxes
form all the furniture of the room. The house is a borrowed one. Aunt
Peggy is having a new one built. It will cost five dollars, and when
we ask her how she is going to pay for it she tells us she has a
quarter saved toward it, and she has promised the man who is building
it her blankets, her only bedding beside an old comforter. But the
weather is growing warm, she says, and "mebbe before it done turn
cold I'll be in the hebbenly mansions." One of the saddest relics of
the old slavery days is these childless, friendless, companionless
old people, childless because slavery separated them from their
children; husbands and wives were parted, and all family life
rendered impossible. Two old people in the region of McIntosh, Ga.,
have recently died, each alone in a little cabin, and the tragedy was
not discovered until the buzzards were seen circling around the
place.

Aunt Peggy's sole comfort and dependence is a little boy eleven or
twelve years old, whom she picked up by the roadside where he, a tiny
baby, had been left by a heartless mother. Although then at least
eighty years old, she strapped him on her back as she went to her
"tasses" (tasks) in the field. She named him Calvary Baker, and now
he has become her dependence and support, although the light in her
shadowed cabin comes from the ministrations of the teachers in
Dorchester Academy; and as she put her old, gaunt, claw-like black
fingers on the face of the delicate, refined academy teacher, Aunt
Peggy said: "Oh, you're my Jesus mudder;" and then, turning to me,
she said, while a smile lit up the old black face, "Oh, missus, I
bress de Lord for the Jesus school, for if it had not been for these
Jesus mudders, I reckon hunger would have carried me off."

It is a wonderful work at McIntosh, as is true of all our schools.
There are great lessons to be learned there. The student of the negro
problem would do well to visit this section of the country with its
historic interest, to note the influence of the old Midway Church,
whose members were obliged to allow their slaves to attend church, so
that at one time the black membership of this