communion with educated and refined people. They think they have
little or no stake in the general weal of life. They feel as though
they have no character to lose, consequently intemperance takes
possession of them.

This evil of intemperence is said by some to be the greatest of all
evils. It is the cause of the ruin of some of our fathers and
brothers, and I am sorry to say it ruins some of the mothers. When we,
the temperance girls and boys, ask them to leave off their habit of
drinking, they tell us that it does them good. When cold it makes them
warm, when warm it makes them cold. When troubled, it cheers
them. When weak, it strengthens them. It is certainly killing them by
degrees.

* * * * *

STUDENT'S LETTER.

THE BLUE-JACKET TEACHER--FIRST SCHOOL EXPERIENCE.

From youth I was impressed that the "Yankee" was the terror of the
world, capable of literally swallowing a small fellow, so it was with
great difficulty that Judge M.J. S----, a Southern white man, induced
me, in 1873, to enter Burrell Academy, then an A.M.A. school located
in Selma, Alabama, and taught by some of those "blue jacket" beings
whose names did not always begin with "blessed." The principal having
sent me to Grade 2, I followed a little girl to the door of that room.
She passed in while I stood at the door and thought thus, "Shall I go
in here when one of those awful "blues" is there?" Half doubting, half
fearing, trembling throughout, I slipped shyly inside the first