and without a desk, a slate, or a blackboard, with a teacher with
unkempt hair, ragged and dirty clothes, possibly bare feet, who
perhaps can scarcely read, the children study at the top of their
voices--_blab_ schools they call them--have for their course of
study the spelling book alone, and are taught that a word is correctly
spelled when all the letters are named, no matter in what order; their
so-called churches, with perhaps a monthly meeting during the summer
months, without Sunday-school, prayer meeting, or any form of church
work, without morality as a requisite of church membership, with an
illiterate ministry--a large number of the ministers cannot read even,
and what is worse in many cases are drunken, impure, and in every
way immoral; their children so easily gathered into day-schools and
Sunday-schools, and so responsive to the work done for them--all these
things appeal to us with pathetic power. Perhaps no missionary work
ever showed greater results in so short a time than those obtained in
these mountains.

We have here in two States eleven schools and twenty-two churches.
Earnest calls have come to us to begin work in North Carolina and
Alabama. We feel sure that if the churches could hear these appeals
they would bid us respond. We have promised to begin work the coming
year in these States, and we must look to the churches to furnish us
the means. New lumbering and mining towns are springing up in this
mountain country, and immediate missionary work is their only hope.
A single one of these new towns, scarcely half-a-dozen years old, has
had already more than a hundred men shot in it, and this awful work
still goes on. This marvelously rich mineral region is sure to be
filled in the near future with these mining towns, and unless the
Christian work keeps pace with this kind of growth, this large
territory will become notorious for bloody scenes as no portion of our