neighborhood, three or four miles from the little, old, tumble-down county seat.  Now a fine building is to be secured.  The lady patrons raise their offerings up to six thousand dollars.  Fine architectural plans are devised at the North.  Meantime, speculators on the ground, who for a few cents an acre have bought up a great quantity of land adjoining and would be glad to sell it at a dollar an acre, have donated a hundred acres, more or less, to the school.  On this tract the building is located and goes forward.  The frame is put up and pretty much enclosed.  For want of money the enterprise comes to a stand, and now for these four years the stranded structure has been taking damage from the storms.

The place has been visited repeatedly by the superintendents of the A.M.A., to find the state of the case and to see if anything could be done to utilize the partial plant.  The pastor of the lady donors became interested to save the investment through the A.M.A., or to stop the pouring of more funds into the venture, but after all his correspondence and personal conference, he found that, if the whole property were to be offered to the Association, it could not afford to accept it and undertake to carry forward the school.  It already has a prosperous academy in that county and another in an adjoining county, and these, wisely located in congenial communities, are all that is needed for those and for contiguous counties.  There is no way to utilize it, Alas, “Wherefore this waste?”

An Orphanage for colored children is a tempting charity.  The A.M.A early undertook such work.  At Wilmington, N.C., and at Atlanta, Ga., it bought lands and erected ample buildings, but the experiment satisfied the authorities that the Association was not called to that department of work.  The children’s god-fathers and god-mothers, in devotion to their covenant, or grand-parents from personal interest, would soon be taking them out, and others having care of them would call them out as soon as, by some growth and training, the scholars were made profitable for work, and so those properties were sold and the avails put into the ordinary educational process.  Then the conclusion was reached that this was the obligation of the local communities, and not of foreign charity.  According to this idea, an Orphanage in a Southern city, undertaken not by the patronage or approval of the A.M.A., though made to appear so because the originator had been under its commission there as a missionary, has been transferred to a local board and to the support of the city {154} and county.  That is as it should be.  Those local authorities ought to take care of their own orphans, and not appeal to the charity of the North to relieve them of their proper burdens of humanity.