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There is, furthermore, a peaceful Christian invasion of this land.  We scarcely realize how much these gospel songs mean to those Southern people, and how they listen with eagerness at once to the sweetness of the tune and to the gospel that is within it.  It is an entering wedge to a new life there.  A dear girl of my acquaintance taught from thirty to fifty of these women; they listened eagerly, and the tears rolled down their cheeks, and they said to her, “Oh, come and tell us more about Jesus, for we want to be different kind of women, different kind of mothers.”

There was one girl who came out to one of our commencements and went back with the arrow in her heart, saying, “I would give all the world if I had it, if I could write a piece, and git up thar and read it like them.”  She went home determined she would go to college.  She was a large girl, fifteen years old, yet did not know a single letter.  She walked fifty miles nearly, and came and said to the college president, that she wanted to work for her board, so that she could enter the school.  What could she do?  He found that really she was incapacitated for doing anything; but she said; “I can hoe corn like a nigger.”  Finally she was set at some sort of work, and that girl, after three or four years, went out as a school teacher into a district where young men dared not go, where her eyes were blistered with the sights she saw—­men shot down before her face and eyes by the whiskey distillers—­and she was asked to organize a Sunday-school there.  When any one starts a Sunday-school he is expected to preach, and so that girl had to become a preacher, and to-day she is preaching the gospel of God and spreading the work there.  And yet she came from one of the very humblest classes.—­Rev. D.M.  Fisk.

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There is another influence of which I would speak, the influence of the home.  Here in our happy homes we know but very little of what that means to the Indian.  An Indian has no home, in our sense of the word.  There is at Santee Agency a piece of limestone, perhaps three feet wide by five feet long, which was the hearthstone of our Dakota mission home.  It was taken a few years ago by my brother, from Minnesota, where it had served the purpose of a hearthstone in one of the original buildings of the mission.  He took it to Santee Agency, and every time I go to Santee, I go out and look at that stone.  There is the hole in the stone into which we poured milk to feed the cat, and on another corner is the place where we used to crack nuts.  That stands for our boyhood home.  The Indian has nothing of the kind.  The Dakota Indian lives in a region, not in a place.  The Christian home coming into the midst of a village carries there an ideal of which the Indian knows nothing, and he is taught by the power of example day after day.  The Christian woman in that home keeps her house clean, keeps her children clean, and stands here as a persistent example of the power of the gospel of soap.—­Rev. T.L.  Riggs.