these years that have passed, this bitterness has largely gone, and this sweet, Christian letter comes to her former slave.  The ex-slave told me with tears in his eyes that he paid her this visit, and that she welcomed him, not to the Negro quarters, nor to the kitchen-chamber, but to her best guest-chamber, and said:  “I want you to feel that you are welcome to the best hospitality of my home.”  “And she treated me almost as tenderly as she would one of her own sons,” said the colored man.  And so light is coming, little by little.

Dr. Haygood expresses a regret that the white women of the South are so slow to appreciate the importance of the moral elevation of the Negroes, and so slow to join hands with their Northern sisters in his education.  But such facts as this kind, Christian letter furnishes, lead us to hope and to believe that better times are coming, and that the Southern Christians, interested as they are in the Negro in Africa, will, little by little, appreciate and minister more and more to the terrible need of the Negro in South Carolina and Alabama.

* * * * *

MUSIC’S MISSION.

BY REV.  E.N.  ANDREWS, HARTFORD, WIS.

Suggested by the following words by Rev. B.A.  Imes in the May MISSIONARY: 

“The Mozart Society at Fisk treated us to an excellent rendering of Haydn’s great oratorio, ‘The Creation.’  Many came over from the city (Nashville),—­whites from the “best families,” all crowding in, listening, wondering, enjoying!  How the music of those well-tuned instruments and voices caught us up and carried us away!  Color-line melted and faded out.  How we wished the politicians all might have been brought under that magic spell of solos and choruses!”

          O Music, with thy wand celestial, touch
          The hearts of men, and by thy alchemy
          Divine, resolve, remelt, aye, e’en recast
          The thought and very being!  Selfish man,
          So filled with prejudice and hate hath need,
          O heavenly messenger, of all thy aid.

          And as thy votaries in anthems sing
          With the immortal Haydn, and do praise
          Creative Wisdom, Who, of one blood made
          All Nations for to dwell on earth in love,
          Then let celestial fires descend and burn
          Complete, the offering of the lips, and purge
          The dross of caste and hate from every soul!

          This do, for Satan hath his spectrum set
          Before the door of human hearts and cast
          Upon the screen the separated lines
          Of black and red and yellow—­white forsooth,
          While these should mingle in that glorious Sun
          That shines alike on all, impartially.

          Then come, O Music, re-resolve the lines,
          These color-lines, and let the sun’s pure ray
          Beam forth in unobstructed light and love,
          Transmuting, by his touch, these human hearts,
          Till they shall mirror forth the Golden Rule.