All honor to the men and women of character and ability who, as Home Missionaries, are devoting their lives to such fields--the most difficult in the world--where no picturesqueness of scenes or people relieves the strain--where sordid sin, monotony, crudity, and newness prevail, but where the returns in character-building contribute to the life of a nation whose mission is the world. * * * * * The following quaint letter was written by Rev. Aratus Kent, a Congregational Missionary at Galena, Ill., to the Congregational Home Missionary Society under date of April 9, 1844: "When I came to Galena (in 1829), there was not any church or clergyman within two hundred miles, and I used to say that my parish extended from Rock River to Wisconsin. Now I can count within these bounds twenty-five churches and fifteen ministers. "Let those then who think little of the influences of the Home Missionary Society blot out of being those twenty-five churches, and drive out of the state those fifteen clergymen, and disband fifty Sabbath-schools, and burn a thousand Bibles, and recall a thousand volumes of the Tract Society, and stop the monthly visit of a tract to five hundred houses, and give back a drunken father to fifty families that are now rejoicing in the peace and plenty consequent upon their regeneration." And yet this work of vandalism is not done until you have taken back that stream of heavenly influence which has gone forth from this district to bless the heathen in our forests and the heathen beyond the ocean, and until you have recalled that company of young men who have gone away for the ministry. "We need within this field more missionaries who can endure privations, and who, to meet their appointments, can face a prairie storm and buffet a swollen stream, and who, like their Divine Master, can take the mountain top for their study and the midnight hour for the season of their devotion. "We want also assistance here in the West to establish literary (educational) institutions upon the right basis, and if the professors of the East would come and see what I see, they would court the honor of contribution to establish the female seminary in Galena which was yesterday projected, and which is next week to commence its existence. This church has sustained a German colporter during the winter." * * * * * About a little valley in the Southland stand mountains grim and forbidding in their rugged beauty--holding close within their bounds those who for generations had found their scanty living upon the sterile mountain sides and in the richer valleys, saying No! to the pressing outside world, with its progress and its change.