Correspondents are specially requested to place at the head of each letter the name of their Post Office, and the County and State in which it is located. * * * * * THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY. * * * * * VOL. XXXII. AUGUST, 1878. No. 8. * * * * * _American Missionary Association._ * * * * * OUR GRADUATES. The colleges of the land have just now been sending forth their classes of graduates, equipped for further study and for new work. The young men and women have passed their examinations and taken their degrees and made their speeches in hundreds of academic halls. Parents and patrons have gathered—these to see the gain and growth of their children, and those to rejoice in the good which their generous benefactions have accomplished. It is the harvest time in the collegiate year; though the crops are not gathered into garners, but scattered and sown at once for other growths. Our schools and colleges, too, have come to the end of another year. Examination and commencement times come to all impartially under the fifteenth amendment. We do not profess that the graduates of our seven colleges go out equipped, for depth and breadth of culture, on an equality with the sons of Yale or Harvard, but we do believe that they are fitted, and fitted well, for the work that is before them, and to be the leaders first of their own people. We do know that the religious impression made upon them is more general and more deep than in most Northern colleges, and that the influences under which they work and study foster and develop seriousness of purpose and that highest of all ambitions—the ambition to be useful. And so, in this our humbler work, we rejoice and take pride. Our Normal-school work is still the largest and perhaps the most important that we have to do. And when we follow in imagination, and occasionally by visitation, and frequently by communication, the pupils of our schools out into the little hamlets and cross-roads all over the Southern States, where they are teaching the mysteries of the A, B, C, to the little children, and the larger ones, who come from humblest homes, where the dark-skinned father and mother look with wondering admiration at the child—their child—who can tell “round O” from “crooked S,” we are filled with the sense of the magnitude and importance of this work of laying foundations on which are to be built the towers of intelligence and virtue. And we pray devoutly that God may bless each one of those who are going forth this year to teach the children of a long neglected race. * * * * *