Your Committee congratulate the Association on the work of the year, as represented in the Report. It is but seventeen years since the first school for Freedmen was opened, and but twelve years since the first Normal school was started. Last year 7,229 pupils were under instruction in the schools of this Association, of whom 1,459 were in Normal schools. The increase in the number of pupils of all grades last year, over the number of the year before, was 1,789; in Normal schools the increase was 126; in college and professional schools, 50. The eagerness of the colored people to obtain at least a rudimentary education has ever been a most encouraging sign. The young man who last year walked fifty miles with his trunk upon his back that he might enter school, recalls the zeal of the late Dr. Goodell, of Constantinople, who, in his youth, also walked sixty miles, with a trunk strapped upon his back, that he might enter the Phillips Academy at Andover. The demand for teachers from the Normal schools--quite beyond the ability to supply them--is one of the surest indications that the schools are meeting an urgent need. But the tendency of some pupils to consider themselves qualified to become teachers, after obtaining the merest rudiments of knowledge, is earnestly to be deprecated and discouraged. It needs to be dealt with as an easily besetting sin. The replacing of the burned buildings by new ones, at a cost within the amounts of insurance recovered, the better location of some of them, the increasing, and increasingly expressed sympathy of the better classes of Southern whites with the educational work of the Association, are also occasions of congratulation. The devotion of a portion of the time of pupils to manual labor is to be commended on grounds of economy, of industrial training, of the best and most diversified moral culture.