There are railroads and there are rivers. The first are laid out after careful survey of the country, and follow the most direct lines of communication possible or politic between two given points. They tunnel mountains and bridge gorges; they cut through hills and level up valleys. They are made. But the rivers—we, at least, do not make them; we only find them, follow them, and use them. They do not run exactly in parallels of longitude, nor flow exactly south or west. They do not take the shortest courses to the sea; they yield to circumstances, and gracefully circle round the obstacles which they cannot surmount. Somehow, they always reach their destination, and leave a path of life and beauty as they go. You may divert them for a little to serve other than their main uses, but still they flow on unwasted to the larger waters, into which they pour their steady streams. There are two theories of missionary work, and especially of the work of missionary societies. One, which sets out to do one definite thing, and to reach it by the shortest surveyed and graded road; another which seeks an end with no less purpose and persistency, but seeks it with more pliability—does not make the country over to fit its needs. Now, our Association is not a railroad, but a river. It was not made by man to serve one fixed and changeless end. It was born of an emergency, and it has been adapting itself to the changing needs of successive years for the third of a century of its existence. We need not recapitulate its history. Its early work was peculiar, and in part transient. Enough that since the war the claims of millions of Freedmen, enfranchised but in ignorance, has seemed its greatest work. It has stretched out a hand more warm than full to the Chinamen on the Western coast. It has not forgotten the wrongs or the needs of the poor Indian. Intrusted with a fund for African evangelization, it has sought to exercise that trust with all fidelity. Of late the foreign work, by new offers, has claimed new attention, and the possibility of opening a new mission in that field has been considered. A little help was sent through it to the poorest class of sufferers by the scourge of pestilence; a little aid seeks by it to reach the needy thousands who have just sought asylum in Kansas; and some of our old friends, perhaps, have come to fear lest we were in peril of being diverted from what they and we consider to be still our great and most important work.