I have just come in from our social evening service of thanksgiving and prayer for the A. M. A. About fifty were present, and there were repeated expressions of gratitude for blessings here received, and fervent prayers for the continued and increasing success of the cause. One brother thought the Association the chief agent in the abolition of slavery, and spoke most feelingly of the inexpressible relief which that abolition had brought to him and to his people. Another in his prayer thanked the Lord for the schools and the church in the city, expressing the conviction that if the A. M. A. had not sent its workers here “things would be in a considerably worse fix than they are.” One woman told her story: her blind gropings as a slave, her joy in being sought out and taught by the teachers of the A. M. A., just when she “_did not know what to do with her freedom_,” and made capable of giving her children, now converted, a Christian training, with a purpose henceforth to use for the good of others all the light and help she had received. Another told us how the A. M. A. had reached out its helping hand to him in this city when he was ignorant and vicious, and through the influence of a faithful teacher in a night school had saved him from evil companions and the curse of drunkenness. It has been an intensely interesting meeting to me, and would have quickened the zeal of any friends of the A. M. A. who might have been present. Our regular prayer-meeting comes tomorrow evening and is a pleasant anticipation to me. I reached the field the 11th inst. and am not yet well acquainted with it. I am sure to be interested in it. I have quite enjoyed the welcome given me and have no painful sense of isolation. Their faces, their intelligence, their quiet good sense, their homes, so far as I have seen them, all surpass my expectations. The work that has been done for them _shows_. I shall esteem it a privilege if I may do something to help it on. * * * * * ALABAMA. Emerson Institute—1865-1879. REV. O. D. CRAWFORD, MOBILE. It was named after Mr. Ralph Emerson, a resident of Rockford, Ill., whose timely gift enabled the Association to purchase “Blue College,” a commodious building, with beautiful grounds, in the western part of the city, two miles from the post-office. It was originally built for the education of the white youth. In the transpositions of the times “after the surrender,” as the close of the war is here styled, it became the resort of three hundred Freedmen. In April of our Centennial year it crumbled in the flames. The school went on in unfavorable quarters until, in May, 1878, it entered its new and elegant building, which was designed for two hundred and fifty pupils. Last year the yellow fever delayed the opening of school and crippled many of its friends. But adverse influences are now disappearing, and the ten thousand colored people of the city are looking to it again as the hope of their youth.