But this is not all. These girls are sent to us to be trained for Christ, and knowing the utter folly of attempting to build up a pure, noble womanhood on any other foundation than Christian principle, we try by all our system and watchfulness and oversight to establish them in this, earnestly praying the Master to send from on high that blessing without which all our labors will be nothing worth. Have you never in some late Spring watched the brown leaf-buds, as day after day they seemed to remain unchanged, till you were tired of waiting for the fulfilment of their promise? And do you remember your joyful surprise when, leaving them thus at night you woke to find the whole tree aglow with the fresh, tiny bits of color from the bursting buds? So we feel often as we wake to realize that the rough, awkward girl who came to us has developed into the quiet, refined Christian woman, leaving us for her life work. Nor are we the only ones to see the transformation. “I am looking to see what kind of a woman you are,” said a child to one of the Talladega students as she opened her log cabin school in the pine wood. “You look to me like a white lady.” The teacher’s face was of the most pronounced African type, and black as ebony, but her quiet dignity and refined manner excited the child’s wonder and elicited the unconscious compliment. As teachers, these girls carry the missionary spirit with them, and feeling their responsibility, open Sunday-schools and engage in temperance work as surely as they begin their day schools. Into the cabins they carry, as far as may be, a regard for neatness, order, and those little adornments which make home what it is. Happy the young colored minister who wins one of them for his wife, thus establishing a home which shall supplement his sermons and act as leaven in the homes of his people. More than one graduate of the colored theological seminaries is gravely hampered in his usefulness by an ignorant, careless wife. As one frankly expressed the matter to a brother minister, “My wife is more trouble to me than all my work put together.” And in thus training our girls to be careful, efficient housewives, we know we may be moulding not them alone, nor their immediate households, but the whole community of women over whom, as ministers’ wives and the most thoroughly educated women, they will exert a powerful influence.