Marion was reached Saturday night, a grand old town of three thousand inhabitants, and an educational centre for the State. As the hacks were full, a colored brother, an old friend, and deacon in our church at this place, took my bag, and I hastened along the sidewalk a mile or more to what was once the “Teachers’ Home,” but now the parsonage, a house to which I was introduced ten years ago when I left my Connecticut pastorate for a winter in the Sunny South. I cannot tell you how I felt, passing along the streets, as I recalled the experiences of ten years ago. I shuddered as I neared the house where my friend, now of Chattanooga, came near losing his life in the small hours of the night by the hands of masked and armed men. The rush, the rope, the tree, the cries for help, the final deliverance, and much more, were very vivid and real to my awakened mind. I thought, also, of those eight consecutive nights when none of our family lay down to rest as usual; of the armed guard of twenty brave men in and about the house all those nights; of the warning letters received, the threats made, the Henry rifles in our chairs when we bowed around our family altar; of the preaching with hands in my pocket on my revolver; of the fear and trembling that seized us when special danger threatened; of our isolation from all except the poor we had come to bless by our labors. I thought, too, of the school-house, the three hundred eager learners, the little church of a dozen members, the precious meetings, the great outpouring of the Spirit, the hundreds of conversions, the “never to be forgotten” prayers and songs—in all the most precious revival of my life. As a drowning man recalls the events of a whole life in a moment, so in an incredibly brief space of time passed before me those early experiences of missionary life in this strange land, impossible for me now to relate. All is changed now. To-day the missionary is welcomed by many Christian people in Marion. The dreadful past is fading from our minds in the love and friendship of the present. Sabbath morning I looked out upon the many cottages and cabin homes in the woods and fields all about, while near by I saw the church edifice with its graceful and airy bell-tower in which hangs a choice bell from the foundry of Veasy & White, of East Hampton, Connecticut, and the gift of the people there. The house will seat three or four hundred, is well proportioned, nicely painted and frescoed,—the most handsome and best kept church edifice of the colored people in the State.