And thus closed the fullest and most hopeful year in the history of this institution, which is beginning to excite the deepest interest among the people of the State, who are awakening to the fact that it is offering the only solution to many dark problems which to them seemed without an answer, or at least one that had anything of hope in it. We cannot better close this article than by giving the following extract from an editorial from the _American_, the ablest and most influential paper of the State: “In the proceedings at the Fisk University, yesterday, another step forward was taken in the way of providing material means for that moral and intellectual growth which is going on silently as a great institution grows and roots itself firmly in the society around it. Universities are not created in a day, nor at all by money, although money is a necessary agency. They grow. The Fisk is passing through with comparatively the early stages of growth, when we compare it with the ideal which finds place in the dreams of its enthusiastic laborers—dreams which enfold the future result. We doubt if the public, although it lend a hearty sympathy and approval, and expect good to flow from it, begins yet to realize the work this institution is to perform. We doubt if there is such appreciation anywhere existent or possible except in the dreams of its enthusiast laborers. These in some way comprehend its future. But the Fisk has had to adapt itself in more ways than one. At first it encountered, as a matter of course, but cold approval from the wealth and culture of Nashville—not hostility, but approval from a languid and cold judgment. But perhaps the hardest task has been to adapt itself to the negro himself. To secure the cold approval of intelligent judgment was apparently easy; to go a little further and secure aid, if it were necessary, would not be hard; but to lift the negro up to appreciate New England culture and conservatism and quiet labor, is like bringing him, in his early religious experience, to accept the calm conservatism and quiet demeanor of the Catholic, Presbyterian or Episcopal churches. In vain is he solicited to enter the intellectual stage of religious experience, when nature tells him that his stage is the emotional, if indeed it be beyond the sensuous. This is the task Fisk has set itself, and is performing, and performing well. It is encountering, and has encountered, a world of prejudice from the very race it seeks to elevate, and must content itself with working upon and with the _creme de la creme_ of the race in the South, while it cannot as yet reach the vast mass unless it let itself down, and we believe that so long as its present laborers are at the helm it will insist on drawing others up and never let itself down. It has a great and widening field, which it is worthily filling, and in the labor of regeneration of a race, no agency will have a higher, or indeed so high a place as this conservative