Anniversary exercises are apt to afford but meagre indication of the real work accomplished by any school. To those of us who know the work of Atlanta University, such exercises seem especially inadequate to the faithful telling of what is being done here. When our good Christian friend, Philander Veryrich, hints that he is ready to come down here with a hundred thousand dollars in each pocket, to be emptied out wherever they will do the most good, I shall not especially urge his attendance upon our Commencement exercises. I shall ask him to spend with us either the first or the last Sunday evening of the school year. I shall beg him to preserve a strict _incognito_, and allow me to conceal him outside one of the windows, or behind one of the doors of our assembly room, with a peep-hole conveniently arranged. If it is the last Sunday evening before the vacation, he will hear many of the scholars speak with grateful appreciation of what the year’s work has done for them, and with enthusiastic hope of what they mean to do for others during their summer’s work of teaching. The members of the graduating class will recall their experience of six or seven or eight years in the Institution, and tell what a home it has been to them, and how much of what they have acquired in the training of mind and character is due to the Christian home influence of the school. If it is the first Sunday evening of the new school year, our benevolent friend will hear many of these same scholars tell of their summer’s work—how they have succeeded in some things and failed in others; what they have done in Sunday-school and temperance work; what obstacles they have met and conquered; what increasing favor they have found in the communities where they have labored. At either of these Sunday evening family gatherings (for such they are), I think our visiting friend will be struck with the simple straightforward way in which our scholars express themselves, with the extremely limited amount of what is sometimes called “gush,” and with the clear revelation which will be made to him that before, behind, around, and underneath everything else, the development of a thoroughly Christian character, and of a true manhood and womanhood, is the all-absorbing purpose of our work. But I am stultifying myself in trying to convey an impression of these gatherings to others. Even to our own corps of workers here, they come, twice a year, almost as a surprise and as a most inspiring revelation to ourselves of what God is permitting us to do.