But one or two railroads cross this section. There are few towns of any importance, and a man who should own $10,000 worth of property would be the great man for twenty miles around. They are an agricultural people, each family living on its own little farm of 50 to 100 acres, the homestead often having been handed down through two or three generations. The houses range from the painted and unpainted frame house of four to six rooms to the very common little log hut of one to two rooms where you will find huddled together at night a father and mother, and children of every age, and you yourself if you happen to be their guest. The most that is needed for family wants, from corn and bacon to tobacco, is raised by themselves. Often such a family will not see $50 in cash the year round. Even the old hand looms find a friendly shelter in those Rip Van Winkle hollows. A man who moved from these regions to Berea, that he might give his seven children an education, wore upon his back his carefully preserved wedding suit, the wool for which he himself had cut from the backs of his father’s sheep, and which his mother, after spinning, and weaving, and dyeing with butternut bark, had cut and made for him. A little shovel plough, a hand-made hoe, and an unkempt mule with a straw collar make up the agricultural outfit. The schoolhouse is a log hut sometimes without doors and windows, or even a floor. For religious services, dependence is placed upon the chance visits of an exhorter who sometimes cannot read, and is even proud of getting his inspiration at first hand. There is a section of Eastern Kentucky, 200 miles one way by 100 the other, that has not a settled minister of any denomination. Some hesitate about extending the work of this Association beyond the blacks, but they need have little scruple here, for this section of the map of our country is black through illiteracy. More than half of the adult white population native born, of the same stock and lineage that furnished from the more favored sections the Clays and Breckenridges, that gave to this country Abraham Lincoln—more than half of this white population cannot read or write. Thus, not on the farther side of broad oceans, or even the distant borders of our land, but right at hand in the very heart of the best settled and most cultured part of our country lies this territory, vast in extent, utterly neglected by all uplifting agencies in the past, peculiarly susceptible to the awakening influences of the changed social conditions at the South, where there is an ignorance so dense that when we remember that they are our brothers and sisters, not by Christian ties simply but by direct blood and lineage, we must hang our heads in shame. Surely if the Church at the North is sighing for new worlds to conquer, what more claim can there possibly be upon its attention and benevolence?