Our women! how shall I describe them? I wish I might picture them before you as they ride into town with their babies in their arms and a child or two on their horses with them, or as they walk in with heavy, dragging gait, loaded with some produce for sale, or as they stand for hours open-eyed and open-mouthed around the counters of some country store. I wish you could see them in their cabin homes, as bare of comfort as a wild desert waste, or at work in the field with the family, but always and everywhere with a chew of tobacco or a snuff stick in their mouths. They never express a desire for what they have not, nor a murmur at what they have, but their very movements are a complaint--a wail. On their face is ever seen that weary, resigned, passionless look. They never lighten with joy or surprise. If you could manage to fire a Vesuvius before their eyes you would never know by any outward expression but that they had seen volcanoes every day of their lives. There is no imagery, no ideality. The world to them is a humdrum routine, a common-place affair. They have no heroes, and they look upon all men, not as protectors, but seducers, not as beings formed in the image of a pure and holy God, but in the image of a God of lust and debauchery. When first going among these people, the ludicrous or comical keeps presenting itself, but as you stay year by year the terrible _reality_ of their lives presses sore upon you. You are cramped by their narrowness; you are depressed by their lack of buoyancy; you grow distrustful because of their perfidy; you become sharer of their woes, but they have no joys to share. Our work among them was begun none too soon. The eye of the speculator is being turned to our mineral and timber resources, and with unscrupulous money-makers for a centre and a demoralized people to gather round them, and no Christ in their midst, what strongholds of Satan would be formed. When we commenced our work seven years ago the field was open to the Congregationalists. If we could have had means to have secured helpers we could have planted ourselves largely, for we had continuous calls to come and organize churches. The people of better minds are sick and tired of the church life around them; they cannot indorse it and so are called infidels. But we have found no infidels there; still it takes no prophet to see that the reaction from this demoralized church life all through the mountains is going to create a great wave of infidelity unless real Christians come to the rescue very soon.