"To be governed merely by instincts is pure savagery. All civilization is the result of subordinating instinct to reason, and to the necessities of peace, amity and righteousness. To surrender to instinct, would destroy all civilization in three days. If, then, the color-line is the result of natural instincts, the commonest daily needs of the merest civilization require that we should ask ourselves, is it better or worse to repress or cherish this instinct, and this color-line?" There are forces at work, regenerative and ennobling, that will lead the Southern white people to be ashamed of their attitude toward the Negroes, and not the least of these are the life and works of Mr. Cable. A letter came into my hand, when I was in the South, which is not only a commentary, but also throws a ray of sunlight where there is much darkness. It was a letter from an old mistress to her former slave. He is now a successful business man in Chattanooga. This earnest, Christian woman, rising above her prejudices, wrote her former slave a cordial invitation to visit her in her home. Her husband, his old master, had died in the Confederate service. She had seen her servants taken away from her through the success of the Union armies. Her property had been depleted, and her fertile plantation overrun by the loyal troops. It must have been with great sadness and a bitter heart, that she looked out upon this ruin, wrought as she believed, throughout the invading of the sacred soil of Virginia. But in these years that have passed, this bitterness has largely gone, and this sweet, Christian letter comes to her former slave. The ex-slave told me with tears in his eyes that he paid her this visit, and that she welcomed him, not to the Negro quarters, nor to the kitchen-chamber, but to her best guest-chamber, and said: "I want you to feel that you are welcome to the best hospitality of my home." "And she treated me almost as tenderly as she would one of her own sons," said the colored man. And so light is coming, little by little. Dr. Haygood expresses a regret that the white women of the South are so slow to appreciate the importance of the moral elevation of the Negroes, and so slow to join hands with their Northern sisters in his education. But such facts as this kind, Christian letter furnishes, lead us to hope and to believe that better times are coming, and that the Southern Christians, interested as they are in the Negro in Africa, will, little by little, appreciate and minister more and more to the terrible need of the Negro in South Carolina and Alabama. * * * * * MUSIC'S MISSION. BY REV. E.N. ANDREWS, HARTFORD, WIS. Suggested by the following words by Rev. B.A. Imes in the May MISSIONARY: