The Eureka Church-Arbor, shown below, sheltered the opening service of the new plantation missions in Southern Georgia. The people came under the shadows of the piney woods from every quarter. The first mission church was organized under this rude booth. There the meetings continued until the cold and rainy months of winter. Now, by the help of a grant from the Church Building Society, a small church building will speedily become the home of a beneficent church and school work. [Illustration: THE EUREKA CHURCH-ARBOR.] This church of the forest took its start from the earnest convictions of its pastor, Rev. J. B. Fletcher. After long study of the New Testament, with the help of few other books than his tattered Greek lexicon, he resigned his ecclesiastical connection because he had found, as he thought, the free church polity on Bible principles. His discovery was substantially the Congregational system. He called his first church "Eureka." It now has nine other churches associated in the same work. A mission preacher, a devoted man residing near, a man who is highly respected by all the people, has immediate charge of the Eureka work and holds the Sunday-school and other services. [Illustration: A PASTOR'S HOME.] The abodes of many of the plantation preachers are as simple and humble as those of their people. We give an illustration of one of these homes. Usually there is a division into two or perhaps three rooms. Sometimes a small lean-to is built at the side or end, for use as kitchen. The chimney, erected on the outside, is often constructed of clay bound with sticks. It starts in a broad fireplace of stone, which warms the whole building. Some of these cabins have small glass windows; others of them have only openings for windows, with wooden shutters. In such dwellings there reside vast numbers of the plantation preachers, and some of our own mission preachers, at the early stages of mission work in the back country. [Illustration: MARIETTA CHURCH AND PARSONAGE.] The picture given herewith of the church, parsonage, and school, in Marietta, Georgia, illustrates very many of the American Missionary Association church missions in the South. A neat church, a plain but comfortable house, with its adjoining school-room, are the type of the improving influences in both religious and educational service, which we seek to carry among these shadowed and suffering millions. In both the Carolinas, as well as in Georgia, there is an awakening in the hearts of the colored people, both in the towns and in the country, for a better church life. This is inciting movements from the centralized forms of church government, with their arbitrary methods and hard taxation, into independency. Often the poverty of the people prevents their attaining anything beyond present and scanty shelter for their new free churches. The accompanying photograph is an illustration of such a chapel among the plantations of South Carolina.