_Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico._ Where voodooism prevails it has not only its adepts and votaries, but a large class who, full of terror, buy at exorbitant prices from voodoo priests charms against its spells. The late war has given the negroes opportunities for education and a future, but the new prosperity has not broken the power of voodooism. Of a thing kept secret and hidden, which many will deny and more be ashamed of, it is not easy to get precise data or details. Yet from time to time revelations are made attesting its vitality. A negro member of the Louisiana Legislature, and a minister in one of the Protestant denominations, was reported within a few years as undergoing certain rites to free himself from the spell of a voodoo priestess. We may therefore easily infer that the negroes, being not only self-governing, but governing the whites in many parts by force of numbers, are not likely to be influenced so much by whites as by the crafty and aspiring among themselves. They will concentrate, and in their concentration this voodoo power cannot but increase and all vestiges of Christianity disappear. The field upon which it can work—the vast colored population of the South—is ready for it. Some may think the whole matter a shallow imposture that will soon die out before the effulgence of newspapers; but it really shows no signs of decline, and, if no cases have been unearthed which show such frightful enormities as those in Hayti, it is certainly attended with ceremonies which, for their very indecency and pampering of the worst vices, should cause it to be rooted out, even by those who would regard the direct worship of the devil as something with which the state cannot interfere. Open the map of the United States, and see how a band of country from the Atlantic to the Pacific is thus permeated by heathenism. In the Southern States the voodoo worship; New Mexico and Indian Territory with nagualism; Utah with Mormonism; California with Buddhism. Throughout this tract the church planted there from one to three centuries is still weak, and, except in California, is not gaining ground with any rapidity. Everywhere Catholic influence is less potent than others. The very climate, enervating and disposing to ease and indulgence, seems to lend power to systems that gratify the passions which the church teaches her children to mortify and control.