One place visited by a general missionary was so full of reckless men that the station-agent always carried a revolver from his house to the railway station. A vile variety show, carried on by abandoned women, was kept open day and night. Sunday was the noisiest day of all. Yet in this place a church was formed; and many men and women, having found a leader, were ready to take a stand for the right. I am not writing of the past; for all the conditions that I have spoken of exist in hundreds, yes, thousands, of places all over the land. One need not go to the far West to find them; they exist in every State of the Union, only varying in their types of sin. Visiting a home missionary in a mining region within two hours' ride of the capital, in a State not four hundred miles from the Atlantic, I found the man in one of the most desolate towns I ever saw. The most prosperous families were earning on an average five dollars a week, store pay. All were in debt. When the missionary announced his intention of going there, he was warned that it was not safe; but that did not alter his plans. The first service was held in a schoolhouse, the door panels of which were out and not a pane of glass unbroken. A roaring torrent had to be passed on an unsteady plank bridge, over which the women and children crawled on hands and knees. It was dark when they came. The preacher could see the gleam of the men's eyes from their grimy faces as the lanterns flickered in the draughts. He began to preach. Soon white streaks were on the men's cheeks, as tears from eyes unused to weeping rolled down those black faces. At the close a church was organized, a reading-room was added, and many a boy was saved from the saloon by it. Yet, strange to say, although the owners (church members too) had cleared a million out of those mines, the money to build the needed church and parsonage had to be sent from the extreme East. Hundreds of miles eastward I have found men living, sixty and seventy in number, in a long hut, their food cooked in a great pot, out of which they dipped their meals with a tin dipper. No less than seventy-five thousand Slovaks live in this one State, and their only spiritual counsel comes from a few Bible-readers. Ought we not then, as Christians, to help those already there, and give of our plenty to send the men needed to carry the light to thousands of places that as yet sit in the darkness and the shadow? HOW THE HOME MISSIONARY BEGINS WORK IN THE NEW COMMUNITY. _First_, pastoral visiting is absolutely necessary to success. The feelings of newcomers are tender after breaking the home ties and getting to the new home, and a visit from the pastor is sure to bring satisfactory results. Sickness and death offer him opportunities for doing much good, especially among the poor, and they are always the most numerous.