e ours at Pleasant Hill? Here, if there can be
sufficient room and ample teaching force, they will be taught and
trained in a practical knowledge of all the duties of life, especially
in those of the household. If we educate and save the _girls_ we are
using the very lever needed to lift these hopeless and neglected
thousands living at our very doors, out of their degraded life and bring
them into the light of the 19th century, and qualify them to take
positions among the best women of the land.

The work for which I plead is full of encouragement and hope. It is not
in Africa. It is within one or two days' ride of the largest and most
wealthy churches of our country, those who love the Kingdom of Christ
and have sent, and are still sending, their thousands of dollars to the
ends of the earth, while these bright American girls are, by some
strange oversight, neglected at our very doors.

The American Missionary Association has undertaken a noble work among
them, and something has been accomplished, yet this good work has but
just begun. The grey dawn has only cast a few signs of daylight over the
mountains. To carry this work forward successfully in behalf of the
neglected girls, there should be, in a great natural center of
operations like Pleasant Hill, a spacious boarding hall with an
industrial department and home, for those girls. It should not be
stinted in size, but large, well-arranged, and well-equipped in all its
departments from the primary upwards, where they can be taught
everything a girl ought to learn, not only in books and in a Christian
life, but taught to sew, knit, darn stockings, to make good bread, and
keep house with order and neatness, and do everything needed to be done
in a Christian home. If the _native girls_ can come from their cabin
homes into such an institution and be thus thoroughly trained, the axe
is then laid at the very root of the tree of a squalid life of
illiteracy, and a life of Christian culture and hope comes in its place,
where Christian mothers throw angelic brightness over their households,
and families of children are trained to act well their part in this
great and growing nation. The institution I suggest, and for which I
must plead, should not only be large enough to accommodate girls near at
hand, but from other neighboring States who stand in need of such a home
and training. It should be a Bethel for these immortal waifs, a house of
bread, so well provided for as to