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Similar acknowledgments came from all our teachers.

The Christmas season being universally accepted among these
people as a time for festivity, the teachers participated in the
general joyfulness, and were enabled materially to increase it by
the distribution of gifts from benevolent friends at the North, as
the annexed extracts will show :—

Response TO A Box sent By Two LirTLe CHILDREN, AGED RESPECTIVELY
Five anp SEVEN.

St. Helena, Twelfth Month 24, 1866.

My dear young Friends :—A happy Christmas to you all, and blessings

on you for the kind, benevolent feeling that put it into your hearts to send

‘ greeting to our flock of sable ones here at St. Helena, and to gladden the
spirits of these by your very pretty and useful gifts, Would that you

could have seen the bright faces of our band of pupils to-day, as we gave

them your Christmas presents ; their eyes sparkled, and their little hearts

beat quick with a new joy. Ah! there are indeed true emotions under-

neath the dark skin; there is a world of real feeling within these shat-

tered caskets, many of them all scarred and seared, and variously dis-

figured; and deep down in their souls there is an innate love for truth

and right, for beauty and harmony, and an ever-controlling love and

reverence for Jesus, even though their young lives were blighted under

the cruel and unhallowed dispensation of slavery; yet, up through all

the darkness and mists, the inhumanity and degradation, spring the

flowers of sympathy, and love and tenderness, of justice and mercy.

Their hearts are easily touched; soon the dew of feeling may be dis-
covered in the eye, and the iip may be seen to quiver, when an appeal is
made to their higher natures, showing that they are not void of con-
science, or lacking in the elements that combine to make true men and
women—as their enemies would fain have us believe. Please accept
their hearty thanks for your contribution. Théy are each and all most
acceptable, and we want each one who added to the store, however small
the gift, to feel in his or her heart that these little ones, who have so long
been sufferers, send you their warm and earnest thanks, and with them a.
«God bless you,” for each one of you. May He keep you ever near
_ Him, and always incline your hearts, as now, to remember the poor and
the friendless. Oh, I wish you could have seen an old woman, (Aunt
Charlotte,) one of the poorest of the poor, receive one of the nice warm
dresses that came in that noble box to us from Philadelphia, packed and
forwarded by a good, kind friend to the destitute, whose name may be
familiar to you; she was too happy to tell half her joy. « Oh!” she said,
«« May the good Jesus bress you; hopes he may allus be good to you, and
never forget you; me can’t tell how tankful I is for dis.” Her face told