ATHENS, ALA.—A larger number of scholars than heretofore is reported, and a deepening religious interest. Several have professed faith in Christ, and many more have been seeking the Lord.
SAND MOUNTAIN, ALA.—The church has no pastor, and only about a dozen members, but meets every Sunday, and a sermon is read by one of the members. The Sunday-school is also kept up.
—There are in the State of Georgia 81,164 colored voters, who own 457,635 acres of land, valued on the tax list at $1,244,104, and city property valued at $1,790,525, and about $1,000,000 worth of horses, cattle, etc., and $2,100,000 on other property not enumerated.
—The Atlanta _Republican_ asserts that a Campbell county negro farmer raised, last year, seventeen bales of cotton and thirteen hundred bushels of corn on nine acres of land, his only help being a bob-tailed yearling.
—A Kentucky law orders the sale of certain convicts for a term of servitude to the highest bidder. A negro was sold for six months the other day at Hickman. It seems to many that the aim of the law is altogether at the colored people. Is it not a dangerous weapon, even if constitutional?
The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, in 1874, decided, after thorough discussion, to continue its Freedmen’s Committee, as then located and constituted, for five years (_i.e._, until 1879), “during which period its affairs shall be conducted with the view to the final merging of the Committee with the Board of Home Missions, the churches to be transferred as soon as possible to the Board.” During this fourth year of the proposed five, this last has been done; all the missionaries exclusively engaged in preaching, and their churches are thus transferred. Evangelical work is still retained by the Committee.
—The shrinkage in value of real estate has reduced the income of the Peabody Educational Fund from $100,000 in 1876, to $60,000 in 1877. It may be still less this year.
—The Congressional Committee on Education recommend that the proceeds of the sale of all public lands be set apart as a fund for school purposes, the income for the first ten years to be divided among the States on the basis of illiteracy.
—The Kentucky Legislature propose to make of their share an endowment for the State University, against which the colored teachers of Fayette County protest, as a gross injustice to the common-schools, in the following resolutions: