We welcome with special pleasure to our table, the first number of the _Fisk Expositor_, published at Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn., from which we give an extract on another page. It is an additional witness to the devotion and enterprise, with which our professors and teachers are working in all directions, to extend their influence for the information and enlightenment of those among whom they labor. This is another of a group of such publications, among which are the _Southern Workman_, of Hampton, the _Southern Sentinel_, of Talladega, and the _Straight Occasional_, of New Orleans. They are full of information as to the work of these institutions, and of valuable discussions of topics of interest and importance to the colored people of the land.
We cited in the MISSIONARY for January a number of large gifts from wealthy men and women, to relieve from debt the Missionary Boards of various churches, as worthy examples to some of the men of liberal heart and means who are in especial sympathy with our work for the lowly. We still have hope that such, alone or in combination, will do great things for us, and make us glad, in freeing us from accumulated but already diminishing indebtedness.
Meanwhile, to enable us to carry on our constantly increasing work, it may not be needless to address this word to those who cannot give large sums from a large store of good, but who, out of their moderate incomes and limited means, have been in the habit of sending us smaller amounts.
Dear friends, after all, it is on you that we depend. If you will look through our list of receipts from month to month, you will see how large a proportion of it all comes to us in little sums—a few dollars here and a few dollars there. You must not fail us, then. We cannot afford to give up the large contributors, perhaps; still less the small ones. Sometimes, when it has gone abroad that such an one has given his five, ten or twenty thousand dollars, the givers of five, ten or twenty dimes are checked for a while in the flowing of their generosity. Because there was a heavy rain yesterday, the dews will not form to-night. The suggestion of plenteous supplies goes abroad because of one large receipt, and the small sums seem so very small to the givers as they compare them with the large ones.