Oriental fashion. Their prayer-meetings and class-meetings are times of real interest, and in listening to them you realize that many of them are truly taught of God.
The number of female orphans is now nearly one hundred and fifty, about twenty having been added during the past year. The good fruits of the institution have so won the confidence of all who are acquainted with it that it has conquered prejudice and conciliated the interest and good-will of many even of the native nobility as well as the English magistrates, from whom the institution every year receives additional destitute orphans to be adopted into this Christian home and family, and trained freely upon our own principles.
From six to nine girls finish their studies and graduate each year. I here present, from a photograph, the last class that graduated, from which the reader will have a correct idea of their persons, style of dress, etc.
The girl on the left hand, standing up, is Julia Pybah, the middle one Mary Cocker, and the right hand one is Elizabeth Husk The first one sitting, left hand side, is Clementina Butler; the next, Rebecca Pettis; the next to her is Josephine, and the fourth is Grace Anable.
During a revival of religion, with which God was pleased recently to visit the Orphanage, over forty of these girls were soundly converted.
Thus God has justified our confidence when we first took these girls to train them up for him; all our hopes have been fulfilled. They have done well intellectually and religiously. More than twenty-five of them have already been married to our native preachers, teachers, and converts, and are now happy wives and mothers in their own homes, exhibiting before their heathen sisters what a Christian wife and mother is. Others of them have become efficient teachers and helpers in the work of visiting and instructing their countrywomen, as the columns of the “Heathen Woman's Friend” show. Probably the highest work which God had in view for these girls is that now in progress under the training of
