Mr. JAMES P. BLAKE was the superintendent of the Freedmen's schools on Edisto Island. ELLEN S. KEMPTON and ELMIRA B. STANTON were teachers. Christmas 1865, the first Christmas after the end of the conflict, brought a Christmas Party. Returning to their home, in the dark, their small boat capsized in St. Pierre's Creek and all three drowned.

IN MEMORIAM:

" They were lovely and pleasant in their lives,
And in death they were not divided."

The stern, curt telegram announcing, with its painful but unavoidable brevity, the death, by drowning, of our three valued friends, was received too late for any other notice than of the shortest form in the January number of the "Freedmen's Record." None but those who know the strong and tender relation of sympathy which exists between the Committee on Teachers and most of those teachers whom they select and supervise, can appreciate the shock it caused in this office: not to a soulless Committee, intent only on business; but to those who hold themselves as guardians and friends of the many noble and self-sacrificing young women and young men whom they send forth, with joy and pity, to the deep satisfactions and the many privations and trials of this great work, — hardships from which no care at home can shield them; but the brave endurance of which, by the greater number of them, wins and secures our loving reverence.

ELLEN S. KEMPTON and ELMIRA B. STANTON have been unfalteringly faithful to the high and holy purpose under whose impulse they left the endearments and protection and delights of home, a single-hearted, pure re­solve to consecrate their time, their talents, and their superior position to the benefit of a long-injured race. With that sweet piety which recognizes a child of the Universal Father in every lowliest human being, they both entered on their work : no difficulties discouraged, no privations fretted them; but their latest letters to us are filled with the same glad enthusiasm which they manifested in the beginning.

JAMES P. BLAKE had also served under this Society in South Carolina, and lately established himself as a lawyer in Charleston, believing he might in that way largely benefit the oppressed freedmen, whose sufferings have called out his indignant pity and earnest activity. His eloquent and pathetic appeals to the North in behalf of the thousands of men, women, and children who, following in the wake of Sherman's resistless course through Georgia, were cast adrift in those winter days among the Sea Islands, almost naked, famished, and frozen, aroused the pity, and secured the aid, which saved innumerable lives.

Christmas, 1865, was a fair and genial day over the creek of St. Pierre in Edisto Island: the guiding moon silvered the placid waters, while the small, insecure boat, too heavily laden, bore the three friends homeward from the neighboring plantation. An anxious listener on the bank heard the sound of their mirthful voices, marked the interruption of a sentence, the pause, and then the sounds of anguish: the Father's last Angel had folded all beneath his protecting wing, and borne them to the beautiful home, and to the "Well done, good and faithful servants." No dirge sounding amid cathedral walls from grand-toned organ could have been so impressive and fitting as the plaintive native songs of their loving, weeping pupils, moving in a funeral train, almost as simple in all its arrangements as the Puritan obsequies on Plymouth Rock in 1621.

Tenderest sympathy for the bereaved homes whose deep loss is keenly felt by us; sweet, enduring memories of the faithful teachers, the beloved friends, — these fill our hearts. That life is not to be reckoned short which has borne fruit so beautiful; nor that death untimely which calls the faithful soul to higher duties.

[From the Freedmen's Record, February 1866]