The negro graveyards occasionally attracted me from the road.  They are usually in an open field, under a clump of some dozen or twenty trees, perhaps live-oaks, and not fenced.  There may be fifty or a hundred graves, marked only by sticks eighteen inches or two feet high and about as large as the wrist.  Mr. Olmsted saw some stones in a negro graveyard at Savannah, erected by the slaves, and bearing rather illiterate inscriptions; but I never succeeded in finding any but wooden memorials, not even at Beaufort.  Only in one case could I find an inscription, and that was in a burial-place on Ladies Island.  There was a board at the head of the grave, shaped something like an ordinary gravestone, about three feet high and six inches wide.  The inscription was as follows:—­

OLd Jiw de PArt his Life on the 2 of WAY Re st frow LAuer

On the foot-board were these words:—­

  We ll
  d OW N.

The rude artist was Kit, the son of the old man.  He can read, and also write a little, and, like his deceased father, is a negro preacher.  He said that he used to carry his father in his arms in his old age,—­that the old man had no pain, and, as the son expressed it, “sunk in years.”  I inquired of Kit concerning several of the graves; and I found, by his intelligent answers, that their tenants were disposed in families and were known.  These lowly burial-places, for which art has done nothing, are not without a fascination, and in some hours of life they take a faster hold on the sentiments than more imposing cemeteries, adorned with shafts of marble and granite, and rich in illustrious dead.

There were some superstitions among the people, perhaps of African origin, which the teachers had detected, such as a belief in hags as evil spirits, and in a kind of witchcraft which only certain persons can cure.  They have a superstition, that, when you take up and remove a sleeping child, you must call its spirit, else it will cry, on awaking, until you have taken it back to the same place and invoked its spirit.  They believe that turning an alligator on his back will bring rain; and they will not talk about one when in a boat, lest a storm should thereby be brought on.

But the features in the present condition of the freedmen bearing directly on the solution of the social problem deserve most consideration.

And, first, as to education.  There are more than thirty schools in the territory, conducted by as many as forty or forty-five teachers, who are commissioned by the three associations in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and by the American Missionary Association.  They have an average attendance of two thousand pupils, and are more or less frequented by an additional thousand.  The ages of the scholars range in the main from eight to twelve years.  They did not know even their letters prior to a year ago last March, except those who were being taught in the single school at Beaufort already referred to,