which had been going on for a few weeks.  Very many did not have the opportunity for instruction till weeks and even months after.  During the spring and summer of 1862 there were not more than a dozen schools, and these were much interrupted by the heat, and by the necessity of assigning at times some of the teachers to act as superintendents.  Teachers came for a brief time, and upon its expiration, or for other cause, returned home, leaving the schools to be broken up.  It was not until October or November that the educational arrangements were put into much shape; and they are still but imperfectly organized.  In some localities there is as yet no teacher, and this because the associations have not had the funds wherewith to provide one.

I visited ten of the schools, and conversed with the teachers of others.  There were, it may be noted, some mixed bloods in the schools of the town of Beaufort,—­ten in a school of ninety, thirteen in another of sixty-four, and twenty in another of seventy.  In the schools on the plantations there were never more than half a dozen in one school, in some cases but two or three, and in others none.

The advanced classes were reading simple stories and didactic passages in the ordinary school-books, as Hillard’s Second Primary Reader, Willson’s Second Reader, and others of similar grade.  Those who had enjoyed a briefer period of instruction were reading short sentences or learning the alphabet.  In several of this schools a class was engaged on an elementary lesson in arithmetic, geography, or writing.  The eagerness for knowledge and the facility of acquisition displayed in the beginning had not abated.

On the 25th of March I visited a school at the Central Baptist Church on St. Helena Island, built in 1855, shaded by lofty live-oak trees, with the long, pendulous moss everywhere hanging from their wide-spreading branches, and surrounded by the gravestones of the former proprietors, which bear the ever-recurring names of Fripp and Chaplin.  This school was opened in September last, but many of the pupils had received some instruction before.  One hundred and thirty-one children were present on my first visit, and one hundred and forty-five on my second, which was a few days later.  Like most of the schools on the plantations, it opened at noon and closed at three o’clock, leaving the forenoon for the children to work in the field or perform other service in which they could be useful.  One class, of twelve pupils, read page 70th in Willson’s Reader, on “Going Away.”  They had not read the passage before, and they went through it with little spelling or hesitation.  They had recited the first thirty pages of Towle’s Speller, and the multiplication-table as high as fives, and were commencing the sixes.  A few of the scholars, the youngest, or those who had come latest to the school, were learning the alphabet.  At the close of the school, they recited in concert the Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd,” requiring prompting at the beginning of some of the verses.  They sang with much spirit hymns which had been taught them by the teachers, as,—­