One of the teachers of this school is an accomplished woman from Philadelphia.  Another is from Newport, Rhode Island, where she had prepared herself for this work by benevolent labors in teaching poor children.  The third is a young woman of African descent, of olive complexion, finely cultured, and attuned to all beautiful sympathies, of gentle address, and, what was specially noticeable, not possessed with an overwrought consciousness of her race.  She had read the best books, and naturally and gracefully enriched her conversation with them.  She had enjoyed the friendship of Whittier; had been a pupil in the Grammar-School of Salem, then in the State Normal School in that city, then a teacher in one of the schools for white children, where she had received only the kindest treatment both from the pupils and their parents,—­and let this be spoken to the honor of that ancient town.  She had refused a residence in Europe, where a better social life and less unpleasant discrimination awaited her, for she would not dissever herself from the fortunes of her people; and now, not with a superficial sentiment, but with a profound purpose, she devotes herself to their elevation.

At Coffin Point, on St. Helena Island, I visited a school kept by a young woman from the town of Milton, Massachusetts, “the child of parents passed into the skies,” whose lives have both been written for the edification of the Christian world.  She teaches two schools, at different hours in the afternoon, and with different scholars in each.  One class had read through Hillard’s Second Primary Reader, and were on a review, reading Lessons 19, 20, and 21, while I was present.  Being questioned as to the subjects of the lessons, they answered intelligently.  They recited the twos of the multiplication-table, explained numeral letters and figures on the blackboard, and wrote letters and figures on slates.  Another teacher in the adjoining district, a graduate of Harvard, and the son of a well-known Unitarian clergyman of Providence, Rhode Island, has two schools, in one of which a class of three pupils was about finishing Ellsworth’s First Progressive Reader, and another, of seven pupils, had just finished Hillard’s Second Primary Header.  Another teacher, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the same island, numbers one hundred pupils in his two schools.  He exercises a class in elocution, requiring the same sentence to be repeated with different tones and inflections, and one could not but remark the excellent imitations.

In a school at St. Helena village, where were collected the Edisto refugees, ninety-two pupils were present as I went in.  Two ladies were engaged in teaching, assisted by Ned Loyd White, a colored man, who had picked up clandestinely a knowledge of reading while still a slave.  One class of boys and another of girls read in the seventh chapter of St. John, having begun this Gospel and gone thus far.  They stumbled a little on words like “unrighteousness”