and “circumcision”; otherwise they got along very well.  When the Edisto refugees were brought here, in July, 1862, Ned, who is about forty or forty-five years old, and Uncle Cyrus, a man of seventy, who also could read, gathered one hundred and fifty children into two schools, and taught them as best they could for five months until teachers were provided by the societies.  Ned has since received a donation from one of the societies, and is now regularly employed on a salary.  A woman comes to one of the teachers of this school for instruction in the evening, after she has put her children to bed.  She had become interested in learning by hearing her younger sister read when she came home from school; and when she asked to be taught, she had learned from this sister the alphabet and some words of one syllable.  Only a small proportion of the adults are, however, learning.

On the 8th of April, I visited a school on Ladies Island, kept in a small church on the Eustis estate, and taught by a young woman from Kingston, Massachusetts.  She had manifested much persistence in going to this field, went with the first delegation, and still keeps the school which she opened in March, 1862.  She taught the pupils their letters.  Sixty-six were present on the day of my visit.  A class of ten pupils read the story which commences on page 86th of Hillard’s Second Primary Reader.  One girl, Elsie, a full black, and rather ungainly withal, read so rapidly that she had to be checked,—­the only case of such fast reading that I found.  She assisted the teacher by taking the beginners to a corner of the room and exercising them upon an alphabet card, requiring them to give the names of letters taken out of their regular order, and with the letters making words, which they were expected to repeat after her.  One class recited in Eaton’s First Lessons in Arithmetic; and two or three scholars with a rod pointed out the states, lakes, and large rivers on the map of the United States, and also the different continents on the map of the world, as they were called.  I saw the teacher of this school at her residence, late in the afternoon, giving familiar instruction to some ten boys and girls, all but two being under twelve years, who read the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Revelation, and the story of Lazarus in the eleventh chapter of St. John.  Elsie was one of these.  Seeing me taking notes, she looked archly at the teacher, and whispered,—­“he’s putting me in the book”; and as Elsie guessed, so I do.  The teacher was instructing her pupils in some dates and facts which have had much to do with our history.  The questions and answers, in which all the pupils joined, were these:—­

“Where were slaves first brought to this country?”

“Virginia.”

“When?”

“1620.”

“Who brought them?”

“Dutchmen.”

“Who came the same year to Plymouth, Massachusetts?”

“Pilgrims.”