“Send ’em to school, Sir.”

“Well, who’ll pay the teacher?”

“We’s pays him.”

One who listens to such answers can hardly think that there is any natural incapacity in these children to acquire with maturity of years the ideas and habits of good citizens.

The children are cheerful, and, in most of the schools, well-behaved, except that it is not easy to keep them from whispering and talking.  They are joyous, and you can see the boys after school playing the soldier, with corn-stalks for guns.  The memory is very susceptible in them,—­too much so, perhaps, as it is ahead of the reasoning faculty.

The labor of the season has interrupted attendance on the schools, the parents being desirous of having the children aid them in planting and cultivating their crops, and it not being thought best to allow the teaching to interfere in any way with industrious habits.

A few freedmen, who had picked up an imperfect knowledge of reading, have assisted our teachers, though a want of proper training materially detracts from their usefulness in this respect.  Ned and Uncle Cyrus have already been mentioned.  The latter, a man of earnest piety, has died since my visit.  Anthony kept four schools on Hilton Head Island last summer and autumn, being paid at first by the superintendents, and afterwards by the negroes themselves; but in November he enlisted in the negro regiment.  Hettie was another of these.  She assisted Barnard at Edisto last spring, continued to teach after the Edisto people were brought to St. Helena village, and one day brought some of her pupils to the school at the Baptist Church, saying to the teachers there that she could carry them no farther.  They could read their letters and words of one syllable.  Hettie had belonged to a planter on Wadmelaw Island, a kind old gentleman, a native of Rhode Island, and about the only citizen of Charleston who, when Samuel Hoar went on his mission to South Carolina, stood up boldly for his official and personal protection.  Hettie had been taught to read by his daughter; and let this be remembered to the honor of the young woman.

Such are the general features of the schools as they met my eye.  The most advanced classes, and these are but little ahead of the rest, can read simple stories and the plainer passages of Scripture; and they could even pursue self-instruction, if the schools were to be suspended.  The knowledge they have thus gained can never be extirpated.  They could read with much profit a newspaper specially prepared for them and adapted to their condition.  They are learning that the world is not bounded north by Charleston, south by Savannah, west by Columbia, and east by the sea, with dim visions of New York on this planet or some other,—­about their conception of geography when we found them.  They are acquiring the knowledge of figures with which to do the business of life.  They are singing the songs of freemen.