The first school which we visited was a girls’ school, in which some forty-four little women of all ages, from four to fifteen years, were assembled under the charge of a young Corfute girl, an Italian Protestant, who had delegated her authority to different children under her.  The small maidens gathered around their chiefs in groups, and read from the book in which they were studying when we appeared.  Some allowance must be made for difference of the languages, Italian being logically spelled and easily pronounced; but I certainly never heard American children of their age read nearly so well.  They seemed also to have a lively understanding of what they read, and to be greatly interested in the scriptural stories of which their books were made up.  They repeated verses from the Bible, and stanzas of poetry, all very eagerly and prettily.  As bashfulness is scarcely known to their race, they had no hesitation in showing off their accomplishments before a stranger, and seemed quite delighted with his applause.  They were not particularly quiet; perhaps with young Neapolitans that would be impossible.  I saw their copy-books, in which the writing was very good, (I am sure the printer would like mine to be as legible,) and the books were kept neat and clean, as were the hands and faces of the children.  Taking the children as one goes in the streets of Naples, it would require a day perhaps to find as many clean ones as I saw in these schools, where cleanliness is resolutely insisted upon.  Many of the children were ragged; here and there was one hideous with ophthalmia; but there was not a clouded countenance, nor a dirty hand among them.  We should have great hopes for a nation of which the children can be taught to wash themselves.

There were fourteen pupils in the boys’ superior school, where geography, mathematics, linear drawing, French, Italian history, and ancient history were taught.  A brief examination showed the boys to be well up in their studies;—­indeed they furnished some recondite information about Baffin’s Bay for which I should not myself have liked to be called on suddenly.  Their drawing-books were prodigies of neatness, and betrayed that aptness for form and facility of execution which are natural to the Italians.  Some of these boys had been in the schools nearly three years; they were nearly all of the class which must otherwise have grown up to hopeless vagabondage; but here they were receiving gratis an education that would fit them for employments wherein trained intellectual capacity is required.  If their education went no higher than this, what an advance it would be upon their original condition!