Of course there are some stupid ones, but these are the minority.  The majority learn with wonderful rapidity.  Many of the grown people are desirous of learning to read.  It is wonderful how a people who have been so long crushed to the earth, so imbruted as these have been,—­and they are said to be among the most degraded negroes of the South,—­can have so great a desire for knowledge, and such a capability for attaining it.  One cannot believe that the haughty Anglo-Saxon race, after centuries of such an experience as these people have had, would be very much superior to them.  And one’s indignation increases against those who, North as well as South, taunt the colored race with inferiority while they themselves use every means in their power to crush and degrade them, denying them every right and privilege, closing against them every avenue of elevation and improvement.  Were they, under such circumstances, intellectual and refined, they would certainly be vastly superior to any other race that ever existed.

After the lessons, we used to talk freely to the children, often giving them slight sketches of some of the great and good men.  Before teaching them the “John Brown” song, which they learned to sing with great spirit, Miss T. told them the story of the brave old man who had died for them.  I told them about Toussaint, thinking it well they should know what one of their own color had done for his race.  They listened attentively, and seemed to understand.  We found it rather hard to keep their attention in school.  It is not strange, as they have been so entirely unused to intellectual concentration.  It is necessary to interest them every moment, in order to keep their thoughts from wandering.  Teaching here is consequently far more fatiguing than at the North.  In the church, we had of course but one room in which to hear all the children; and to make one’s self heard, when there were often as many as a hundred and forty reciting at once, it was necessary to tax the lungs very severely.

My walk to school, of about a mile, was part of the way through a road lined with trees,—­on one side stately pines, on the other noble live-oaks, hung with moss and canopied with vines.  The ground was carpeted with brown, fragrant pine-leaves; and as I passed through in the morning, the woods were enlivened by the delicious songs of mocking-birds, which abound here, making one realize the truthful felicity of the description in “Evangeline,”—­

            “The mocking-bird, wildest of singers,
  Shook from his little throat such floods of delirious music
  That the whole air and the woods and the waves seemed silent to listen.”

The hedges were all aglow with the brilliant scarlet berries of the cassena, and on some of the oaks we observed the mistletoe, laden with its pure white, pearl-like berries.  Out of the woods the roads are generally bad, and we found it hard work plodding through the deep sand.