se lowly burial-places, for which art has done nothing,
are not without a fascination, and in some hours of life they take a
faster hold on the sentiments than more imposing cemeteries, adorned
with shafts of marble and granite, and rich in illustrious dead.

There were some superstitions among the people, perhaps of African
origin, which the teachers had detected, such as a belief in hags as
evil spirits, and in a kind of witchcraft which only certain persons can
cure. They have a superstition, that, when you take up and remove a
sleeping child, you must call its spirit, else it will cry, on awaking,
until you have taken it back to the same place and invoked its spirit.
They believe that turning an alligator on his back will bring rain; and
they will not talk about one when in a boat, lest a storm should thereby
be brought on.

But the features in the present condition of the freedmen bearing
directly on the solution of the social problem deserve most
consideration.

And, first, as to _education_. There are more than thirty schools in the
territory, conducted by as many as forty or forty-five teachers, who are
commissioned by the three associations in Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia, and by the American Missionary Association. They have an
average attendance of two thousand pupils, and are more or less
frequented by an additional thousand. The ages of the scholars range in
the main from eight to twelve years. They did not know even their
letters prior to a year ago last March, except those who were being
taught in the single school at Beaufort already referred to, which had
been going on for a few weeks. Very many did not have the opportunity
for instruction till weeks and even months after. During the spring and
summer of 1862 there were not more than a dozen schools, and these were
much interrupted by the heat, and by the necessity of assigning at times
some of the teachers to act as superintendents. Teachers came for a
brief time, and upon its expiration, or for other cause, returned home,
leaving the schools to be broken up. It was not until October or
November that the educational arrangements were put into much shape; and
they are still but imperfectly organized. In some localities there is as
yet no teacher, and this because the associations have not had the funds
wherewith to provide one.

I visited ten of the schools, and conversed with the teachers of others.
There were, it may be noted, some mixed blo