sto
refugees, ninety-two pupils were present as I went in. Two ladies were
engaged in teaching, assisted by Ned Loyd White, a colored man, who had
picked up clandestinely a knowledge of reading while still a slave. One
class of boys and another of girls read in the seventh chapter of St.
John, having begun this Gospel and gone thus far. They stumbled a little
on words like "unrighteousness" 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