In another room, a bright, lady-like young quadroon, who was similarly occupied, smiled a pleasant greeting as we entered. She had been at the fair at Pierre Soulé’s. With ample means and a pleasant home, she volunteered to do this work of duty to her race; and the neat, orderly school-room, with the quiet ways and clean faces of her little charge, not less than their prompt answers, told her success. In one of the rooms in this building a row of picaninnies, ranging from four to fourteen, stood up to recite in the First Reader. At their head, painfully spelling his way through a sentence as we entered, was an old man of sixty, with white wool and a wrinkled face. He wore a pair of huge brass-rimmed spectacles; but they would not stick on his bullet-shaped head without further contrivance, and so he had tied a bit of packing-cord into the ends of the brass temples, and around his head. I asked the old man what he wanted to learn to read for. “Reckon if it’s good for white folks, good for me too.” “But you’re so old, uncle, one would think you wouldn’t care for such things any more.” “Reckon if it’s good for chil’en, can’t be bad for old folks.” Subsequent talk showed that the old man had a Bible, and wanted to learn to read it, and, further, that he believed, as soon as he could read, he would be entitled to vote. Precisely what good that would do him he did not seem to understand; but he worked away industriously over his well-thumbed First Reader, and scarcely gave a second look to the visitors, at whom the children were staring with all their eyes. It was a trifling thing, doubtless, and the old man may have been very silly to be thus setting himself to children’s tasks, in the simplicity of his desire to learn what he knew white folks had found good for them; but to me there seemed nothing more touching or suggestive in all the sights of New Orleans. We saw no other old men in the schools, and few young ones beyond the age of twenty; but the teachers said the cases were quite numerous in which the more intelligent scholars were instructing their parents at home. In all such instances the parents were sure to enforce regular attendance on the part of their children, and the influence of the school became reflex, first on the scholars, from them to the families, thence back to the school again.