All seemed attentive; and though the teachers complained that the sudden entrance of visitors always led to more confusion than usual, there was certainly no more than one would expect from any school of equal extent anywhere, or under any management. The rolls contained the names of three hundred and seventy-four pupils, of whom about two hundred were present. The Superintendent, who seemed an earnest, simple-minded man, enthusiastically convinced that he had a “mission” here, spoke of this as about the average attendance. The parents, he said, were themselves so uncertain, and so little accustomed, as yet, to habits of regularity, that they could not well bring up this average to a better point. It seemed to me surely not so far behind our ordinary public schools at the North as to suggest any unfavorable contrasts. These children had all been slaves, and nearly all had accompanied their parents on their escape from the plantations of the Peninsula, and of the upper counties of North Carolina, to the Fortress. The parents had generally been field hands, and one noticed among the children very few faces not of pure African descent. Such masses of little woolly heads, such rows of shining ivories, and flat noses and blubber lips, I had never seen collected before, unless in a state of filth utterly unbearable. The teachers were all convalescent soldiers from the hospitals, moving noiselessly about among the benches in their hospital slippers and cheap calico wrappers—as they themselves had often seen moving about among their hospital cots the angels of mercy from the North. Who shall say they were not doing as beneficent a work, or that the little negroes might not well follow them with as longing and affectionate a gaze? Several classes were called up to exhibit their proficiency. Doubtless the teachers selected their best scholars for the test—I think even Northern schools sometimes do that—but there can be little opportunity for deception in the reading of an unlearned lesson in a book, or in answers to questions in mental arithmetic, propounded by the visitors themselves. It was strange to see boys of fourteen or fifteen reading in the First Reader; but stranger to observe how intelligently scholars in the First Reader went about their work, and with what comparative rapidity they learned. I passed among the forms and conversed with a good many of the soldier-teachers. They all united in saying that on an average the raw negro boys admitted to the school would learn their letters and be able to read well in the First Reader in three months; while some of them, who were originally bright, and who were kept in regular attendance, made considerably more rapid progress.