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 bloods in the schools of the town of Beaufort,--ten in a school of ninety, thirteen in another of sixty-four, and twenty in another of seventy. In the schools on the plantations there were never more than half a dozen in one school, in some cases but two or three, and in others none. The advanced classes were reading simple stories and didactic passages in the ordinary school-books, as Hillard's Second Primary Reader, Willson's Second Reader, and others of similar grade. Those who had enjoyed a briefer period of instruction were reading short sentences or learning the alphabet. In several of this schools a class was engaged on an elementary lesson in arithmetic, geography, or writing. The eagerness for knowledge and the facility of acquisition displayed in the beginning had not abated.