February 20, Evening.
Yesterday I visited
Miss Murray's school on St. Helena Island. Miss Murray is assisted by Miss
Towne and Miss Foster. Since the season for tilling the land has begun, the
school has lessened in numbers from 200 to 125: both sexes and from three to
fifteen years of age. Many of them have been under tuition several months and
compare very favorably with Irish children after the same length of
instruction, as I have seen them in N. E. From what I have seen in camp, I
think the mode of receiving instruction is very different in the two races.
Imitation and musical concert are the avenues to the minds of these children.
Of course the habit of such dependence will be changed by education, but such
is the beginning. After centuries of slavery, which utterly shut the avenues of
thought, we should hardly expect rapid development of activity in the superior
regions of thought. Only now and then, some genius, like Robert Sutton, can be
left to prove the God-like relation. The simple fact is that use is less distructive
than disuse.
I dined at Friend
Hunn's and was accompanied by Miss Forten on a visit to Mr. Thorpe, who has
charge of the Tripp plantation. “Edisto” [is] a meagre little confiscated
creature from Edisto Island, with a saddle that must have been afloat since the
flood; a bridle that left him comparatively unbridled and erratic in his ways,
and a girth that could never gird his loins up to the scriptural injunction
without breaking. He had neither sandals nor shoes to his feet nor speed to his
body. You can imagine that our ride of four miles through the pine barrens was
not so rapid as John Gilpin's. But the afternoon was like the last of June and
full of sunshine and jasmine blossoms and the ground was covered with brown
pine needles. I have seen none but the pitch pine here. The needles are often a
foot long and now that they are enlivened by steady warmth, they sport graceful
plumes against the sky.
But I have made my
last visit to St. Helena Island. The fortunes of war uproot too suddenly, for
my fancy, all the little fibres of local attachment just as they begin to take
kindly to the soil. I have just got everything in good attitude towards my new
hospital when all is to be abandoned and we are to pitch our tents (if the
rebels permit) in another state. Being exactly what I want, I do not grumble at
the fact.
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