men have begun public life by schoolmastering, it would be a great piece of affectation in me, if I should employ any deprecatory expressions, or apolo

born on the same lands where we live together; and there is not a sunlight or a shade falling on my lot, which does not in due proportion cheer or sadden theirs. Let us call another case, Alice! This phi-gize for any determination to repair losses by "taking lanthropic mystery is too deep for my decrepit wits.

CHAPTER VII.

"Ilion in Tyriam transfer felicius urbem."

OVID-HEROIDES.

Philadelphia was the city to which Gottlieb Pfeiffer was bound; and after a tedious beating up stream from the Capes of Delaware, we saw its neat brick rows, its trim rectangles, and its lone steeple, in one of the last years of the last century. Pfeiffer was always talking of a certain regenerator of education whom he called Basedow-a type of Pestalozzi and Fellenberg, only with a dash of crazyhood, and a streak of jacobinism. My young German was going to a village called Germantown, I forget how many miles from the city; where his uncle was a leader among the sectaries called Mennonites, or vulgarly Menneeses. He was a very Quixote in education, and was about to rear the tender youth without bench, birch, or berating, and almost without book. He was to teach more Socratico out of doors, by sheer talk, along the romantic Wissahiccon and the slopes of Chestnut Hill. 1 gave him my adieux, as he sallied out on his first lesson, with a covey of younglings under his guidance. Poor fellow! he was carried off by the yellow fever.

a school." The only apology which now seems necessary, is for the presumption of dreaming that by such an occupation any man could make money. In truth, I knew then as well as I know now, that school keeping was not a specific for raising the wind, but I did not know as well as I know now, that it was not in public esteem a literary profession. Though not learned I was fond of books, and took to teaching as I once fondly thought of taking to book selling, because I fancied it would bring me into connections with the wisdom of past ages.

My schoolhouse was on the edge of a pine forest, a few hundred yards from where a brawling springhead burst out of the embankment of rock, some miles from any human habitation. It was not favored with any extensive distant prospects. Could I have perched with the crows which abounded there on the top of some eminent tree, I might have seen the broad but turbid Roanoke, sweeping its heavy tide around a neighboring bluff. But we were shut in to forest scenes. No one who has lived among them can forget the moaning sound made by even a gentle wind among the great branches of the pines; or the solitude formed by their dark surrounding shroud; or the mosaic of sunlight and shade on the earth when rays break through the network of boughs. But the monotony was oppressive, and I sighed for those lighter and varied traits of nature, which belong to a less primeval state of the world. In quiet hours, the wild-turkey's cry would be heard in the brake; the shrill red-bird, and the shy wood-lark were scarcely ever wanting; and several species of squirrel made no stranger of me, but dropped nut-shells from the hickory over the roof of my academy.

The Philadelphia which I remember was a sweet and gentle city. Many a boy and girl was then to be met, in all the rigor of plain dress, pacing to Arch Street Meeting. Shade trees were abundant in the great streets. The Chestnut Street Theatre was still called the "New Theatre." Morris's famous house was still visible; you got into the country a few hundred yards westward of the old prison; the Dock draw-bridge was in its glory; and many rows of houses in Front street were chequered with glazed brick and adorned with porch-benches. There was a soothing, umbrageous quietude in those broad, well paved stretches of Third street, where tall old fashioned mansions seemed to retire a little under spreading elms, in dignified coolness. I am afraid I should not know the places again. The calm and stillness of Penn's spirit was yet hovering over the town, with a shade and a natural grace which have long since been scared away by steam-wagons and engine-brook as it murmurs over the pebbles. The "scorcampaigns. But what was all this to a bewildered creature, who had gained glimpses of the old world before he had studied the new; who had gone over sea dreaming that he was rich, and had come back assured that he was poor; who had been ill-taught and was nevertheless to redeem his patrimony by labors beginning in a log school-house.

Take a view of the aforesaid seat of learning. The hour is noon. You might take this long house of logs for a châlet in the Emmenthal, if it were not for certain plain indications of another climate. There is a hum of bees through a thousand vines and dogwoods. The song of birds has lulled at this hour of heat, except perhaps the wearisome repetition of his double note by the chewink. But this intermission brings out more fully the music of the

pions "-start not, gentle reader at this southern name of the poor lacerta-peep round the gnarled bole of the pine, where the turpentine reflects the burning ray. Two or three switch-tailed horses are tethered in the oasis, ready to carry home double or triple loads of the young academicians. Hats, sunbonnets, and even coats, are hung upon the alder branches. Under the brow of the rock is a row of dinner baskets; and two or three jugs of milk are immersed in the darkest, coolest corner of the spring. Two fiddles and a flute are hid away among the broad leaves of a grape vine that clambers up the bank. All this will be obscure to such as have never gone to an "old-field school." Inside, the

scene is more lively but less idyllic. By counting | recking little of falls upon the yielding earth, which several who never appeared, I think I made my indeed seldom occur, and clings to his seat with the school to number fifteen, as a maximum. Four or tenacity of a limpet. Before he has arrived at the five short wooden forms, with some sloping boards dignity of the hat, he has learned to swim rivers and for desks, and a straw-bottomed chair for the master, play the feats of a Centaur. My young master is not made up the compliment of furniture; for I scarcely slow to practice in the same school, so that the cavreckon a churn-like vessel at the door, duly toted on alry has had some of its most daring and elegant the head of a laughing negress, every half-hour, riders from this part of the Union. I can no longer and emptied by two or three gourds with fantastic throw my leg over a saddle; but I still recall the handles. flush with which, accompanied by gallant comrades, I swept through forests, which to an unaccustomed eye had seemed impassable, or, stooping low, pierced the tangle of a brake, up from the basin of some low and deeply shaded stream. For years did I look to the grooming of my spirited Rhinoceros, who repaid the attention by a docility which concealed itself under a show of perverseness.

One thing is certain-I was as autocratic as Nicholas or Crusoe. My voice was the sole code of laws and often the text-book. The system was the sic volo, sic jubeo. The hour of beginning was denoted by my clattering up the pebbly path on my black steed, Rhinoceros. This dispersed the squads around the spring, and broke up the concert under the alders. Little Nanny Lee, who was the Jenny Lind of our The long evenings of summer found me sallying community, would sometimes carol away after my on rapid expeditions to the estates of my father's ferula had given its three knocks; but we soon fell friends; and I passed more nights in such hospitable into places. Ours was a loud school. There was mansions than in my own humble lodgings. Hospino rubric enjoining silence. There was no reading tality is the law of the land. Where towns are rare to one's self. Hark! the grand overture is performed and newspapers infrequent, and where even the mail by the simultaneous play of tenore and treble instru- in those days came only once a week, it was doing ments. One piping voice is rehearsing the alphabet a generous favor to enter a neighbor's doors for a and another the "twenty pence is one and eight-long visit, the host would be out before I could dispence;" another is reading of one who unrighteously mount, and sometimes a bevy of ladies clustered at ascended the apple tree and was experimented on by the door. fair words, grass, and other missiles. A croak between boy and man, is galloping over the quadrupedante putrem sonitu; while Mr. Blaney (we always called him Mister,) is in a dignified soliloquy over the trigonometrical survey of a polygonal field, with half-a-score of instruments laid out before him. If my ear serves me, there is a sotto voce addition of uncommanded recitations, concerning cats-cradles, tit-tat-to, and jack-straws.

Scorn not-O ye, who court the muse in Gothic quadrangles, and alcoved libraries, where the light colors your folio through "storied window, richly dight"-scorn not, the lowly lessons of the Red Swamp School-house! Its windows were not all glazed, nor were the crannies of its logs all stopped; but the sun has seldom broken in on brighter faces than some that were radiant in that little company. Though a few were barefoot (how otherwise could they have waded for hours in the rippling stream!) a few were the children of wealth. Among them was one who has since held the ear of a senate. And among them was one-alas, that she should have had me for a master!-who made deeper wounds than she ever knew. But Judith-thou shalt not have thy cruelty exposed!

CHAPTER IX.

"Tis true, he has a spark just come from France, But then, so far from beau-why, he talks sense!" FARQUHAR.

Riding was an accomplishment among the Romans, as it is in England and some parts of America; but in the South it is one of the necessaries of life. The bareheaded negro child mounts all the colts in the pasture, strains his horse over boundless meads,

Let me tell the truth. On looking back I perceive that while a flow of unimpeded talk, often prompted by large and capricious reading, made me welcome to every circle, I was, nevertheless, by no means successful in my personal overtures to the reigning sex. It was mortifying to me to observe, that many a roystering bumpkin, full of health and ignorance, made his suit in less time and with fewer embarrassments than I. Even my voyages and travels were of little avail. Indeed, in a self-contained community, where every thing goes by clanship and family tradition, and where the sight of a foreigner is commonly the signal for a joke, there is less éclat in foreign travel, than in seaports and great cities. I was glad, therefore, to fall back on county-connection. My father had married into a distinguished family, who, though poor, could hold up their heads. One of my uncles was high sheriff, and my cousin was in Congress. Revolutionary officers were still living who were of my kin. And I enjoyed a pretty free access to what are somewhat offensively called the first families.

After all 1 was known to be a poor schoolmaster, and suspected-as I now think, justly, of being a pedant. It would be both sad and comical, if I were to record my experiences as a teacher; the plans I dreamed over; the schedules I copied on large paper; the attempts to make the big boys talk Latin; the experiments in physics which burst my retorts and burnt my fingers; the amazement of parents and the fun of children. I verily believe there was not a more chimerical or less useful teacher, south of Mason's and Dixon's line. Lessons went to leeward, while I was drifting away after a project of a new Latin Grammar. The primers were made into boats

mist to see some grand discovery which he longs for printed in the daily sheet before his investigations are half done. You remember Montaigne's story of the ancient philosopher and the dish of figs which had been laid in honey.

and cocked-hats, while I invented a new orthogra- | denouement by any perverse brother or nephew peepphy; and my best coat was sewed over with bits of ing into the last pages, and forestalling the catastrored flannel, while I draughted a lecture. on Female phe. No, the winding-up is not to be preposterously Education. Donald Gordon courted Judith Brew-revealed. This were as disappointing as for a chester, during the very period in which I was bringing her to the point of conjugating amo, amare, amari. Early hours and hard reading, kept me still advancing in a sort of miscellaneous and preposterous condition. I began a hundred pursuits, with the furore of a crusader. I gathered flowers for an herbarium, and pasted wrong names on the species for want of a master. I made maps of the stars, and pointed them out to Judith, as we walked on the top of the house. My only Italian book was an odd volume of Dante, which broke me down after getting half way up the circling Babel of the Purgatory. My version of the Bucolics shamed me beyond expression, on comparison with Dryden.

In riding about the country, I fell in with planters and county-court lawyers, and doctors, who had little Latin and less Greek, but who nevertheless foiled me in argument. They knew how to talk of crops, of "good seasons for stripping tobacco," of the weather being giv-y, of long and short staple in cot- | ton, of horizontal ploughing, and of prices at Liverpool; while they could also connect with these questions the political economy of our great products, the effects of the British policy on our carrying-trade, and the theory of state-sovereignty as discussed in Congress. All these things were beyond my ken. That "reading" which "makes a full man" made me often seem a very foolish one. I made blunders in history, and was innocently unacquainted with several dates, such as George Mason's letters and the Battle of the Cow-Pens. I could have said much about AegosPotamos, or the Thirty Tyrants; but my old-time studies were very rapidly turning me into a mummy.

I dictate these confessions, in perpetuam rei memoriam, to guard solitary and too-forward boys from going too freely before the gales of their literary propensities. Nevertheless, for individual delight, everlasting novelty and sweet recollections, I still hold my way to have been best of any.

CHAPTER X.

"He cherished his friend, and he relished a bumper,
Yet one fault he had, and that one was a thumper-
Then what was his failing? come, tell it, add burn ye,
He was, could he help it? a special attorney."

GOLDSMITH'S RETALIATION.

The female readers of these rambling chapters have already been considering-no doubt-how some kind of a plot may be divined from the foregoing hints; but this arises from a total misconception of my plan.

Blessed ladies! toward whom, as viewed in imagination, my heart warms, and live coals stir among the hoary embers, I write not a romance or even a story. These are reminiscences, memorandums, odd leaves torn from the volume of recollection. Thanks to the modern way of publishing by piece-meal, my fair critics cannot be cheated of the agrodolce of the

Bent on learning, and not a little conceited in regard to my small and fragmentary acquisitions, I rode about the county in search of some congenial characters, and certainly I alighted on some odd ones. The straggling village around our court-house comprised a church, a school, a doctor's house and laboratory, a store, several mechanics' shops, and two lawyers' offices. In one of the last mentioned lived Gideon Stowe.

mer.

Rumor says that Stowe was the son of an overseer; but he was in my day a man of wide-spread reputation at the bar. A strong savor of his plebeianism adhered to him, which he rather cherished than concealed. I see him now, a strong-built man of fifty or thereabout; large-headed, bald and glabrous on the crown, with curly gray-hair gathered around his thick neck. He wore blue broad-cloth, and a white neck-cloth, and his low shoes displayed the blue yarn stockings, which covered a sturdy leg even in sumOf the graces he made small account. All dignity but that of sinewy argumentation he held far beneath him. I have seen him sit for hours on a court-day, on the counter of the country store, with his feet dangling, as he whittled off pecks of splinters and shavings from a bludgeon of soft pine, as he discoursed on constitutional law to the group who lis tened and admired. Stowe was the resort of despe rate culprits, for an hundred miles around. He loved plantation-talk, was a thriving agriculturist, a wealthy man, and the father of numerous accomplished daughters. If the English of the highway was in any case stronger than the dialect of books he seized on it, as

Cobbet used to do.

The collision of sturdy talk daily, for years, had so disciplined him, that his colloquies-when he found a fit antagonist-were like a game at quarterstaff: there was little breathing and there were hard knocks. Stowe was a devourer of books, not only in his own profession, but in history, politics, and theology. He knew little Greek, and no modern language but our own, but had taught himself Latin, which a prodigious memory enabled him to quote with force, though with a contempt of all quantity. He loved to crack the bones of tough places in Persius and Tacitus. His English favorites were Bentley, Warburton, Churchill, and the colloquial effu sions of Johnson. The attractions to his house, even leaving five blooming girls out of the question, I found irresistible. But it was a fearful pleasure; for, until repeated floorings had taught me my place, he would bring me down with a momentum, as often as I dared to encounter him.

Anne Stowe, the third daughter, possessed the grace and gentleness of her mother-whom I never

The short, broken, insufficient visits of a city, and hand she gave more than one refusal to an aspiring the thronged assemblies of fashion, afford no speci-young fellow whose name I am not free to mention.

LIFE'S BATTLE MARCH.

BY MRS. J. H. THOMAS, (L. L. M.)

167

THE HARVEST OF GOLD.

THREE years ago, one Mr. Smith, a gentleman | pains and penalties for disobedience. Licenses were engaged in iron-works in Australia, made his appearance at the Government House, Sydney, with a lump of gold. He offered, for a large sum of money, to point out where he had got it, and where more was to be found in abundance. The Government, however, thinking that this might be no more than a device, and that the lump produced might, in reality, have come from California, declined to buy a goldfield in the dark, but advised Mr. Smith to unfold his tale, and leave his payment to the liberality of GoThis Mr. Smith refused to do, and there

vernment.

the matter ended.

to be obtained upon the spot, at the rate of thirty shillings per month, liable to future alteration. No licenses were granted to any one who could not produce a certificate of discharge from his last service, or otherwise give a satisfactory account of himself; and the descriptions of such as were refused were registered. A small body of mounted police were at the same time organized, who were paid at the somewhat curious rate of three shillings and threepence per day, with rations, and lodgings when they could be procured. Fortunately, there was no attempt at disturbance, for the Governor in a dispatch states, "that the rush of people (most of them armed) was so great, that had they been disposed to resist, the whole of the troops and police would have been unable to cope with them." The licenses, too, were all cheerfully paid for, either in coin or gold.

On the third of June, Mr, Hargraves (who, in the meantime, had received a responsible appointment) underwent an examination before the Legislative Council, when he stated that he was led to search in the neighborhood of Bathurst, by observing the simi

On the third of April, 1851, Mr. Hargraves, who had recently returned from California, addressed the Government, stating that the result of his experience in that country had led him to expect gold in Australia; that the results of his exploring had been highly satisfactory; and that for the sum of five hundred pounds he would point out the precious districts. The same answer was returned that had disposed of Mr. Smith, but with an opposite effect; for Mr. Hargraves declaring himself "satisfied to leave the remuneration for his discovery to the liberal considera-larity of the country to California. He found gold tion of Government," at once named the districts, which were Lewis Ponds, Summer-Hill Creek, and Macquarie River, in Bathurst and Wellington-the present Ophir. Mr. Hargraves was directed to place himself at once in communication with the Government Surveyor.

Meantime, the news began to be whispered about. A man who appeared in Bathurst with a lump of gold worth thirty pounds, which he had picked up, created a great sensation, and numbers hastened to see whether they could not do likewise. The Commissioner of Crown Lands became alarmed. He warned all those who had commenced their search, of the illegality of their proceedings, and made earnest application for efficient assistance, imagining that the doings in California were to be repeated in Bathurst, and that pillage and murder were to be the order of the day. The Government immediately took active measures for the maintenance of order. Troops were dispatched to the gold fields, and the Inspector-General of Police received a discretionary power to employ what force he thought proper.

Great was the excitement in Sydney upon the confirmation of all this intelligence. Hasty partings, deserted desks, and closed shops, multiplied in number. Every imaginable mode of conveyance was resorted to, and hundreds set off on foot.

On the fourteenth of May, the Government Surveyor reported that, in communication with Mr. Hargraves, he had visited the before-mentioned districts, and after three hours' examination, "had seen quite enough"-gold was every where plentiful.

A proclamation was at once issued, forbidding any person to dig without a license, setting forth divers

66

as soon as he dismounted. He found it everywhere; rode from the head of the Turon river to its confluence with the Macquarie, about one hundred miles; found gold over the whole extent; afterward found all along the Macquarie. Bathurst," observed Mr. Hargraves, "is the most extraordinary place I ever saw. Gold is actually found lying on the ground, close to the surface." And Mr. Commissioner Green, two days afterward, reported that "gold was found in every pan of earth taken up."

But the most important event connected with these discoveries, and which is without parallel in the world's history, remains to be told.

On the sixteenth of July, The Bathurst Free Press, commenced a leader with the following passage:—

"Bathurst is mad again! The delirium of golden fever has returned with increased intensity. Men meet together, stare stupidly at one another, and wonder what will happen next. Everybody has a hundred times seen a hundred weight of flour. A hundred weight of sugar is an every-day fact; but a hundred weight of gold is a phrase scarcely known in the English language. It is beyond the range of our ordinary ideas; a sort of physical incomprehensibility; but that it is a material existence, our own eyes bore witness." Now for the facts.

On Sunday, eleventh July, it was whispered about in Sydney, that a Dr. Kerr had found a hundred weight of gold! Few believed it. It was thought a capital joke Monday arrived, and all doubts were dispelled; for at mid-day a tandem, drawn by two grays, drew up in front of the Free Press Office. Two immense lumps of virgin gold were displayed