employed, every one in finding his place, under the control for the time, of a short Irishman, usher, named Jimmy M'Cue. On the entrance of the master, all shuffling of the feet, 'scrouging,' hitting of elbows, and whispering disputes, were hastily adjusted, leaving a silence which might be felt, 'not a mouse stirring.' He, Todd, dressed after the plainest manner of Friends, but of the richest material, with looped cocked hat, was at all times remarkably clean and nice in his person, a man of about sixty years, square built, and well sustained by bone and muscle.

After an hour, maybe, of quiet time, everything going smoothly on-no sound, from the master's voice, while hearing the one standing near him, a dead calm, when suddenly a brisk slap on the ear or face, for something or for nothing, gave 'dreadful note' that an erruption of the lava was now about to take place Next thing to be seen was 'strap in full play over the head and shoulders of Pilgarlic.' The passion of the master,' growing by which it fed on,' and wanting elbow room, the chair would be quickly thrust on one side, when, with sudden gripe, he was to be seen dragging his struggling suppliant to the flogging ground, in the centre of the room; having placed his left foot upon the end of a bench, he then, with a patent jerk, peculiar to himself, would have the boy completely horsed across his knee, with his left elbow on the back of his neck, to keep him securely on. In the hurry of the moment he would bring his long pen with him, griped between his strong teeth, (visible the while,) causing both ends to descend to a parallel with his chin, and adding much to the terror of the scene. His face would assume a deep claret color-his little bob of hair would diseugage itself, and stand out, each 'particular hair' as it were, 'up in arms and eager for the fray.' Having his victim thus completely at command, and all useless drapery drawn up to a bunch above the waistband, and the rotundity and the nankeen in the closest affinity possible for them to be, then once more to the 'staring crew' would be exhibited the dexterity of master and strap. By long practice he had arrived at such perfection in the exercise, that, moving in quick time, the fifteen inches of bridle rein (allas strap) would be seen after every cut, elevated to a perpendicular above his head; from whence it descended like a flail on the stretched nankeen, leaving 'on the place beneath' a fiery red streak, at every slash. It was customary with him to address the sufferer at intervals, as follows; 'Does it hurt?' 'Oh! yes, master; oh! don't master.' 'Then I'll make it hurt thee more. I'll make thy flesh creep-thou shan't want a warming pan to-night. Intolerable being! Nothing in nature is able to prevail upon thee but my strap.' He had one boy named George Fudge, who usually wore leather breeches, with which he put strap and its master at defiance. He would never acknowledge pain-he would not 'sing out.' Todd seized him one day, and having gone through the evolutions of strapping, (as useless, in effect, as if he had been thrashing a flour bag,) almost breathless with rage, he once more appealed to the feelings of the 'reprobate,' by saying; 'Does it not hurt?' The astonishment of the school and the master was completed, on hearing him sing out, 'No! Hurray for leather crackers!' He was thrown off immediately, sprawling on the floor, with the benediction as follows; 'Intolerable being! Get out of my school. Nothing in nature is able to prevail upon thee-not even my strap!'

'Twas not his love in learning was in fault,' so much as the old British system of introducing learning and discipline into the brains of boys and soldiers

by dint of punishment. The system of flogging on all occasions in schools, for something or for nothing, being protected by law, gives free play to the passions of the master, which he, for one, exercised with great severity. The writer has, at this moment, in his memory, a schoolmaster then of this city, who, a few years ago, went deliberately out of his school to purchase a cow-skin, with which, on his return, he extinguished his bitter revenge on a boy who had offended him. The age of chivalry preferred ignorance in its sons, to having them subjected to the fear of a pedagogue-believing that a boy who had quailed under the eye of the schoolmaster, would never face the enemy with boldness on the field of battle; which it must be allowed is 'a swing of the pendulum' too far the other way. A good writer says: 'We do not harden the wax to receive the impression wherefore, the teacher seems himself most in need of correction— for he, unfit to teach, is making them unfit to be taught!'

I have been told by an aged gentleman, that in the days of his boyhood, sixty-five years ago, when boys and girls were together, it was a common practice to make the boys strip off their jackets, and loose their trowser's band preparatory to hoisting them upon a boy's back so as to get his whipping, with only the linen between the flesh and the strap. The girls too-we pity them-were obliged to take off their stays to receive their floggings with equal sensibility. He named one distinguished lady, since, who was so treated among others, in his school. All the teachers then were from England and Ireland, and brought with them the rigorous principles which had before been whipped into themselves at home."

PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN BOSTON, MASS.

The following "Memorandum of an eminent clergyman, who was educated in the best schools of Boston just before the Revolution," we copy from a volume of the "Massachusetts Common School Journal," vol. xii., pp. 311, 312. The notes are by the editor of the Journal, Wm. B. Fowle:

"At the age of six and a half years, I was sent to Master John Lovell's Latin school. The only requirment was reading well: but, though fully qualified, I was sent away to Master Griffith, a private teacher, to learn to read, write and spell. I learned the English Grammar in Dilworth's Spelling Book by heart. Griffith traced letters with a pencil, and the pupils inked them.

*

Entered Lovell's school at seven years. Lovell was a tyrant, and his system one of terror. Trouncing was common in the school. Dr. Cooper was one of his early scholars, and he told Dr. Jackson, the minister of Brookline, that he had dreams of schools till he died. The boys were so afraid they could not

Trouncing was performed by stripping the boy, mounting him on another's back, and whipping him with birch rods, before the whole school. James Lovell the grandson of John, once related to us the following anecdote, which shows the utility of corporeal punishment! It seems that a boy had played truant, and Master John had publicly declared that the offender should be trounced. When such a sentence was pronounced, it was understood that the other boys might seize the criminal, and take him to school by force. The culprit was soon seized by one party, and hurried to the master, who inflicted the punishment without delay. On his way home, the culprit met another party, who cried out, 'Ah, John Brown,' or whatever his name was, you'll get it when you go to school!' 'No, I shan't,' said the victorious boy, who felt that he had got the start of them, 'No, I shan't, for I've got it,' and, as he said this, he slapped his hand upon the part that had paid the penalty, thus, as the poet says, 'suiting the action to the word."

study. Sam. Bradford, afterward sheriff, pronounced the P in Ptolemy, and the younger Lovell rapped him over the head with a heavy ferule.*

We studied Latin from 8 o'clock till 12, and from 1 till dark. After one or two years, I went to the town school, to Master Holbrook, at the corner of West street, to learn to write; and to Master Proctor, on Pemberton's Hill, in the south-east part of Scollay's Building. My second, third, and fourth year, I wrote there, and did nothing else. The English boys alone were taught to make pens. Griffith was gentle, but his being a private teacher accounts for it.

The course of study was grammar; Esop, with a translation; Clark's introduction to writing Latin; Eutropius, with a translation; Corderius: Ovid's Metamorphoses; Virgil's Georgics; Æneid; Cæsar; Cicero. In the sixth year I began Greek, and for the first time attempted English composition, by translating Cæsar's Commentaries. The master allowed us to read poetical translations, such as Trappe's and Dryden's Virgil. I was half way through Virgil when I began Greek with Ward's Greek Grammar.

After Cheever's Latin Accidence, we took Ward's Lily's Latin Grammar. After the Greek Grammar, we read the Greek Testament, and were allowed to use Beza's Latin translation. Then came Homer's Iliad, five or six books, using Clarke's translation with notes, and this was all my Greek education at school. Then we took Horace, and composed Latin verses, using the Gradus ad Parnas-. sum. Daniel Jones was the first Latin scholar in 1771 or 1772, and he was brother to Thomas Kilby Jones, who was no scholar, though a distinguished merchant afterward.

I entered college at the age of fourteen years and three months, and was equal in Latin and Greek to the best in the senior class. Xenophon and Sallust were the only books used in college that I had not studied. I went to the private school from 11 to 12 A. M., and to the public from 3 to 5 P. M.

The last two years of my school life, nobody taught English Grammar or Geography, but Col. Joseph Ward, (son of Deacon Joseph Ward, of Newton, West Parish, blacksmith,) who was self-taught, and set up a school in Boston. He became aid to General Ward when the war commenced, and did not teach after the war.

I never saw a map, except in Cæsar's Commentaries, and did not know what that meant. Our class studied Lowth's English Grammar at college. At Master Proctor's school, reading and writing were taught in the same room, to girls and boys, from 7 to 14 years of age, and the Bible was the only reading book. Dilworth's Spelling Book was used, and the New England Primer. The master set sums in our MSS. but did not go farther than the Rule of Three.

Master Griffith was a thin man, and wore a wig, as did Masters Lovell and Proctor, but they wore a cap when not in full dress. James Lovell was so beaten by his grandfather John, that James the father rose and said, ‘Sir, you have flogged that boy enough.' The boy went off determined to leave school, and

"We saw this done by another Boston teacher, about thirty years ago, and when we remonstrated with him upon the danger of inflicting such a blow, upon such a spot. O, the caitiffs,' said he, it is good for them!' About the same time, another teacher who used to strike his pupils upon the hand so that the marks and bruises were visible, was waited upon by a committee of mothers, who lived near the school, and had been annoyed by the outcries of the sufferers. The teacher promised not to strike the boys any more on the hand, and the women went away satisfied. But, instead of inflicting blows upon the hand, he inflicted them upon the soles of the feet, and made the punishment more severe."

go to Master Proctor's; but he met one of Master Proctor's boys, who asked whither he was going, and when informed, warned him not to go, for he would fare worse."

Hon. Edward Everett, in an address at the Annual School Festival in Faneuil Hall in 1852, gives the following account of the educational advantages he enjoyed in early life:

"It was fifty-two years last April since I began, at the age of nine years, to attend the reading and writing schools in North Bennett street. The reading school was under Master Little, (for 'Young America' had not yet repudiated that title,) and the writing school was kept by Master Tileston. Master Little, in spite of his name, was a giant in stature-six feet four, at least-and somewhat wedded to the past. He struggled earnestly against the change then taking place in the pronunciation of u, and insisted on saying monooment and natur. But I acquired, under his tuition, what was thought in those days a very tolerable knowledge of Lindley Murray's abridgment of English grammar, and at the end of the year could parse almost any sentence in the 'American Preceptor.' Master Tileston was a writing master of the old school. He set the copies himself, and taught that beautiful old Boston handwriting, which, if I do not mistake, has, in the march of innovation, (which is not always the same thing as improvement,) been changed for the better. Master Tileston was advanced in years, and had found a qualification for his calling as a writing master, in what might have seemed at first to threaten to be an obstruction. The fingers of his right hand had been contracted and stiffened in early life, by a burn, but were fixed in just the position to hold a pen and a penknife-and nothing else. As they were considerably indurated, they served as a convenient instrument of discipline. A copy badly written, or a blotted page, was sometimes visited with an infliction which would have done no discredit to the beak of a bald eagle. His long, deep desk was a perfect curiosity-shop of confiscated balls, tops, penknives, marbles and Jews-harps-the accumulation of forty-years. I desire, however, to speak of him with gratitude, for he put me on the track of an acquisition which has been extremely useful to me in after life-that of a plain, legible hand. I remained at these schools about sixteen months, and had the good fortune in 1804 to receive the Franklin medal in the English department. After an interval of about a year, during which I attended a private school kept by Mr. Ezekiel Webster, of New Hampshire, and on an occasion of his absence, by his ever memorable brother, Daniel Webster, at that time a student of law in Boston, I went to the Latin school, then slowly emerging from a state of extreme depression. It was kept in School street, where the Horticultural Hall now stands. The standard of scholastic attainment was certainly not higher than that of material comfort in those days. We read pretty much the same books-or of the same class-in Latin or Greek, as are read now, but in a very cursory and superficial manner. There was no attention paid to the philosophy of the languages-to the deduction of words from their radical elements to the niceties of construction-still less to prosody. I never made a hexameter or pentameter verse, till, years afterward, I had a son at school in London, who occasionally required a little aid in that way. The subsidiary and illustrative branches were wholly unknown in the Latin school in 1805. Such a thing as a school library, a book of reference, a critical edition of a classic, a

map, a blackboard, an engraving of an ancient building, or a copy of ancient art, such as now adorn the walls of our schools, was as little known as the electric telegraph. If our children, who possess all these appliances and aids to learning, do not greatly excel their parents, they will be much to blame."

AN OLD FIELD SCHOOL, OR ACADEMY, IN VIRGINIA.

The experience of one of that class of teachers, who found temporary occupation in teaching the children of one or more families of planters in Virginia, and other southern states, will be found in the "Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States, (in 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801 and 1802,) by John Davis." Mr. Davis was an Englishman of more than ordinary education and social address, and while in this country numbered among his friends such men as Aaron Burr, President Jefferson, and other men of high political standing. He was a private tutor in N. York, S. Carolina, and Virginia, and his graphic sketches of men and manners show some of the deficiencies in the means of education which even wealthy planters in the southern states experienced. With letters of introduction from President Jefferson he proceeds to the plantation of a Mr. Ball, and is engaged to teach his and his neighbor's children:

"The following day every farmer came from the neighborhood to the house, who had any children to send to my Academy, for such they did me the honor to term the log-hut in which I was to teach. Each man brought his son, or his daughter, and rejoiced that the day was arriving when their little ones could light their tapers at the torch of knowledge! I was confounded at the encomiums they heaped upon a man whom they had never seen before, and was at a loss what construction to put upon their speech. No price was too great for the services I was to render their children; and they all expressed an eagerness to exchange perishable coin for lasting knowledge. If I would continue with them seven years! only seven years! they would erect for me a brick seminary on a hill not far off; but for the present I was to occupy a log-house, which, however homely, would soon vie with the sublime college of William and Mary, and consign to oblivion the renowned academy in the vicinity of Fauquier Court-House. I thought Englishmen sanguine; but these Virginians were infatuated.

I now opened what some called an academy,* and others an Old Field School; and, however it may be thought that content was never felt within the walls of a seminary, I, for my part, experienced an exemption from care, and was not

It is worth the while to describe the academy I occupied on Mr. Ball's plantation. It had one room and a half. It stood on blocks about two feet and a half above the ground, where there was free access to the hogs, the dogs, and the poultry. It had no ceiling, nor was the roof lathed or plastered, but covered with shingles. Hence, when it rained, like the nephew of old Elwes, I moved my bed (for I slept in the academy), to the most comfortable corner. It had one window, but no glass, nor shutter. In the night, to remedy this, the mulatto wench who waited on me, contrived very ingeniously to place a square board against the window with one hand, and fix the rail of a broken down fence against it with the other. In the morning when I returned from breakfasting in the great big house,' (my scholars be ing collected,) I gave the rail a forcible kick with my foot, and down tumbled the board with an awful roar. Is not my window,' said I to Virginia, of a very curious construction?' Indeed, indeed, sir,' replied my fair disciple, 'I think it is a mighty noisy one.'