Let the public high school come as rapidly as possible. Vanderbilt University will be its friend and fosterer, as it has been in the city of Nashville. But in any event it will ever remain true that a great work for education has been accomplished in its relation to private secondary schools. It was truly said by President H. N. Snyder, of Wofford College, some years ago; “If ever Vanderbilt University has had a mission, and has fulfilled it greatly and even gloriously, it is in the way it has helped to form what we understand as training or fitting schools.” [Illustration] THE FOREIGN WIFE. By Claude M. Girardeau. CHAPTER I. It was the last of January, 1815. The harbor of the city of Charleston was enveloped in a cold gray fog, that rose above the ramparts of the sea wall and advanced its phantom cohorts upon the houses facing the Battery, capturing their outposts one by one, gradually submerging gable-end and piazza, surmounting tiled roof and overtopping chimney, until at nightfall the city, like a second Germe Ishausen, although resting upon the surface of one ocean, was buried in the impalpable profundity of another. Invisible to the eye, even at the distance of a few yards, the street lamps were mere ineffectual points of light in the dense and watery atmosphere. The solid wooden shutters of the Battery houses were tightly battened so that they presented an impenetrable front to the fog, which nevertheless insinuated itself beneath threshold and window-sill and made its ghostly presence felt upon the very hearths where fires of pitch-pine and seasoned ash were lighted to dispel the dampness. At the conjunction of the South and the East Battery, the mansion of Governor Grantham occupied the right angle of the corner, its stone steps encroaching upon the narrow sidewalk. Overhanging them, at the second story, the iron balcony bore upon the middle panel of its rail the entwined “G. G.” of the eldest son of the house of Grantham from time immemorial. A visitor admitted beyond the front door would have found himself in a dark and somewhat cramped hall, or entry, from the center of which mounted a flight of carefully waxed stairs, leading to an upper hall of dimensions more in keeping with the outward aspect of the building. Turning to the right and guiding one’s steps warily over its icy surface, converted into a mirror by the daily brush of the slave, one would have been ushered into the drawing room, an apartment high of ceiling, scant of furniture, also slippery of floor, extending perhaps fifty feet along the west side of the mansion. On this account it was easily convertible into a ball room.