Parents little know what a sensitive child suffers at a public school. I verily believe that these schools engender often more treachery, falsehood and cruelty than exists in West India slavery; I was about saying even in the brains of an abolitionist. Most tenderly nurtured, under the care of an affectionate old aunt, who was always fixing my clothes to keep me warm, coddling up something nice to pamper me with, watching all my outgoings and incomings, and seeing that everything around me conduced to my convenience and comfort, the contrast was indeed great when I appeared at the Belle Air academy, one of the smallest boys there, and subjected to the taunts and buffetings of every larger boy than myself in the institution. My father little knew what agony it cost me to be made a man of. I am not certain that the good produced by such academies is equal to their evils. I remember well for two or three nights after Prettyman laughed at me, that I crept into bed to say my prayers, and, at last, under his ridicule—for he practised his gift on me every night—I not only neglected to say them, but began to feel angry towards my aunt that she had ever learned them to me, as they brought so much contempt upon me. Yet, such is the power of conscience, at that tender age, that, when I awoke in the morning of the first night that I had not prayed, I felt myself guilty and unworthy, and went into the garden and wept aloud, tears of sincere contrition. Too often, in public schools, the first thing a youth learns from his elders, is to laugh at parental authority, and to exhibit to the ridicule of his fellows the letter of advice which his parent or guardian feels it his duty to write to him, taking care, with a jest upon them, to pocket the money they send, with an air of incipient profligacy which, any one may see, will soon not only be rank but prurient—such a moral contagion should be avoided, and, I therefore am inclined to think that the Catholic mode of tuition, where some one of the teachers is with the scholars, not only by day but by night, is preferable. And, in fact, any one who has witnessed the respectful familiarity they teach their pupils to feel and act towards them, and the kindness with which they return it, cannot but be impressed with the truth of my remark. There were nearly one hundred pupils at Belle Air, at the period of which I write, and the only assistant Mr. Sears had, was a gaunt fellow named Dogberry. Like his illustrious namesake in Shakspeare, from whom I believe he was a legitimate descendant, he might truly have been “_written down an ass_.”