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 brook as it murmurs over the pebbles. The “scorpions”—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 several who never appeared, I think I made my school to number fifteen, as a maximum. Four or five short wooden forms, with some sloping boards for desks, and a straw-bottomed chair for the master, made up the compliment of furniture; for I scarcely reckon a churn-like vessel at the door, duly _toted_ on the head of a laughing negress, every half-hour, and emptied by two or three gourds with fantastic handles.