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 community, would sometimes carol away after my ferula had given its three knocks; but we soon fell into places. Ours was a loud school. There was no rubric enjoining silence. There was no reading to one’s self. Hark! the grand overture is performed by the simultaneous play of tenore and treble instruments. One piping voice is rehearsing the alphabet and another the “twenty pence is one and eight-pence;” another is reading of one who unrighteously ascended the apple tree and was experimented on by 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 shall 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.