Perhaps the public schools of Memphis would be better (though not so without liberal endowment) if the city had not two exceptionally good private schools for young ladies. These are the Clara Conway Institute and the Higby School for Young Ladies, taking their names from their principals and founders. Each of these schools has about 350 pupils, from the age of six to the mature age of graduation, boys being admitted until they are twelve years old. Each has pleasant grounds and fine buildings, large, airy, well planned, with ample room for all the departments—literature, science, art, music—of the most advanced education. One finds in them the best methods of the best schools, and a most admirable spirit. It is not too much to say that these schools give distinction to Memphis, and that the discipline and intellectual training the young ladies receive there will have a marked effect upon the social life of the city. If one who spent some delightful hours in the company of these graceful and enthusiastic scholars, and who would like heartily to acknowledge their cordiality, and his appreciation of their admirable progress in general study, might make a suggestion, it would be that what the frank, impulsive Southern girl, with her inborn talent for being agreeable and her vivid apprehension of life, needs least of all is the cultivation of the emotional, the rhetorical, the sentimental side. However cleverly they are done, the recitation of poems of sentiment, of passion, of lovemaking and marriage, above all, of those doubtful dialect verses in which a touch of pseudo-feeling is supposed to excuse the slang of the street and the vulgarity of the farm, is not an exercise elevating to the taste. I happen to speak of it here, but I confess that it is only a text from which a little sermon might be preached about “recitations” and declamations generally, in these days of overdone dialect and innuendoes about the hypocrisy of old-fashioned morality. The city has a prosperous college of the Christian Brothers, another excellent school for girls in the St. Agnes Academy, and a colored industrial school, the Lemoyne, where the girls are taught cooking and the art of house-keeping, and the boys learn carpentering. This does not belong to the public-school system.