All literary influences were of course greatly checked and straitened, while our people held their breath in suspense as to the issue of the war. Colleges were closed, schools went on lamely for want of teachers, who were in the army, and for want of text-books. An effort was made here and there to supply the increasing demand for grammars, arithmetics, readers, and primers; but the paper was coarse and dark, and the type was old and worn--the general getting up of these home-made books affording the clearest evidence of the insurmountable difficulties under which our people labored in endeavoring to make books while struggling for bread. Some of them ran the blockade, being sent abroad to be stereotyped. Some of them need only a new dress to take their place as standards in any school in the country now; but the majority of them may be set down as failures. The common-schools, kept going at first, shared at last in the general decline and relaxation of order, and were hardly in existence at all at the close. As to books from abroad--magazines, papers, etc.--it may well be imagined that in the interior of the Confederacy at least, we were at a standstill in regard to all such means of improvement or information. Occasionally a copy of the _London Times_, or one or two of the leading New-York journals found its way from Richmond, or Wilmington, or Charleston, and was sent from house to house until utterly worn out. Occasionally some enterprising publishing house, getting hold of a copy of the latest English novel, would issue a reprint of it, solitary copies of which circulated through a county, and soon shared the fate of the papers. Northern magazines or books were but little in request, and little read if obtained.[20] I am by no means certain that the loss of the current "light literature" of the day was a loss much to be deplored. Such privations may rather be classed among the benefits of the war. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 19: The writer might have added--or in America. Its editor, Mr. Hale, is a gentleman of broad intellect, large information, and rare journalistic ability.--Ed. Watchman.] [Footnote 20: But one number of _Harper's Magazine_ was seen at Chapel Hill during the war; this ran the blockade from Nassau: and one number of the _London Quarterly Review_, found among the effects of Mrs. Rosa Greenhow, which floated ashore from the wreck in which she perished. Among such of her books as were recovered, much damaged and stained with sea-water, was her narrative of her imprisonment in Washington, just published in London, and the MS. of her private journal kept during her visit to London and Paris. Her elegant wardrobe was sold at public sale in Raleigh, by order of the Confederate Government, for the benefit of her daughter in Paris.] CHAPTER XVIII.