The Southern matron was noted for her administrative rather than for her executive ability. Not that, generally speaking, her days were passed in idleness; on the contrary, her life was usually a full and beneficent one, including not only her domestic avocations—among which may be mentioned the now well-nigh forgotten accomplishments of cookery and fine needlework—but the many good offices of a Lady Bountiful which she graciously dispensed among her numerous dependants; plantation life affording ample scope for her activities in this direction. But the menial drudgery of a household did not devolve upon its mistress; and, in consequence, she had at her command an abundant portion of that leisure which—while not a _sine qua non_ as regards strictly intellectual acquirement—is undoubtedly essential to the cultivation of the mental graces. Truth to say, as a class, Southern women were more distinguished for their soft femininity and finished refinement of manner than for their erudition. By which I am far from implying that they ignored grammar; much less that—in common with their male relatives—they used the negro-dialect. As a matter of fact indeed, by no people was purer _dictionary_ English spoken, than by the upper-class in the Old South. In its whole internal arrangement and frictionless daily routine the homelife of the South much more nearly resembled that of the English gentry, than that of the dwellers in the Northern States of the Union. Thanks to “the institution,” the household machine was too complex a mechanism ever to be thrown completely out of gear, the direful domestic problems so often confronting the Northern housewife being at the South entirely unknown. And as conditions, homely and trivial in themselves, sometimes exert an influence on things seemingly beyond their sphere, it may be that that large hearted, free-handed hospitality for which the Old South was famed, was in part at least, the result of this feeling of stability about the domestic foundations. H. E. BELIN. CHARLESTON, S. C. (_To be continued._) [Illustration: [Fleuron]] ANTHONY WALTON WHITE, BRIGADIER IN THE CONTINENTAL ARMY