“’Tis true, he has a spark just come from France,
But then, so far from beau—why, he talks sense!”
Farquhar.
Riding was an accomplishment among the Romans, as it is in England and
some parts of America; but in the South it is one of the necessaries of
life. The bareheaded negro child mounts all the colts in the pasture,
strains his horse over boundless meads, recking little of falls upon the
yielding earth, which indeed seldom occur, and clings to his seat with
the tenacity of a limpet. Before he has arrived at the dignity of the
hat, he has learned to swim rivers and play the feats of a Centaur. My
young master is not slow to practice in the same school, so that the
cavalry has had some of its most daring and elegant riders from this
part of the Union. I can no longer throw my leg over a saddle; but I
still recall the flush with which, accompanied by gallant comrades, I
swept through forests, which to an unaccustomed eye had seemed
impassable, or, stooping low, pierced the tangle of a brake, up from the
basin of some low and deeply shaded stream. For years did I look to the
grooming of my spirited Rhinoceros, who repaid the attention by a
docility which concealed itself under a show of perverseness.
The long evenings of summer found me sallying on rapid expeditions to
the estates of my father’s friends; and I passed more nights in such
hospitable mansions than in my own humble lodgings. Hospitality is the
law of the land. Where towns are rare and newspapers infrequent, and
where even the mail in those days came only once a week, it was doing a
generous favor to enter a neighbor’s doors for a long visit, the host
would be out before I could dismount, and sometimes a bevy of ladies
clustered at the door.
Let me tell the truth. On looking back I perceive that while a flow of
unimpeded talk, often prompted by large and capricious reading, made me
welcome to every circle, I was, nevertheless, by no means successful in
my personal overtures to the reigning sex. It was mortifying to me to
observe, that many a roystering bumpkin, full of health and ignorance,
made his suit in less time and with fewer embarrassments than I. Even my
voyages and travels were of little avail. Indeed, in a self-contained
community, where every thing goes by clanship and family tradition, and
where the sight of a foreigner is commonly the signal for a joke, there
is less éclat in foreign travel, than in seaports and great cities. I
was glad, therefore, to fall back on county-connection. My father had
married into a distinguished family, who, though poor, could hold up
their heads. One of my uncles was high sheriff, and my cousin was in
Congress. Revolutionary officers were still living who were of my kin.
And I enjoyed a pretty free access to what are somewhat offensively
called the first families.
After all I was known to be a poor schoolmaster, and suspected—as I now
think, justly, of being a pedant. It would be both sad and comical, if I
were to record my experiences as a teacher; the plans I dreamed over;
the schedules I copied on large paper; the attempts to make the big boys
talk Latin; the experiments in physics which burst my retorts and burnt
my fingers; the amazement of parents and the fun of children. I verily
believe there was not a more chimerical or less useful teacher, south of
Mason’s and Dixon’s line. Lessons went to leeward, while I was drifting
away after a project of a new Latin Grammar. The primers were made into
boats and cocked-hats, while I invented a new orthography; and my best
coat was sewed over with bits of red flannel, while I draughted a
lecture on Female Education. Donald Gordon courted Judith Brewster,
during the very period in which I was bringing her to the point of
conjugating _amo_, _amare_, _amari_. Early hours and hard reading, kept
me still advancing in a sort of miscellaneous and preposterous
condition. I began a hundred pursuits, with the _furore_ of a crusader.
I gathered flowers for an herbarium, and pasted wrong names on the
species for want of a master. I made maps of the stars, and pointed them
out to Judith, as we walked on the top of the house. My only Italian
book was an odd volume of Dante, which broke me down after getting half
way up the circling Babel of the Purgatory. My version of the Bucolics
shamed me beyond expression, on comparison with Dryden.
In riding about the country, I fell in with planters and county-court
lawyers, and doctors, who had little Latin and less Greek, but who
nevertheless foiled me in argument. They knew how to talk of crops, of
“good seasons for stripping tobacco,” of the weather being giv-y, of
long and short staple in cotton, of horizontal ploughing, and of prices
at Liverpool; while they could also connect with these questions the
political economy of our great products, the effects of the British
policy on our carrying-trade, and the theory of state-sovereignty as
discussed in Congress. All these things were beyond my ken. That
“reading” which “makes a full man” made me often seem a very foolish
one. I made blunders in history, and was innocently unacquainted with
several dates, such as George Mason’s letters and the Battle of the
Cow-Pens. I could have said much about Aegos-Potamos, or the Thirty
Tyrants; but my old-time studies were very rapidly turning me into a
mummy.
I dictate these confessions, _in perpetuam rei memoriam_, to guard
solitary and too-forward boys from going too freely before the gales of
their literary propensities. Nevertheless, for individual delight,
everlasting novelty and sweet recollections, I still hold my way to have
been best of any.