the decision of the teacher, which was
announced thus: "Well, Mary, I must punish you."

All eyes were directed to William. Deliberately he laid down his books,
and, stepping quickly up to the teacher, said, respectfully: "Don't
strike her. Whip me. I'll take it for her," as he arrested with his
hand the uplifted switch. Every eye in that little log school-house
brightened with approbation, and, in a moment after, filled with tears,
as the teacher laid down his rod and said: "William, you are a noble
boy, and, for your sake, I will excuse Mary." Ten years after, Mary was
the wife--the dutiful, loving, happy wife of William; and William,
twenty years after, was a member of the Legislature, and then a
representative in Congress, (when it was an honor to a gentleman to be
such,) and afterwards was for years a Senator in the same body--one of
Georgia's noblest, proudest, and best men.

Can any one enumerate an instance where evil grew out of the early
association of the sexes at school? In the neighborhoods least
populous, and where there were but few children, the pedagogue usually
divided the year into as many parts as he had pupils, and boarded
around with each family the number of days allotted to each child. If
he was a man of family, the united strength of the neighborhood
assembled upon a certain day, and built for him a residence contiguous
to the school-house, which was erected in like manner.

These buildings were primitive indeed--consisting of poles cut from the
forest, and, with no additional preparation, notched up into a square
pen, and floored and covered with boards split from a forest-tree near
at hand. It rarely required more than two days to complete the
cabin--the second being appropriated to the chimney, and the chinking
and daubing; that is, filling the interstices with billets of wood, and
make these air-tight with clay thrown violently in, and smoothed over
with the hand. Such buildings constituted nine-tenths of the homes of
the entire country sixty years ago; and in such substitutes for houses
were born the men who have moved the Senate with their eloquence, and
added dignity and power to the bench of the Supreme Court of the
nation, startled the world with their achievements upon the
battle-field, and more than one of them has filled the Presidential
chair.

Men born and reared under such circumstances, receive impressions which
they carry through life, and their characters always discover th