eached for his well-trimmed hickory, one of many
conspicuously displayed upon his table. With truthful sincerity I
answered:

"Father Duffy, I was laughing to think how much your nose is like a
frog."

It was just after play-time, and I was compelled to stand by him and
at intervals of ten minutes receive a dozen lashes, laid on with
brawny Irish strength, until discharged with the school at night.
To-day I bear the marks of that whipping upon my shoulders and in my
heart. But Duffy was not alone in the strictness and severity of his
rules and his punishments. Children were taught to believe that there
could be no discipline in a school of boys and girls without the
savage brutality of the lash, and the teacher who met his pupils with
a caressing smile was considered unworthy his vocation. Learning must
be thrashed into the tender mind; nothing was such a stimulus to the
young memory as the lash and the vulgar, abusive reproof of the gentle
and meritorious teacher.

There was great eccentricity of character in all the conduct and
language of Duffy. He had his own method of prayer, and his own
peculiar style of preaching, frequently calling out the names of
persons in his audience whom it was his privilege to consider the
chiefest of sinners, and to implore mercy for them in language
offensive almost to decency. Sometimes, in the presence of persons
inimical to each other, he would ask the Lord to convert the sinners
and make the fools friends, first telling the Lord who they were by
name, to the no small amusement of his most Christian audience; many
of whom would in deep devotion respond with a sonorous "Amen."

From such a population sprang the present inhabitants of Georgia; and
by such men were they taught, in their budding boyhood, the rudiments
of an English education;--such, I mean, of the inhabitants who still
live and remember Duffy, Cummings, and McLean. They are few, but the
children of the departed remember traditionally these and their like,
in the schoolmasters of Georgia from 1790 to 1815.

At the close of the war of 1812-15, a new impetus was given to
everything throughout the South, and especially to education. The
ambition for wealth seized upon her people, the high price of cotton
favored its accumulation, and with it came new and more extravagant
wants, new and more luxurious habits. The plain homespun jean coat
gave way to the broad-cloth one; and the neat, Turkey-red striped
Sunday frock of