they first teach the heart to love—­not fear; they warn against the evils of life—­teach the good, and the child’s duties to its parents, to its brothers and sisters, to its teachers, to its playmates, and to its God.  When the heart is mellowed and yields obedience in the faithful discharge of these duties, and the brain sufficiently matured to comprehend the necessity of them, then attention is directed to the mind; its capacities are learned and known, and it is treated as this knowledge teaches is proper:  it is, as the farmer knows, the soil of his cultivation, and is prepared by careful tillage before the seed is sown.  The vision of the child’s mind is by degrees expanded; the horizon of its knowledge is enlarged, and still the heart’s culture goes on in kindness and affection.  The pupil has learned to love the teacher, and receives with alacrity his teaching; he goes to him, without fear, for information on every point of duty in morals, as on every difficult point of literary learning.  He knows he will be received kindly, and dealt with gently.  Should he err, he is never rebuked in public, nor harshly in private; the teacher is aggrieved, and in private he kindly complains to the offender, whose love for his preceptor makes him to feel, and repent, and to err no more.  All this is only known to the two; his school-fellows never know, and have no opportunity for triumph or raillery.  Thus taught from the cradle, principles become habits; and on these, at maturity, he is launched upon the world, with every safeguard for his future life.  So with the girl.  With the experience of forty-five years, the writer has never known a vicious, bad woman, wife, or mother trained in a Jesuit convent, or reared by an educated Catholic mother.

The daughters of the pioneers of Georgia’s early settlements received a home education; at least, in the duties of domestic life.  In the discharge of these duties, they gained robust constitutions and vigorous health; they increased the butcher’s bill at the expense of the doctor’s; and such women were the mothers of the men who have made a history for their country, for themselves and their mothers.  I may be prolix and prosaic, but I love to remember the mothers of fifty years ago—­she who gave birth to Lucius Q.C. and Mirabeau B. Lamar, to William C. Dawson, Bishop George Pierce, Alexander Stuart, Joseph Lumpkin, and glorious Bob Toombs.  I knew them all, and, with affectionate delight, remember their virtues, and recall the social hours we have enjoyed together, when they were matrons, and I the companion of their sons.  And now, when all are gone, and time is crowding me to the grave, the nobleness of their characters, the simplicity of their bearing in the discharge of their household duties, and the ingenuousness of their manners in social intercourse, is a cherished, venerated memory.  None of these women were ever in a boarding-school, never received a lesson in the art of entering a drawing-room or