A few men only are born to think.  Their minds expand with education, and their usefulness is commensurate with it.  This few early evince a proclivity so strong for certain avocations as to enable those who have the direction of their future to educate them for this pursuit.  This proclivity frequently is so overpowering as to prompt the possessor, when the early education has been neglected, to educate himself for this especial idiosyncrasy.  This was the case with Newton—­with Stevenson, the inventor of the locomotive-engine, who, at twenty years of age, was ignorant even of his letters.  Arkwright was a barber, and almost entirely illiterate when he invented the spinning-jenny.  Train, the inventor of the railroad, was, at the time of its invention, a coal-heaver, and entirely illiterate.

These cases are rare, however.  The great mass of mankind are born to manual labor, and only with capacities suited for it.  To attempt to cultivate such minds for eminent purposes would be folly.  Even supposing they could be educated—­which is scarcely supposable, for it would seem a contravention of Heaven’s fiat—­they could no more apply this learning, which would simply be by rote, than they could go to the moon.  Such men are not unfrequently met with, and are designated, by common consent, learned fools.  Nature points out the education they should receive.  In like manner with those of higher and nobler attributes, educate them for their pursuits in life.  It requires not the same education to hold a plough, or drive an ox, that it does to direct the course of a ship through a trackless sea, or to calculate an eclipse; and what is essential to the one is useless to the other.—­But I am wandering away from the purpose of this work.  Turning back upon the memories of fifty years ago, and calling up the lives and the histories of men, and women too, I have known, I was led into these reflections, and ere I was aware they had stolen from my pen.

The rude condition of a country is always imparted to the character of its people, and out of this peculiarity spring the rough sports and love of coarse jokes and coarse humor.  No people ever more fully verified this truth than the Georgians, and to-day, even among her best educated, the love of fun is a prevailing trait.  Her traditions are full of the practical jokes and the practical jokers of fifty years ago.  The names of Dooly, Clayton, Prince, Bacon, and Longstreet will be remembered in the traditions of fun as long as the descendants of their compatriots continue to inhabit the land.  The cock-fight, the quarter-race, and the gander-pulling are traditions now, and so is the fun they gave rise to; and I had almost said, so is the honesty of those who were participants in these rude sports.  Were they not more innocent outlets to the excessive energies of a mercurial and fun-loving people than the faro-table and shooting-gallery of to-day?  Every people must have their amusements