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.

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