The Memories of Fifty Years | Page 9

approving smiles of the girls,--had his choice of partners in the dance, and in triumph rode home on horseback with his belle, the horse's consciousness of bearing away the championship manifesting itself in an erect head and stately step.
The apparel of male and female was of home-spun, woven by the mothers and sisters, and was fashioned, I was about to say, by the same fair hands; but these were almost universally embrowned with exposure and hardened by toil. Education was exceedingly limited: the settlements were sparse, and school-houses were at long intervals, and in these the mere rudiments of an English education were taught--spelling, reading, and writing, with the four elementary rules of arithmetic; and it was a great advance to grapple with the grammar of the language. As population and prosperity increased, their almost illiterate teachers gave place to a better class; and many of my Georgia readers will remember as among these the old Irish preachers, Cummings, and that remarkable brute, Daniel Duffee. He was an Irishman of the Pat Freney stripe, and I fancy there are many, with gray heads and wrinkled fronts, who can look upon the cicatrices resulting from his merciless blows, and remember that Milesian malignity of face, with its toad-like nose, with the same vividness with which it presents itself to me to-day. Yes, I remember it, and have cause. When scarcely ten years of age, in his little log school-house, the aforesaid resemblance forced itself upon me with such vim that involuntarily I laughed. For this outbreak against the tyrant's rules I was called to his frowning presence.
"What are you laughing at, you whelp?" was the rude inquiry.
Tremblingly I replied: "You will whip me if I tell you."
"And you little devil, I will whip you if you don't," was his rejoinder, as he reached 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 the belle yielded to the gaudy red calico one, and there was a sniff of aristocratic contempt in the upturned nose towards those who, from choice or necessity, continued in the old habits.
Material wealth augmented rapidly, and with it came all of its assumptions. The rich lands of Alabama were open to settlement. The formidable Indian had been humbled, and many of the wealthiest cultivators of the soil were commencing to emigrate to a newer and more fertile country, where