Hill, in the estimation even of the most reactionary Ethiopians, was "run clean out." The corn-stalks had shrunk to the size of your little finger, and, save in the rich hollows by the streams, produced nothing but "rubbins."1 The wheat-straw was so miserably short, and the ears so scanty, that Uncle Ephraim's forcible illustration as to their being scarcely within hollerin' distance of one another, was by no means so far-fetched. The oat-crops had grown so weak that the briers and bushes, rioting in the filthy soil, simply choked them out of existence; while the fierce winter rains had cut gullies down the hillsides, which the thunderstorms of summer rent into ravines so deep that men and mules nearly disappeared from sight when they floundered through them. barometers. The signs had never been known to fail. When "de mis'ry" took that venerable henchman "in de left shoulder, there'd be fallin' wedder befo' day, cert'n and sho'." No growing crop was better 'tended than Mar'se Dab's tobacco; and if some of the tenants' houses "cured up a little blotchy or ran some " during that critical period, it was because the boss, "rustler " though he was, couldn't be everywhere at the same time. But while Mar'se Dab's tobacco was well done by, everything else was neglected; and economical laws were defiantly and aggressively flouted. Clover Hill was not quite in the real tobacco-belt,— that group of counties where the highest grade of leaf is produced, and where other crops may be safely made subservient to tobacco culture. These are technicalities, however, that would only bore the non-agricultural reader. I will simply quote once more that oracle Uncle Ephraim, who was fond of declaring that "any one who put his main 'pendance on terbaccer in North Berkeley, 'ud git inter the porehouse sho'." Mar'se Dab put his 'pendance on tobacco. He didn't go to the poorhouse, because he had a brother-in-law in Western Kansas of a kindly turn of mind; but the latter alternative was, I fear, only one degree removed from the former in the Colonel's mind. Mar'se Dab "died fighting." It was the extraordinary dry year of 187 that finished him. The sight of the crops on Clover Hill that year made venerable agriculturists weep who remembered the glories of the past. Mar'se Dab believed in tobacco till the last, nor was there anything unreasonable in his faith, considered in the abstract. It was his mode of applying it that was wrong. His tobacco he managed admirably. His plant-beds were burnt in good season. When the spring frosts cut other folks young plants, or the fly got them in cold dry weather, Mar'se Dab had always a plentiful supply. When "planting out" came in June, the Colonel always had his land ploughed, harrowed, and hilled up, ready for the first good "season," and everybody in the plantation had ample warning of the coming rain. For so long as Uncle Ephraim was One glance at Mar'se Dab is there, he was better than fifty sufficient to discover that he ig I can recall his figure, as it were but yesterday, sitting on the roadside fence on a hot June morning, looking wistfully towards the west for the long-expected rain that will enable him to plant out his tobacco. 1 Short deformed heads. nores the assistance of the tailor when sectional bitterness was exeven more completely than he treme. It made your flesh creep does that of the manure-merchant. to hear the pains and penalties to But there is method and not mad- which Mar'se Dab consigned in ness in this. In his patriotic fer- fancy his fellow-citizens north of vour, Mar'se Dab swore that he Maryland. At election times he would wear nothing that was not was the terror of Republican manufactured in old Virginia. To stump-orators and carpet-baggers. a man who was fastidious about At the same time I am perfectly his personal appearance, such a sure that if a Connecticut man, resolution would have amounted even though he were loaded down (in those days anyhow) to an as- with wooden nutmegs, stood in tonishing pitch of self-denial. It need of a dinner, and Mar'se Dab was very praiseworthy in Mar'se had only a crust, he would have Dab, no doubt, but I don't think shared it with him. it weighed oppressively upon him. He had yellow homespun pants, the cloth of which had been woven by an old lady of colour up on the mountain, who still possessed that disappearing art. The cut suggested Mrs Digges's sewing-machine. His boots were made by Uncle Ephraim, who solaced himself in his cabin during the long winter evenings with shoemaking and the weaving of baskets. I once had a pair of boots from Uncle Ephraim myself; but we will draw a veil over the recollection, and hasten on. Mar'se Dab despised a waistcoat even in cold weather. His coat was always out at both elbows: whether this was because he got the cloth by the piece from the new woollen mills at Barksville or not, I can't say. It was, I think, a kind of defiant tatterdemalionism that the Colonel liked to hug as a sort of mute undying protest against the forcible disruption of the South's old institutions. For however great his financial difficulties might have been, they were not on a scale so trifling as to necessitate an exposure of both elbows. When his neighbours joked with him about his ragged edges, he used to say, "times were too durned hard for fancy dressin'." Mar'se Dab's hatred of Yankees was conspicuous even at a period There is something, I think, in the culture of tobacco, as pursued from time immemorial in the old Dominion, that appeals to the patriarchal instincts of the conservative Virginian. The unnumbered waggon-loads of wood that are set to blaze upon the new plantbeds in midwinter, to kill the germs of weeds and prepare the woodland soil for the tender seed; the crashing and tumbling of the forest-trees when new grounds" are being opened; the cheery shouting of the negroes, and the unwonted energy that any momentous undertaking, more especially if it is connected with tobacco, calls forth; the excitement and rush of transplanting from the beds to the field in early summer, when the necessary rain, perhaps, is scarce, and opportunities consequently few. Then there is the pleasure of watching, through the hot days of July and August, the gradual growth and expansion of the broadening gummy leaves to the sun, and all the risks of shattering hailstorms and of early night-frosts catching the "crinkley" ripening plants before they are fit to cut. Then the critical period of curing; and lastly, the long journey, plunging through the mud to the market, where the interests of master and man, of landlord and tenant, are absorbed for a short and exciting period in the yellow-labelled heaps upon the warehouse floor, which the auctioneer is knocking down to local and foreign buyers, at figures which vary so much from day to day as to impart a flavour of speculation to tobacco-raising that may perhaps be one of its attractions. Everything to do with tobacco Mar'se Dab loved with a hereditary devotion to the time-honoured product of his native land. Still tobacco-making," in his estimation, had gone to the dogs. The very seasons had altered since the war; the sun seemed to shine less brightly; the moon to shed a dimmer light (and Mar'se Dab believed in the moon); the summer dews to fall more sparingly than of yore. So at any rate Mar'se Dab was thinking, when we left him just now sitting upon the roadside, looking westward at the thunder-clouds. The tobacco-land is hilled up, but scarcely half of it as yet planted. The young plants in the beds are pushing one another out of the ground from their size and vigour, however. The earth is dry and parched, and in two weeks it will be July-and upon July-planted tobacco, as everybody in Virginia knows, no 'pendance, as old Ephraim would say, can be placed. The great black cloud comes nearer and nearer; woods and mountains are absorbed, and vanish into the approaching gloom, while from the inky void there breaks gradually upon the silent air the hoarse roar of waters dashing upon a myriad leaves. Mar'se Dab's hopes have ceased to have even that slight element of uncertainty that is inseparable from the word. "It's come this time, anyway," says he, as he turns homeward, full in his mind of the big crop he will now pitch. The very spray of the coming storm scuds on the newly awakened breeze that is flying before it; and the red dust of the turnpike, as if its last chance for a frolic had come, whirls this way and that in the changing currents of the thunderladen air. Everywhere there is the hurry of preparation for the coming storm. The Clover Hill domestics are hard at work rushing the family linen and mattresses off the front portico. Aunt Judy is racing after the young turkeys; the negroes have unyoked their teams from the corn-rows, and are hastening up to the barnyard, singing tearful dirges for joy at the "prospec' of a season." The spring calves in the yard are galloping hither and thither with their tails in the air, like quadrupeds demented; and old Uncle Ephraim, at his cabin-door, is reminding Aunt Milly that "he'd bin lookin' fur weather" (inspired of course by the sensations in his shoulder), but hardly reckoned it would cum befo' sundown." Here, happy in the prospect of at any rate planting out his tobacco-crop, we must leave Mar'se Dab. If he was obstinate and prejudiced, there was no kinderhearted man, as Uncle Ephraim said, "north of Jeems river." If he was loud-mouthed and boisterous, and stormed at his hands in a way that made him conspicuous in a place where these peculiarities are uncommon, it was, at the same time, the confiding fashion in which he supplied these very dependents with the necessaries of life in advance from year to year that hastened his downfall. His inability to refuse security for all the bacon and corn-meal, the cotton dresses and "pars o' shoes" that the inmates of the twenty cabins on Clover Hill want the Office of this Paper. ed, or thought they wanted, at with all necessary Outbuildings, and Captain Topfodder's, no doubt 16 Cabins. Price $9500. Apply at swelled greatly the obligations that finally crushed Mar'se Dab. How the gallant Captain came out among the creditors I never heard, for I left the neighbourhood before the great crisis occurred, and was most happily spared the harrowing spectacle of the sale.. The details of this great occasion, however, were of course fully communicated. There was twelve months' credit given, and the prices were accordingly quite fabulous. How much was actually collected at that remote future period is of course a matter I know nothing about. But, so far as paper went, the bidding was so brisk and the prices so unprecedented that Major Hogshead, the famous auctioneer from Shucksville, had twice to go behind the stable for a drink-his feelings were so much overcome. Poor Mar'se Dab, however, benefited from none of these things. His chief creditor, a local Jew with a Scotch name, took over the place, and here is the advertisement of sale, cut out of the local newspaper of that date, and kept all these years as a memento:— FOR sale, on terms to suit pur chaser, 13 miles from Shucksville and I from school, store, and mill, situate on the old Richmond Pike, 924 acres of fine rolling land, 100 acres original forest, 50 acres bottom-land; fine brick Mansion, A Philadelphia man bought Clover Hill and commenced to farm the property. A supreme belief in himself, a boundless contempt for everything Southern, so far as business was concerned, and a repudiation of all advice from his neighbours, had the usual result. The place is now in the hands of a practical Virginian of the reformed school. Clover once again, I have heard, has been induced to spring upon its hillsides-—or, at any rate, some of them. The wayward courses of Buffalo Creek and its little feeders have been checked with banks and walls; the deep gullies have been filled with logs and pine-brush. In the bottomlands the horse-mower goes "clicking" on June mornings through grass as heavy almost as that which bent the negroes' backs in old slavery days. There are not, I hear, half-a-dozen negroes on the place, and those that are there have got to "work or quit." There is nothing left of Mar'se Dab's reign but the gullies, a few tenantless rotting cabins, the log walls of the negro church that, in spite of preacher Moses' endeavours and sarcasm, never achieved a roof for want of funds, and the old coloured burying-ground at the corner of the brown-sedge pasture above the mill. SECONDARY EDUCATION IN SCOTLAND. No apology need be made for directing public attention to the question of Secondary Education in Scotland, and to the extent to which the present supply of secondary education and secondary schools, whether as regards quantity or quality, is adequate to the requirements of the country. In the matter of Elementary education, gigantic strides have been taken since the passing of the Act of 1872. The country is now supplied from one end to the other with an excellent system of elementary schools; and the great necessities of the country, as they existed fifteen years ago, may be said to have been adequately met. But the case is far otherwise as regards secondary education and secondary schools. The Act of 1872 left the existing secondary schools of Scotland practically out in the cold. The amending Acts which have been passed since, and especially the Act of 1878, have done much to enable the School Boards to equip and to maintain adequately the Higher Class schools under their charge; but, as a matter of fact, these schools have still been left, up to the present moment, almost entirely outside the current of improvement. School Boards, as a rule, have been timid in devoting to higher-class schools the expenditure without which it is impossible that a high standard of education can be maintained. They have had the fear of the ratepayers ever before their eyes; and the average ratepayer watches jealously the expenditure of any money from which he does not see that he derives an immediate personal benefit. The result has been, as was well pointed out in the address delivered by Mr Marshall, Rector of the Edinburgh High School, to the Association of Secondary teachers in October last, that the public schools of the country specially devoted to higher education have, as a whole, been starved, and are unable to do their work properly for want of means. It might have been supposed, under these circumstances, that the need of the community for a higher education would have been met in another way; and that secondary schools outside the Government system, maintained by private enterprise, and looking for their support to the higher classes of the community, would have thriven in exact proportion to the decline of those secondary schools which are under the management of School Boards. But the fact has been the reverse. From all parts of the country we hear complaints on the part of managers of such schools, that their scholars are being drawn away from them by a class of schools not specially contemplated by the Educational Acts, but which, in Glasgow and elsewhere, has been brought into existence under the School Board system. For although ready to neglect the higher-class schools specially committed to their charge, the School Boards throughout the country are by no means willing to confess that they are unable to provide the higher education demanded by the country. On the contrary, they maintain that, by the wording of the Education Acts, there is no distinction to be drawn in Scotland between elementary and higher education; and that it is their business in the present, as it was with the old parish schools |