omfortable manner. We were a
little surprised, therefore, the other day, to pick up at a book-stall
in Nassau Street a work entitled:

"The North Carolina Reader, Number III. Prepared with
Special Reference to the Wants and Interests of North
Carolina. Under the Auspices of the Superintendent of Common
Schools. Containing Selections in Prose and Verse. By C.H.
Wiley. New York: A.S. Barnes and Burr."

The acute reader will at once surmise that the object of this series
of school readers was to instil into the minds of the youth of North
Carolina a due regard for the sacredness and blessed effects of our
peculiar institution. But for once the acute reader is mistaken. No
such purpose appears, at least not in Number III.; in which there are
only one or two even distant allusions to that dread subject. Onesimus
is not mentioned; there is no reference to Ham, nor is there any
discourse upon long heels and small brains. The great, the only object
of this Reader was to nourish in the children of the State the feeling
which the boy expressed-when he proudly said that his country was
South Carolina. Nothing can exceed the innocent, childlike manner in
which this design is carried out in Number III. First, the children
are favored with a series of chapters descriptive of North Carolina,
written in the style of a school geography, with an occasional piece
of poetry on a North Carolina subject by a North Carolina poet. Once,
however, the compiler ventures to depart from his plan by inserting
the lines by Sir William Jones, "What constitutes a State?" To this
poem he appends a note apologizing for "breaking the thread of his
discourse," upon the ground that the lines were so "applicable to the
subject," that it seemed as if the author "must have been describing
North Carolina." When the compiler has done cataloguing the fisheries,
the rivers, the mountains, and the towns of North Carolina, he
proceeds to relate its history precisely in the style of our school
history books. The latter half of the volume is chiefly occupied by
passages from speeches, and poems from newspapers, written by natives
of North Carolina. It is impossible for us to convey an idea of the
innutritiousness and the inferiority of most of these pieces. North
Carolina is the great theme of orator and poet.

"We live," says one of the legislators quoted,

"in the most beautiful land that the sun of heaven ever
shone upon. Yes