, sir, I have heard the anecdote from Mr.
Clay, that a preacher in Kentucky, when speaking of the
beauties of paradise, when he desired to make his audience
believe it was a place of bliss, said it was a Kentucky of a
place. Sir, this preacher had never visited the western
counties of North Carolina. I have spent days of rapture in
looking at her scenery of unsurpassed grandeur, in hearing
the roar of her magnificent waterfalls, second only to the
great cataract of the North; and while I gazed for hours,
lost in admiration at the power of Him who by his word
created such a country, and gratitude for the blessings He
had scattered upon it, I thought that if Adam and Eve, when
driven from paradise, had been near this land, they would
have thought themselves in the next best place to that they
had left."

We do not aver that the contents of this collection are generally as
ludicrous as this specimen; but we do say that the passage quoted
gives a very fair idea of the spirit and quality of the book. There is
scarcely one of the North Carolina pieces which a Northern man would
not for one reason or another find extremely comic. One of the reading
lessons is a note written fifteen years ago by Solon Robinson, the
agricultural editor of the Tribune, upon the use of the long leaves of
the _North Carolina_ pine for braiding or basket-work; another is a
note written to accompany a bunch of _North Carolina_ grapes sent to
an editor; and there are many other newspaper cuttings of a similar
character. The editor seems to have thought nothing too trivial,
nothing too ephemeral, for his purpose, provided the passage contained
the name of his beloved State.

How strange all this appears to a Northern mind! Everywhere else in
Christendom, teachers strive to enlarge the mental range of their
pupils, readily assenting to Voltaire's well-known definition of an
educated man: "One who is _not_ satisfied to survey the universe from
his parish belfry." Everywhere else, the intellectual class have some
sense of the ill-consequences of "breeding in and in," and take care
to infuse into their minds the vigor of new ideas and the nourishment
of strange knowledge. How impossible for a Northern State to think of
doing what Alabama did last winter, pass a law designed to limit the
circulation in that State of Northern newspapers and periodicals! What
Southern men mean by "State