h your
person, & so satisfied as to your ability in the capacity of a Teacher;
& in short, fully convinced, that, from a principle of Duty, you have
both, by night and by day endeavoured to acquit yourself honourably, in
the Character of a Tutor; & that this account, you have their free and
hearty consent, without making any manner of demand upon you, either to
stay longer in the Country with them, which they would choose, or
whenever your business calls you away, that they may not have it in
their Power either by charms or Justice to detain you, and when you must
leave them, have their sincere wishes & constant prayrs for Length of
days & much prosperity."[53]

We have little or no evidence concerning the education of women
belonging to the Southern laboring class, except the investigation of
court papers mentioned above, showing the lamentable amount of
illiteracy. In fact, so little was written by Southern women, high or
low, of the colonial period that it is practically impossible to state
anything positive about their intellectual training. It is a safe
conjecture, however, that the schooling of the average woman in the
South was not equal to that of the average women of Massachusetts, but
was probably fully equal to that of the Dutch women of New York. And yet
we must not think that efforts in education in the southern colonies
were lacking. As Dr. Lyon G. Tyler has said; "Under the conditions of
Virginia society, no developed educational system was possible, but it
is wrong to suppose that there was none. The parish institutions
introduced from England included educational beginnings; every minister
had a school, and it was the duty of the vestry to see that all poor
children could read and write. The county courts supervised the
vestries, and held a yearly 'orphans court,' which looked after the
material and educational welfare of all orphans."[54]

Indeed the interest in education during the seventeenth century, in
Virginia at least, seems to have been general. Repeatedly in examining
wills of the period we may find this interest expressed and explicit
directions given for educating not only the boys, but the girls. Bruce
in his valuable work, _Institutional History of Virginia in the
Seventeenth Century_, cites a number of such cases in which provisions
were made for the training of daughters of other female relatives.

"In 1657, Clement Thresh, of Rappahannock, in his will declared that all
his estate shou