and to our lodging gone,
    Must give us pain.  There’s the respect
    That makes the patience of a teacher’s life. 
    For who would bear the thousand plagues of a school,—­
    The girlish giggle, the tyro’s awkwardness,
    The pigmy pedant’s vanity, the mischief,
    The sneer, the laugh, the pouting insolence,
    With all the hum-drum clatter of a school,
    When he himself might his quietus make
    With a bare hickory?  Who would willing bear
    To groan and sweat under a noisy life,
    But that the dread of something after school
    (That hour of rumor, from whose slanderous tongue
    Few Tutors e’er are free) puzzles the will,
    And makes us rather bear these lesser ills,
    Than fly to those of greater magnitude. 
    Thus error does make cowards of us all;
    And thus the native hue of resolution
    Is sicklied over with undue clemency,
    And pedagogues of great pith and spirit,
    With this regard their firmness turn away,
    And lose the name of government.

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We here record a curious affair which took place in the State of Georgia in the year 1811.  At the Superior Court at Milledgeville a Mrs. Palmer, who, the account states, “seems to have been rather glib of the tongue, was indicted, tried, convicted, and, in pursuance of the sentence of the Court, was punished by being publicly ducked in the Oconee River for—­scolding.”  This, we are told, was the first instance of the kind that had ever occurred in that State, and “numerous spectators attended the execution of the sentence.”  A paper copying this account says that the “crime is old, but the punishment is new,” and that “in the good old days of our Ancestors, when an unfortunate woman was accused of Witchcraft she was tied neck and heels and thrown into a pond of Water:  if she drowned, it was agreed that she was no witch; if she swam, she was immediately tied to a stake and burnt alive.  But who ever heard that our pious ancestors ducked women for scolding?” This writer is much mistaken; for it is well known that in England (and perhaps in this country in early times) the “ducking-stool” was resorted to for punishing “scolds.”  This was before the days of “women’s rights,” for there is no record of any man having been punished in this way.

It is said that the ducking-stool was used in Virginia at one time.  Thomas Hartley writes from there to Governor Endicott of Massachusetts in 1634, giving an account of the punishing a woman “who by the violence of her tongue had made her house and neighborhood uncomfortable.”  She was ducked five times before she repented; “then cried piteously, ’Let me go! let me go! by God’s help I’ll sin so no more.’  They then drew back y^e Machine, untied y^e Ropes, and let her walk home in her wetted Clothes a hopefully penitent woman.”  In the “American Historical Record,” vol.