There is a great yearning heart in North Carolina; and it has pined for an object of devotion, and sought it, in vain, in foreign climes, worshipping strange gods, among strangers in strange and uncongenial lands.

Let us rear in our midst the long-expected temple, and it will soon be filled with votaries: towards it will the

"Tribes of the wandering foot"

be gathered from their exile in distant regions, and at its shrines, and to the God of our fathers, in our own fatherland, will be offered for ever the oblations of the pure and steadfast and faithful and heroic North Carolina heart. The author pretends not to be the prophet whose mission it is to effect this great undertaking; but he does profess to be a worker in the cause, and, in the language of Nehemiah, when endeavouring to repair the walls of Jerusalem, that his people might "be no more a reproach," he would earnestly call to every patriot, "Let us rise up and build."

Some there will be who will scoff, as Sanballat and his brethren scoffed at Nehemiah: some there will be who will war on such designs even as the Tories of the Revolution, now damned to an eternity of infamy, warred on the champions of Independence. Unerring instinct, which governs especially the brute creation, leads some to the vocation of critics; these, too feeble to build, and under a necessity to labour, maintain a sickly and filthy existence in the world of letters, by picking out carious spots in the fabrics of better men. These scavengers of literature, however unenviable their vocation, serve, perhaps, a useful purpose; and doubtless few of them will be found willing to decry the object of this work, however greedily they may devour any offal matter cast before them in the execution. There are a few of another class, who profess to be too good and worthy for their state; men who look on their mother as a shame to them, and who make a merit of scandalizing her before the world. They never can see any virtue or beauty in any thing not exotic: if born in Italy, they would endeavour to speak Cherokee; and if denizens of the most polished capitals of Europe, would ape the manners of the Bedouin Arabs, or of the Caffres at the Cape of Good Hope.

Place them any where, among any people, and they become alien in heart and sentiment from those about them; and they are especially spiteful towards the mother which bore them, and the state which protects them. The authors of their own state, of course, they despise; nor would they have tolerated Milton or Shakspeare had they been their fellow-citizens and neighbours.

The schools, the books, the fabrics of their own country are not worthy of their patronage; and the idea of permitting their children to learn to read in the work of a North Carolina author, and which does not treat of far off places and foreign customs, cannot for a moment be tolerated. A true slave is readily recognised by his disposition to mimic his master and gossip about his affairs; and so those to whom allusion has been made, the servitors of a base passion, will continue to sport the liveries of masters voluntarily selected, and offer their cringing service across oceans and continents. True to the instincts of their servile natures, these people will permit their children to read only those books which will teach them that they are the slaves of foreign interests and fashions. But these two classes will prove feeble obstacles in the way of this work, if it is really worthy of public regard; and it will have to encounter other and more serious difficulties, to which the author looks with no little concern.

We have become used to a habit of dependence on others for our books. The traders in books will be afraid of new experiments, and the teachers who recommend, will be, from custom, prejudice, or pedantry, attached to particular systems of instruction, and to particular works, in the different branches.

The stagnation of things has produced a disposition to succumb: we have lain helpless so long, we are afraid to make an effort to stand alone. Hypochondriac humours have affected the imaginations of the best of us; and we are literally afraid of our own shadows. "It's no use-it can't succeed:" that is the lugubrious response made to those who suggest improvements.

To this universal liver-complaint, so fatal in the climate of Carolina, there is one class who have not yet fallen victims; and to these resolute spirits, these heroic nurses, the author believes he will not appeal in vain. He looks confidently to the support of the entire editorial corps; and he believes that he may also calculate on the good wishes of a majority of another class. Undoubtedly the most important profession, in North Carolina at least, is that of the schoolmaster; and many of these the author knows to be patriotic and public-spirited. To them, to the editors, to all public men and all patriots, in every rank and of every sex, his work now appeals; and surely it will not appeal in vain. Will the North Carolinians continue to patronize Readers whose authors have blotted North Carolina from their maps, or who mention it only to defame? Will they send their money to enrich writers whose pens labour to make them infamous, and whose works inspire a veneration for all other places but their own homes-for the deeds of all other people but those of their honoured and illustrious progenitors?

The author has tried to do his part; and that his work might be admitted into universal use, he has not dared to insert entirely original instructions for correct reading, but has compiled his rules from the works most in use. To the rules, he thinks, there can be no exceptions: will not the text serve as an exercise for those learning to read? Look at the selections in Part Third! Whatever others may do and think, the author cannot-never will despair of his own State.

To him, the scenes of his boyhood are the dearest on earth; and he considers his honour and his welfare as bound up with the honour and welfare of the country in which he lives.

To him, the name and the reputation of North Carolina are sacred; that is to him the most cherished and the most illustrious State which contains the ashes of his ancestors, in whose affairs he is an actor, and which he expects to hold his own mortal remains.

WOODBOURNE, N. C., July 4th, 1851.

C. H. W.

RULES AND INSTRUCTIONS.

EVERY teacher should be able to read well; and the student, especially the new-beginner, must necessarily depend more upon his instructor than on the rules laid down in books. These should be few, simple, and comprehensive; and the teacher ought to be able to show their application, and to illustrate them with examples. To do this in a book would be unnecessary, and, in fact, injurious: the very sight of such a cumbrous system would fatigue the scholar, and give him a distaste for his studies. Besides, it is supposed that the student is learning to read: how then can he be instructed by written examples, to appreciate which requires a knowledge of the very science they profess to teach? One great fault of some modern systems is, that too much is put in books; the teacher is presumed to be ignorant, and the scholar so feeble-minded as to be incapable of drawing a conclusion or making an application for himself.

A correct and elegant taste in composition can be acquired only by a close study of the most polished writers; but the rules of reading are neither hard to learn nor difficult to understand.

They may be classified under five heads, to wit: those which relate to Pronunciation, to Enunciation or Articulation, Pauses, Emphasis, and Inflection.

I. OF PRONUNCIATION.

No one can read well who cannot pronounce correctly, and to pronounce correctly requires a thorough knowledge of the elementary principles of spelling. How much, then, depends upon the apparently simple science of spelling! Books and newspapers are the chief sources of intellectual enjoyment and improvement: of these benefits we are deprived, and we cannot make good orators, or teachers, unless we can read well; and we cannot read well unless we can spell correctly.

The art of spelling is one of the most important parts of a good education; it is the corner-stone: and the strength and symmetry of the superstructure depend much on this. Hence it is of great importance to be well grounded in the rules of spelling; and hence care and judgment should be shown in the selection of books for this purpose. The student should be taught the nature, power, and sound of all the letters; and should be made

to enunciate all those different sounds, and classify them, until he has thoroughly mastered this department. After this, he should be practised in spelling, by heart, as it is called, or from memory, until he knows how to spell most of the words in ordinary use; and then he should learn the rules for correct spelling, and be also exercised in parsing words, or telling the accented syllable and vowel, the vowel sound of the accented syllable, the other vowel sounds, and the sounds of the consonants, the rules by which the syllables are formed, &c. &c. &c.

After a thorough course of this kind, the student is prepared to learn to enunciate or articulate words in a sentence.

II. OF ARTICULATION.

As soon as the student begins to read, he should be carefully taught to enunciate his words distinctly, intelligibly, and with a full, round, clear voice. In this matter, a great deal depends on habit; and bad habits of enunciation once formed are very difficult to overcome.

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Therefore, at the very outset, the reader should be taught to articulate properly; and a little pains at that stage of his gress will be of vast service to him ever afterwards. If he has not been so instructed at the proper time, it will be necessary for him to learn after the formation of bad habits; and to conquer these will require considerable exercise, watchfulness, and dili

gence.

A distinguished bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in the United States, a very eloquent, impressive, and charming orator, was, when he first began to speak in public, a bad reader and an uninteresting speaker. He spoke rapidly, running his words into each other, slurring the sounds of unaccented syllables, and, with a hissing sound, mangling sentences that would have looked very well in print; and hence the force of his ideas was not appreciated, and his ministerial labours not productive of their proper effect.

He undertook to make himself an orator; and, instead of following the celebrated advice of Demosthenes, and studying action, he studied and practised the rules of enunciation, of uttering his words distinctly and properly. He began with a word of one syllable; and this he would slowly articulate, time after time, until he learned to pronounce it properly, and also to give to each letter a distinct sound or force. After exercising himself in this way with various words of one syllable, he would take words of two syllables, and pronounce them until he could articulate each syllable and each letter, and still pronounce the word correctly.