Beyond Newgate, Bull Run was to be crossed. Having passed that famous stream, the pedagogue and peripatetic, after a mile or two, came to the Ball plantation. An old negro showed him the way, who related, among many other things, that when he was a young buck he made as much as fifteen dollars one winter as capitation money—“Master, I don’t tell you a word of a lie”—levied on the wolves of the region. At Mr. Ball’s: “In my way through the garden I passed two young ladies gathering roses, who, however immured in the woods, were clad with not less elegance than the most fashionable females of Europe. I asked them whether Mr. Ball was at home. They replied that their papa was in the parlour, and with much sweetness of manner directed me by the shortest path to the house. Mr. Ball[O] received me with undissembled accents of joy. He said he had long expected my coming and was gratified at last. I was not a little delighted with the suavity of his manners and the elegance of his conversation. I now opened what some called an Academy and others an Old Field School; and, however it may be thought that content was never felt within the walls of a seminary, I for my part experienced an exemption from care and was not such a fool as to measure the happiness of my condition by what others thought of it. Of the boys I can not speak in very encomiastic terms. Of my female students there was none equal in capacity to Virginia. Geography was one of our favorite studies. I often addressed the rose of May in an appropriate ode—
TO VIRGINIA, LOOKING OVER A MAP
“Powerful as the magic wand,
Displaying far each distant land,
Is that angel hand to me,
When it points each realm and sea.
“Plac’d in geographic mood,
Smiling, shew the pictur’d flood,
Where along the Red Sea coast
Waves o’erwhelm’d the Egyptian host.