The proprietor of the delightful spot which lay spread out around me--a lake of foliage--fringed by majestic forest trees, and diversified with labyrinthyne walks,--had, the preceding summer, consigned to the tomb the mother of his "beautiful ones." They were under the care of a dignified lady, his sister, and the widow of a gentleman formerly distinguished as a lawyer in New-England. But like many other northern ladies, whose names confer honour upon our literature, and whose talents elevate and enrich our female seminaries of education, she had independence enough to rise superior to her widowed indigence; and had prepared to open a boarding school at the north, when the death of his wife led her wealthier brother to invite her to supply a mother's place to his children, to whom she was now both mother and governess. The history of this lady is that of hundreds of her country-women. There are, I am informed, many instances in the south-west, of New-England's daughters having sought, with the genuine spirit of independence, thus to repair their broken fortunes. The intelligent and very agreeable lady of the late President H., of Lexington, resides in the capacity of governess in a distinguished Louisianian family, not far from the city. Mrs. Thayer, formerly an admired poet and an interesting writer of fiction, is at the head of a seminary in an adjoining state. And in the same, the widow of the late president of its college is a private instructress in the family of a planter. And these are instances, to which I can add many others, in a country where the occupation of instructing, whether invested in the president of a college or in the teacher of a country school, is degraded to a secondary rank. In New-England, on the contrary, the lady of a living collegiate president is of the élite, decidedly, if not at the head, of what is there termed "good society." Here, the same lady, whether a visiter for the winter, or a settled resident, must yield in rank--as the laws of southern society have laid it down--to the lady of the planter. The southerners, however, when they can secure one of our well-educated northern ladies in their families, know well how to appreciate their good fortune. Inmates of the family, they are treated with politeness and kindness; but in the soirée, dinner party, or levée, the governess is thrown more into the back-ground than she would be in a gentleman's family, even in aristocratic England; and her title to an equality with the gay, and fashionable, and wealthy circle by whom she is surrounded, and her challenge to the right of _caste_, is less readily admitted. But this illiberal jealousy is the natural consequence of the crude state of American society, where the line of demarcation between its rapidly forming classes is yet so uncertainly defined, that each individual who is anxious to be, or even to be thought, of the better file, has to walk circumspectly, lest he should inadvertently be found mingling with the _canaille_. The more uncertain any individual is of his own true standing, the more haughtily and suspiciously will he stand aloof, and measure with his eye every stranger who advances within the limits of the prescribed circle.