The Daily Advertiser

To the TRUSTEES of ERASMUS-HALL.

There are many complaints from the pupils, that they are obliged to act the part of Negroes, through the rigorous season of winter, by making school fires. This is a very great hardship upon delicate boys from the age of nine to twelve, to lift heavy logs, kindle a fire at break of day, and remove the ashes. Their object is education in the elements of the sciences, and their prospects make it unnecessary for them to go through the laborious lessons of cutting and lifting wood, and disposing it mathematically in the fire-places. All parents speak of this regulation with anger and vexation, and consider it as originating from Dutch parsimony and low ideas of delicacy. This object is equal to your attention, and really deserves it; or this Athenian and literary village will lose all boarders. If this labor is allowed, the privy or the Green Pond may occupy the attention and hands of these delicate and youthful laborers.

I should not give you any counsel with respect to literary objects, which you have so unreservedly and prudently resigned to the principal. -- Literature is not the portion of many, and was never imported from Holland with oil or white-wash brushes, nor smuggled in a chest of tea.

It will be absurd to see these little wood-cutters and fire-makers with their rough and black hands, and torn clothes, going through the coupeé and borée, and all the various acts of bowing and shaking of hands; which external elegancies are meant, I am told, to finish the course of studies at the classical village.

A FATHER.