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Updated: May 7, 2025
The parish-school was six miles distant, and the teaching given in it was of a very inferior sort usually administered by students, probationers for the ministry, or by half-fledged dominies, themselves more needing instruction than able to impart it.
But I should discredit upon general principles the statement of the woman who related with much detail how she and her whole family had seen a pair "of small brown birds" carry their half-fledged young from their nest in a low bush, where there was danger from cats, to a new nest which they had just finished in the top of a near-by tree! Could any person who knows the birds credit such a tale?
Tom had been to a small party at the house a few evenings before, brought thither by the well-known leader of a certain literary clique, who, in return for homage, not seldom, took younger aspirants under a wing destined never to be itself more than half-fledged.
Sabbath-schools are indisputably excellent things, and I can testify that they are ponderous ecclesiastical hammers, pounding creeds and catechisms into the mould of memory; but these nurseries of the church nourish and harbor some Satan's imps among their half-fledged saints; and while they certainly accomplish a vast amount of good, they are by no means infallible machines for the manufacture of Christians, of which fact I stand in melancholy attestation.
For thus would be thrown out upon our society, year after year, a class of thinkers, of earnest, working, strong-minded men and women, searchers after truth and disciples of the highest good, instead of the crowd of half-fledged intellectual idlers who yearly emerge from our schools with the conceited idea that the course of study is finished, the paths of investigation fully explored, and that life is henceforth a holiday from study.
The tragedy of one of the nests was heightened, or at least made more palpable, by one of the half-fledged birds, either in its attempt to escape or while in the clutches of the enemy, being caught and entangled in one of the horse-hairs by which the nest was stayed and held to the limb above. There it hung bruised and dead, gibbeted to its own cradle.
When they get back they are so chock full of knowledge of the Yankees, that it runs over of itself, like a Hogshead of molasses rolled about in hot weather a white froth and scum bubbles out of the bung; wishy-washy trash they call tours, sketches, travels, letters, and what not; vapid stuff, jist sweet enough to catch flies, cockroaches, and half-fledged gals. It puts me in mind of my French.
There was a pile of trunks as big as a city dwelling-house. Baby-carriages cumbered the way; dogs were under foot, yelping and rending the tender hearts of their owners; the porters staggered about under their loads, and shouted till they were hoarse; farewells were said; rendezvous made alas! how many half-fledged hopes came to an end on that platform!
Clayborne fired popguns at Lord Baltimore, and the Catholic and Protestant Marylanders enacted Toleration Acts, and then chased one another over the border, with some of the fugitives running all the way to the Carolinas, where the settlers were perspiring over their efforts in installing new governors and thrusting them out again, in the hope that a half-fledged statesman would turn up sometime or other in the shuffle.
The actions of men are often but little better indications of the men themselves. A prolonged despair arising from remorse is unreasonable at any age, but if possible, still more so when felt by the young. To think, for example, that the great Being who made us could have made eternal ruin and misery inevitable to a poor half-fledged creature of eighteen or nineteen!
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