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"A Token for Children. Being the exact account of the Conversion & Holy & Exemplary Lives of several Young Children by James Janeway."

To it was added by Cotton Mather:

"Some examples of Children in whom the fear of God was remarkably Budding before they died; in several parts of New England."

Cotton Mather also wrote: "Good Lessons for Children, in Verse." Other books were, "A Looking Glasse for Children," "The life of Elizabeth Butcher, in the Early Piety series;" "The life of Mary Paddock, who died at the age of nine;" "The Childs new Plaything" (which was a primer); "Divine Songs in Easy Language;" and "Praise out of the Mouth of Babes;" "A Particular Account of some Extraordinary Pious Motions and devout Exercises observed of late in many Children in Siberia." Also accounts of pious motions of children in Silesia and of Jewish children in Berlin. One oasis appeared in the desert waste—after the first quarter of the eighteenth century Puritan children had Mother Goose.

By 1787, in Isaiah Thomas' list of "books Suitable for Children of all ages," we find less serious books. "Tom Jones Abridged," "Peregrine Pickle Abridged," "Vice in its Proper Shape," "The Sugar Plumb," "Bag of Nuts Ready Crack'd," "Jacky Dandy," "History of Billy and Polly Friendly." Among the "Chapman's Books for the Edification and Amusement of young Men and Women who are not able to Purchase those of a Higher Price" are, "The Amours and Adventures of Two English Gentlemen in Italy," "Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony," "The Lovers Secretary," and "Laugh and be Fat." Another advertisement of about the same date contained, among the books for misses, "The Masqued Wedding," "The Elopement," "The Passionate Lovers," "Sketches of the History and Importance of the Fair Sex," "Original Love Letters," and "Six Dialogues of Young Misses Relating to Matrimony;" thus showing that love-stories were not abhorred by the descendants of the Puritans.

In such an exceptional plantation as New England, a colony peopled not by the commonplace and average Englishmen of the day, but by men of special intelligence, and almost universally of good education, it was inevitable that early and profound attention should be paid to the establishment of schools. Cotton Mather said in 1685, in his sermon before the Governor and his Council, "the Youth in this country are verie Sharp and early Ripe in their Capacities." So quickly had New England air developed the typical New England traits. And the early schoolmasters, too, may be thanked for their scholars' early ripeness and sharpness.

At an early age both girls and boys were sent to dame-schools, where, if girls were not taught much book-learning, they were carefully instructed in all housewifely arts. They learned to cook; and to spin and weave and knit, not only for home wear but for the shops; even little children could spin coarse tow string and knit coarse socks for shop-keepers. Fine knitting was well paid for, and was a matter of much pride to the knitter, and many curious and elaborate stitches were known; the herring-bone and the fox- and geese-patterns being prime favorites. Initials were knit into mittens and stockings; one clever young miss of Shelburne, N.H., could knit the alphabet and a verse of poetry into a single pair of mittens. Fine embroidery was to New England women and girls a delight. The Indians at an early day called the English women "lazie Squaes" when they saw the latter embroidering coifs instead of digging in the fields. Mr. Brownell, the Boston schoolmaster in 1716, taught "Young Gentle Women and Children all sorts of Fine Works as Feather works, Filigree, and Painting on Glass, Embroidering a new Way, Turkey-work for Handkerchiefs two new Ways, fine new Fashion purses, flourishing and plain Work." We find a Newport dame teaching "Sewing, Marking, Queen Stitch and Knitting," and a Boston shopkeeper taking children and young ladies to board and be taught "Dresden and Embroidery on gauze, Tent Stitch and all sorts of Colour'd Work." Crewels, embroidery, silks, and chenilles appear frequently in early newspapers. Many of the fruits of these careful lessons of colonial childhood remain to us; quaint samplers, bed hangings, petticoats and pockets, and frail lace veils and scarfs. Miss Susan Hayes Ward has resuscitated from these old embroideries a curious stitch used to great effect on many of them, and employed also on ancient Persian embroideries, and she points out that the designs are Persian also. This stitch was not known in the modern English needlework schools; but just as good old Elizabethan words and phrases are still used in New England, though obsolete in England, so this curious old stitch has lived in the colony when lost in the mother country; or, it may be possible, since it is found so frequently in the vicinity of Plymouth, that the Pilgrims obtained both stitch and designs in Holland, whose greater commerce with the Orient may have supplied to deft English fingers the Persian pattern.

Other accomplishments were taught to girls; "cutting of Escutcheons" and paper flowers—"Papyrotamia" it was ambitiously called—and painting on velvet; and quilt-piecing in a hundred different and difficult designs. They also learned to make bone lace with pillow and bobbins.

The boys were thrust at once into that iron-handed but wholly wise grasp—the Latin Grammar. The minds trained in earliest youth in that study, as it was then taught, have made their deep and noble impress on this nation. The study of mathematics was, until well into this century, a hopeless maze to many youthful minds. Doubtless the Puritans learned multiplication tables and may have found them, as did Marjorie Fleming, "a horrible and wretched plaege," though no pious little New Englanders would have dared to say as she did, "You cant conceive it the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7, it is what nature itself can't endure."

Great attention was paid to penmanship. Spelling was nought if the "wrighting" were only fair and flowing. I have never read any criticism of teachers by either parents or town officers save on the one question of writing. How deeply children were versed or grounded in the knowledge of the proper use of "Simme colings nots of interiogations peorids and commoes," I do not know. A boundless freedom apparently was given, as was also in orthography—if we judge from the letters of the times, where "horrid false spells," as Cotton Mather called them, abound.

It is natural to dwell on the religious teaching of Puritan children, because so much of their education had a religious element in it. They must have felt, like Tony Lumpkin, "tired of having good dinged into 'em." Their primers taught religious rhymes; they read from the Bible, the Catechism, the Psalm Book, and that lurid rhymed horror "The Day of Doom;" they parsed, too, from these universal books. How did they parse these lines from the Bay Psalm Book?

"And sayd He would not them waste; had not

Moses stood (whom he chose)

'fore him i' th' breach; to turn his wrath

lest that he should waste those."

Their "horn books"—

"books of stature small

Which with pellucid horn secured are

To save from fingers wet the letters fair,"

those framed and behandled sheets of semi-transparent horn, which were worn hanging at the side and were studied, as late certainly as the year 1715 by children of the Pilgrims, also managed to instil with the alphabet some religious words or principles. Usually the Lord's Prayer formed part of the printed text. Though horn-books are referred to in Sewall's diary and in the letters of Wait Still Winthrop, and appear on stationers' and booksellers' lists at the beginning of the eighteenth century, I do not know of the preservation of a single specimen to our own day.

The schoolhouses were simple dwellings, often tumbling down and out of repair. The Roxbury teacher wrote in 1681:

"Of inconveniences [in the schoolhouse] I shall mention no other but the confused and shattered and nastie posture that it is in, not fitting for to reside in, the glass broke, and thereupon very raw and cold; the floor very much broken and torn up to kindle fires, the hearth spoiled, the seats some burned and others out of kilter, that one had well-nigh as goods keep school in a hog stie as in it."

This schoolhouse had been built and furnished with some care in 1652, as this entry in the town records shows:

"The feoffes agreed with Daniel Welde that he provide convenient benches with forms, with tables for the scholars, and a conveniente seate for the scholmaster, a Deske to put the Dictionary on and shelves to lay up bookes."

The schoolmaster "promised and engaged to use his best endeavour both by precept and example to instruct in all Scholasticall morall and Theologicall discipline the children so far as they be capable, all A.B.C. Darians excepted." He was paid in corn, barley or peas, the value of £25 per annum, and each child, through his parents or guardians, supplied half a cord of wood for the schoolhouse fire. If this load of wood were not promptly furnished the child suffered, for the master did not allow him the benefit of the fire; that is, to go near enough the fireplace to feel the warmth.

The children of wise parents like Cotton Mather, were also taught "opificial and beneficial sciences," such as the mystery of medicine—a mystery indeed in colonial times.

Puritan schoolmasters believed, as did Puritan parents, that sparing the rod spoiled the child, and great latitude was given in punishment; the rod and ferule were fiercely and frequently plied "with lamming and with whipping, and such benefits of nature" as in English schools of the same date. When young men were publicly whipped in colleges, children were sure to be well trained in smaller schools. Every gradation of chastisement was known and every instrument from

"A beesome of byrche for babes verye fit

To a long lastinge lybbet for lubbers as meete,"

from the "thimell-pie" of the dame's school—a smart tapping on the head with a heavy thimble—to belaboring with a heavy walnut stick or oaken ruler. Master Lovell, that tigerish Boston teacher, whipped the culprit with birch rods and forced another scholar to hold the sufferer on his back. Other schoolmasters whipped on the soles of the feet, and one teacher roared out, "Oh the Caitiffs! it is good for them." Not only were children whipped, but many ingenious instruments of torture were invented. One instructor made his scholars sit on a "bark seat turned upside down with his thumb on the knot of a floor." Another master of the inquisition invented a unipod—a stool with one leg—sometimes placed in the middle of the seat, sometimes on the edge, on which the unfortunate scholar tiresomely balanced. Others sent out the suffering pupil to cut a branch of a tree, and, making a split in the large end of the branch, sprung it on the culprit's nose, and he stood painfully pinched, an object of ridicule with his spreading branch of leaves. One cruel master invented an instrument of torture which he called a flapper. It was a heavy piece of leather six inches in diameter with a hole in the middle, and was fastened at the edge to a pliable handle. The blistering pain inflicted by this brutal instrument can well be imagined. At another school, whipping of unlucky wights was done "upon a peaked block with a tattling stick;" and this expression of colonial severity seems to take on additional force and cruelty in our minds that we do not at all know what a tattling stick was, nor understand what was meant by a peaked block.

I often fancy I should have enjoyed living in the good old times, but I am glad I never was a child in colonial New England—to have been baptized in ice water, fed on brown bread and warm beer, to have had to learn the Assembly's Catechism and "explain all the Quaestions with conferring Texts," to have been constantly threatened with fear of death and terror of God, to have been forced to commit Wigglesworth's "Day of Doom" to memory, and, after all, to have been whipped with a tattling stick.