Child Life in Colonial Days

CHAPTER XI

MANNERS AND COURTESY

In ancient days in England, manners and courtesy, manly exercises, music and singing, knowledge of precedency and rank, heraldry and ability to carve, were much more important elements in education than Latin and philosophy. Children were sent to school, and placed in great men's houses to learn courtesy and the formalities of high life.

Of all the accomplishments and studies of the Squire as recounted by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, but one would now be taught in English college—music. Of all which were taught, courtesy was deemed the most important.

The importance given to outward forms of courtesy was a natural result of the domination for centuries of the laws of chivalry and rules of heraldry. But they were something more than outward show. Emerson says, "The forms of politeness universally express benevolence in a superlative degree." They certainly developed a regard for others which is evinced in its highest and best type in the character of what we term a gentleman and gentlewoman.

It is impossible to overestimate the value these laws of etiquette, these conventions of customs had at a time when neighborhood life was the whole outside world. Without them life would have proved unendurable. Even savage nations and tribes have felt in their isolated lives the need of some conventions, which with them assume the form of taboos, superstitious observances, and religious restrictions.

The laws of courtesy had much influence upon the development of the character of the colonial child. Domestic life lacked many of the comforts of to-day, but save in formality it did not differ in essential elements from our own home life. Everything in the community was made to tend to the preservation of relations of civility; this is plainly shown by the laws. Modern historians have been wont to wax jocose over the accounts of law-suits for slander, scandal-monging, name-calling, lying, etc., which may be found in colonial court records. Astonishingly petty seem many of the charges; even the calling of degrading nicknames, making of wry faces, jeering, and "finger-sticking" were fined and punished. But all this rigidity tended to a preservation of peace. The child who saw a man fined for lying, who beheld another set in the stocks for calling his neighbor ill names, or repeating scandalous assertions, grew up with a definite knowledge of the wickedness and danger of lying, and a wholesome regard for the proprieties of life. These sentiments may not have made him a better man, but they certainly made him a more endurable one.

The child of colonial days had but little connection with, little knowledge of, the world at large. He probably never had seen a map of the world, and if he had, he didn't understand it. Foreign news there was none, in our present sense. Of special English events he might occasionally learn, months after they had happened; but never any details nor any ordinary happenings. European information was of the scantiest and rarest kind; knowledge of the result of a war or a vast disaster, like the Lisbon earthquake, might come. From the other great continents came nothing.

Nor was his knowledge of his own land extended. There was nothing to interest him in the newsletter, even if he read it. He cared nothing for the other colonies, he knew little of other towns. If he lived in a seaport, he doubtless heard from the sailors on the wharves tales of adventure and romantic interest, and he heard from his elders details of trade, both of foreign and native ports.

The boy, therefore, grew up with his life revolving in a small circle; the girl's was still smaller. It had its advantages and its serious disadvantages. It developed an extraordinarily noble and pure type of neighborliness, but it did not foster a general broad love of humanity. Perhaps those conditions developed types which were fitted to receive and absorb gradually the more extended views of life which came through the wider extent of vision, which has been brought to us by newspapers, by steam, and by electricity. At any rate children were serenely content, for they were unconscious.

Among early printed English books are many containing rules of courtesy and behavior. Many of these and manuscripts on kindred topics were carefully reprinted in 1868 by the Early English Text Society of Great Britain. Among these are: The Babees Book; The Lytill Children's Lytil Boke; The Boke of Nurture, 1577; The Boke of Curtasye, 1460; The Schole of Vertue, 1557. From those days till the present, similar books have been written and printed, and form a history of domestic manners.

It certainly conveys an idea of the demeanor of children of colonial days to read what was enjoined upon them in a little book of etiquette which was apparently widely circulated, and doubtless carefully read. Instructions as to behavior at the table run thus:—

"Never sit down at the table till asked, and after the blessing. Ask for nothing; tarry till it be offered thee. Speak not. Bite not thy bread but break it. Take salt only with a clean knife. Dip not the meat in the same. Hold not thy knife upright but sloping, and lay it down at right hand of plate with blade on plate. Look not earnestly at any other that is eating. When moderately satisfied leave the table. Sing not, hum not, wriggle not. Spit no where in the room but in the corner, and—"

But I will pursue the quotation no further, nor discover other eighteenth-century pronenesses painfully revealed in lurid light in other detailed "Don'ts."

It is evident that the ancient child was prone to eat as did Dr. Samuel Johnson, hotly, avidly, with strange loud eager champings; he was enjoined to more moderation:—

"Eat not too fast nor with Greedy Behavior. Eat not vastly but moderately. Make not a noise with thy Tongue, Mouth, Lips, or Breath in Thy Eating and Drinking. Smell not of thy Meat; nor put it to Thy Nose; turn it not the other side upward on Thy Plate."

In many households in the new world children could not be seated at the table, even after the blessing had been asked. They stood through the entire meal. Sometimes they had a standing place and plate or trencher; at other boards they stood behind the grown folk and took whatever food was handed to them. This must have been in families of low social station and meagre house furnishings. In many homes they sat or stood at a side-table, and trencher in hand, ran over to the great table for their supplies. A certain formality existed at the table of more fashionable folk. Children were given a few drops of wine in which to drink the health of their elders. In one family the formula was, "Health to papa and mamma, health to brothers and sisters, health to all my friends." In another, the father's health only was named. Sometimes the presence of grandparents at the table was the only occasion when children joined in health-drinking.

The little book teaches good listening:—

"When any speak to thee, stand up. Say not I have heard it before. Never endeavour to help him out if he tell it not right. Snigger not; never question the Truth of it."

The child is enjoined minutely as to his behavior at school: to take off his hat at entering, and bow to the teacher; to rise up and bow at the entrance of any stranger; to "bawl not in speaking"; to "walk not cheek by jole," but fall respectfully behind and always "give the Wall to Superiors."

"Run not Hastily in the Street, nor go too Slowly. Wag not to and fro, nor use any Antick Postures either of thy Head, Hands, Feet or Body. Throw not aught on the Street, as Dirt or Stones. If thou meetest the scholars of any other School jeer not nor affront them, but show them love and respect and quietly let them pass along."

Boys took a good deal from their preceptors, and took it patiently and respectfully; but I can well imagine the roar of disgust with which even a much-hampered, eighteenth-century schoolboy read the instructions to show love and respect to the boys of a rival school and not to jeer or fire stones at them.

This book of manners was reprinted in Worcester by Isaiah Thomas in 1787. I have seen an earlier edition, called The School of Manners, which was published in London in 1701. The title-page and a page of the precepts are here reproduced. The directions in these books of etiquette are plainly copied from a famous book entitled Youths' Behaviour, or Decency in Conversation Amongst Men, a book unsurpassed in the seventeenth century as an epitome of contemporary manners, and held in such esteem that it ran through eleven editions in less than forty years after its first appearance. Not the least remarkable thing about this volume was the fact that the first edition in English was by an "ingeniose Spark" not then eight years of age, one Francis Hawkins, who rendered it from "the French of grave persons." The bookseller begs the reader to "connive at the stile," on the plea that it was "wrought by an uncouth and rough file of one in green years." Green years! we cannot fancy sober young Francis as ever green or as anything but a sere and prematurely withered leaf. We can see him in sad colored attire, carefully made quill pen in hand, seated at desk and standish, his poor little shrunken legs hanging pitifully down, inditing on foolscap with precision and elegance his pompous precepts. After all he only translated these maxims; hence, perhaps, was the reason that he managed to live to grow up. For translating did not tax his "intellectuals" as would have composition.

The Youths' Behaviour contained many rules and instructions worded from still older books on courtesy, such as The Babees Book, and The Boke of Nurture, and traces of those hackneyed rules lingered even in the etiquette books of Isaiah Thomas, long after the house-furnishings and household conditions indicated by them and sometimes necessitated by them had become as obsolete as the formal duties of the squire's sons, "the younkers of account, youths of good houses, and young gentlemen henxmen," for whom they had originally been written. Let us believe that the habits pointed out by such rules were obsolete also. I cannot think, for instance, that the boy born after our Revolutionary war was in the habit of casting poultry and meat bones under dining tables, even though he is so seriously enjoined not to do so. This rule is a survivor from the earthen floors and dirty ways of old England.

A famous book of rules of etiquette, entitled The Mirror of Compliments, was printed in 1635 in England, and as late as 1795 many pages of it were reprinted in America by Thomas under the title A New Academy of Compliments. The teachings in this book were fearfully and wonderfully polite. This is the sort of thing enjoined upon children and grown folk as correct phrases to be exchanged on the subject of breaking bread together:—

"Sir, you shall oblige me very much if you will do me the honour to take my poor dinner with me.

"Sir, you are too courteous and persuasive to be refused and therefore I shall trouble you.

"Sir, pray excuse your bad entertainment at the present dinner and another time we will endeavour to make you amends.

"Truly, Sir, it has been very good, without any defect, and needs no excuse."

The child who sought to be mannerly certainly must have felt rather discouraged at the prospect laid before him. These superfluities of politeness were equalled by the absurdities of restraint. It would certainly have been a study of facial expression to see the average schoolboy when he read this dictum, "It is a wilde and rude thing to lean upon ones elbow."

In Brinsley's Grammar Schoole, written in 1612, he enumerates the "bookes to bee first learned of children." First were "abcies" and primers, then the Psalms in metre, then the Testament.

"Then if any other require any little booke meet to enter Children, the Schoole of Virtue is one of the Principall, and easiest for the first enterers being full of precepts of ciuilitie.... And after the Schoole of Good Manners, leading the child as by the hand, in the way of all good manners."

The constant reading of these books, and the persistent reprinting of their formal rules of behavior, may have tended to conserve the old-fashioned deportment of children which has been so lamented by aged grumblers and lovers of the good old times. It was certainly natural that children should be affected by the regard for etiquette, the distinctions of social position which they saw heeded all around them, and in all departments of life. No man could enlist in the Massachusetts Cavalry unless he had a certain amount of property. Even boys in college had their names placed in the catalogues, not by classes, years, scholarship, or alphabetical order, but by the dignity and wealth of their family and social position; and a college boy at Harvard had to give the baluster side of the staircase to any one who was his social superior. Of course the careful "seating of the meeting" was simply an evidence of this regard of rank and station.

A certain regard for formality obtained even in very humble households. The childhood of David and John Brainerd, born respectively in 1718 and 1720, in East Haddam, Connecticut, who later in life were missionaries to the New Jersey Indians, has been written by a kinsman. They were nurtured under the influences of Connecticut Puritanism, in a simple New England home. Their biographer writes of their rearing:—

"A boy was early taught a profound respect for his parents, teachers, and guardians, and implicit prompt obedience. If he undertook to rebel his will was broken by persistent and adequate punishment. He was taught that it was a sin to find fault with his meals, his apparel, his tasks or his lot in life. Courtesy was enjoined as a duty. He must be silent among his superiors. If addressed by older persons he must respond with a bow. He was to bow as he entered and left the school, and to every man and woman, old or young, rich or poor, black or white, whom he met on the road. Special punishment was visited on him if he failed to show respect for the aged, the poor, the colored, or to any persons whatever whom God had visited with infirmities."

All children in godly households were taught personal consideration of the old and afflicted, a consideration which lasted till our present days of organized charities. As a lesson of patience and kindness, read Mrs. Silsbee's account of the blind piano tuner in Salem. He was employed in many households and ever treated with marked attention. His tuning instrument had to be placed for him on each piano-screw by some member of the family. He was paid, given cake and wine, then humored by being given a tangled skein of silk to unravel and thus show his dexterity, and finally led tenderly home.

Sir Francis Doyle says, "It is the intention of the Almighty that there should exist for a certain time between childhood and manhood, the natural production known as a boy." This natural production existed two centuries ago as well as to-day. Though children were certainly subdued and silent in the presence of older folk, still they were boys and girls, not machine-like models of perfection. We know of their turbulence in church; and boys in colonial days robbed orchards, and played ball in the streets, and tore down gates, and frightened horses, and threw stones with as much vim and violence as if they had been born in the nineteenth century. Mather, in his Vindication of New England, referring to the charge of injuring King's Chapel, shows us Boston schoolboys in much the same mischief that schoolboys have been in since:—

"All the mischief done is the breaking of a few Quarels of Glass by idle Boys, who if discover'd had been chastis'd by their own Parents. They have built their Chapel in a Publick burying place, next adjoining a great Free School, where the Boyes (having gotten to play) may, some by Accident, some in Frolick, and some perhaps in Revenge for disturbing their Relatives' Graves by the Foundation of that Building, have broken a few Quarels of the Windows."

Children did not always pose either as models of decorum or propriety in their relations with each other. In a little book called The Village School, we read of their beating and kicking each other, and that there was one bleeding nose. Worse yet, when the girls went forth to gather "daisies and butter-flowers," the ungallant boys kicked the girls "to make them pipe."

CHAPTER XII

RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND TRAINING

Puritanism is not of the Nineteenth Century, but of the Seventeenth, the grand unintelligibility for us lies there. The Fast Day Sermons, in spite of printers, are all grown dumb. In long rows of dumpy little quartos they indeed stand here bodily before us; by human volition they can be read, but not by any human memory remembered. The Age of the Puritans is not extinct only and gone away from us, but it is as if fallen beyond the capabilities of memory itself; it is grown what we may call incredible. Its earnest Purport awakens now no resonance in our frivolous hearts, ... the sound of it has become tedious as a tale of past stupidities.

          —Oliver Cromwell's Life and Letters. Thomas Carlyle, 1845.

The religious aspect of the life of children, especially in early colonial days, and most particularly in New England, bore a far deeper relation to the round of daily life than can be accorded to it in these pages. The spirit of the Lord, perhaps I should say the fear of the Lord, truly filled their days. Born into a religious atmosphere, reared in religious ways, surrounded on every side by religious influences, they could not escape the impress of deep religious feeling; they certainly had a profound familiarity with the Bible. The historian Green says that the Englishman of that day was a man of one book, and that book the Bible. It might with equal truth be said that the universal child's book of that day was the Bible. There were few American children until after the Revolution who had ever read from any book save the Bible, a primer, or catechism, and perhaps a hymn book or an almanac.

The usual method at that time of reading the Bible through was in the regular succession of every chapter from beginning to end, not leaving out even Leviticus and Numbers. This naturally detracted from the interest which would have been awakened by a wise selection of parts suited to the liking of children; and many portions doubtless frightened young children, as we have abundant record in the writings of Sewall and Mather. J. T. Buckingham stated in his Memoirs that he read the Bible through at least a dozen times before he was sixteen years old. Some portions, especially the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John, filled him with unspeakable terror, and he called the enforced reading of them "a piece of gratuitous and unprofitable cruelty." He was careful, however, to pay due tribute to the influence of the Bible upon his literary composition and phraseology. The constant reading of the beautiful English wording of the Bible influenced not only the style of writing of that day, but controlled the everyday speech of the people, keeping it pure and simple.

There was one important reason for the unfailing desire of English folk for the Bible and the employment of its words and terms; it was not only the sole book with which most English readers were familiar,—the book which supplied to them sacred hymns and warlike songs, the great voices of the prophets, the parables of the Evangelists, stories of peril and adventure, logic, legends, history, visions,—but it was also a new book. The family of the seventeenth century that read the words of the small Geneva Bibles in the home circle, or poorer folk who listened to the outdoor reading thereof, heard a voice that they had longed for and waited for and suffered for, and that their fathers had died for, and a treasure thus acquired is never lightly heeded. The Pilgrim Fathers left England for Holland before King James' Bible, our Authorized Version, had been published. The Puritans of the Boston and Salem settlements had seen the importation of Geneva Bibles forbidden in England by Laud in 1633, and the reading prohibited at their meetings. They revelled in it in their new homes, for custom had not deadened their delight, and they were filled with it; it satisfied them; they needed no other literature.

Though Puritanism in its anxious and restricted religionism denied freedom to childhood, yet the spirit of Puritanism was deeply observant and conservative of family relations. The meagre records of domestic life in Puritan households are full of a pure affection, if not of grace or good cheer. The welfare, if not the pleasure of their children, lay close to the heart of the Pilgrims. Their love was seldom expressed, but their rigid sense of duty extended to duty to be fulfilled as well as exacted.

Governor Bradford wrote in his now world-famous Log-book, in his lucid and beautiful English, an account of the motives of the emigration from Holland, and in a few sentences therein he gives one of the most profound reasons of all, their intense yearning for the true welfare of their children:—

"As necessitie was a taskmaster over them, so they were forced to be such, not only to their servants but in a sorte, to their dearest children; the which as it did not a little wound ye tender harts of many a loving father and mother, so it produced likewise sundrie sad and sorrowful effects. For many of theier children, that were of best dispositions and gracious inclinations, having lernde to bear the yoake in their youth and willing to beare parte of their parents burden, were often times so oppressed with their hevie labours, that though their minds were free and willing yet their bodies bowed under ye weight of ye same, and became decrepid in their early youth, the vigor of nature being consumed in ye very budd as it were. But that which was more lamentable and of all sorrows most heavie to be borne was that many of their children, were drawne away by evill examples into extravagant and dangerous coarses, getting ye raines off their necks, and departing from their parents."

This country was settled at a time when all English people were religious. The Puritan child was full of religious thoughts and exercises, so also was the child of Roman Catholic parents, or one reared in the Established Church. The diarist Evelyn was a stanch Church of England man, no lover of Puritan ways, but he could write thus of his little child:—

"As to his piety, astonishing were his applications of Scripture upon occasion and his sense of God. He had learned all his Catechism early, and understood all the historical part of the Bible and New Testament to a wonder, how Christ came to redeem mankind, and how comprehending those messages himself, his godfathers were discharged of his promises.

"He would of himself select the most pathetic psalms and chapters out of Job, to read to his maid during his sickness, telling her, when she pitied him, that all God's children must suffer affliction. He declaimed against the vanities of the world before he had seen any. Often he would desire those who came to see him to pray by him, and a year before he fell sick to kneel and pray with him alone in some corner."

It was not of a Puritan dame that this was written:—

"Her Maids came into her Chamber early every morning, and ordinarily shee passed about an howr with them; In praying, and catechizing, and instructing them: To these secret and private Praiers, the publick Morning and Evening praiers of the Church, before dinner and supper, and another form, together with reading Scriptures, and singing Psalms, before bed-time, were daily and constantly added."

This zealous Christian was Letice, Lady Falkland, a devoted Church of England woman; so strict was she that if she missed any from the religious services, she "presently sent for them and consecrated another howr of praier there purposely for them." A strenuous insistence showed itself in all sects in the new world. The "Articles Lawes and Orders Divine Politique and Martiall for the colony of Virginea" were unrivalled in their mingling of barbarity and Christianity by any other code of laws issued in America. No Puritan dared go farther than did the good Episcopalian Sir Thomas Dale. For irreverence to "any Preacher or Minister of Gods Holy Word" the offender was to be whipped three times and thrice to ask public forgiveness. Any one who persistently refused to be instructed and catechized could be whipped every day. Rigidly were all forced to attend the Sunday exercises.

There is one name which must appear constantly on the pages of any history of New England of the half century from 1680 to 1728,—that of Cotton Mather. This reference is due him not only because he was prominent in the history of those years, but because he is the preserver of that history for us. From his multitudinous pages—full though they be of extraordinary religious sentiments, strained metaphors, and unmistakable slang—we also gain much to show us the life of his day. The man himself was not only a Puritan of the Puritans, but the personification of a passionate desire to do good. This constant thought for others and wish to benefit them frequently led him to perform deeds which were certainly officious, ill-timed, and unwelcome, though inspired by noble motives.

His son Samuel wrote a life of him, which has justly been characterized by Professor Barrett Wendell as the most colorless book in the English language; but even from those bleached and dried pages we learn of Cotton Mather's love of his children, and his earnest desire for their education and salvation. His son's words may be given as evidently truthful:—

"He began betimes to entertain them with delightful stories, especially Scriptural ones; and he would ever conclude with some lesson of piety bidding them to learn that lesson from the story. Thus every day at the table he used himself to tell some entertaining tale before he rose; and endeavor to make it useful to the olive plants about the table. When his children accidentally at any time came in his way, it was his custom to let fall some sentence or other that might be monitory or profitable to them.

"He betimes tried to engage his children in exercises of piety, and especially secret prayer.... He would often call upon them, 'Child, don't you forget every day to go alone and pray as I have directed you.' He betimes endeavoured to form in his children a temper of kindness. He would put them upon doing services and kindnesses for one another and other children. He would applaud them when he saw them delight in it. He would upbraid all aversion to it. He would caution them exquisitely against all revenges of injuries and would instruct them to return good offices for evil ones.... He would let them discover he was not satisfied, except when they had a sweetness of temper shining in them."

His thought for the young did not cease with those of his own family; he never failed to instil good lessons everywhere; and a special habit of his on visiting any town was to beg a holiday for the school children, asking them to perform some religious task in return.

These ministers lived at a time when New England Puritanism in its extreme type was coming to a close; but parents and households thus reared clung more rigidly and exactly to it and instilled in it a fervent hope of giving permanency to what seemed to their sad eyes in danger of being wholly thrust aside and lost. Such religionists were both Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall, "true New-English Christians" they called and deemed themselves. They were very gentle with their children; but a profound anxiety for the welfare of those young souls made them most cruel in the intensity of their teaching and warning; especially displeasing to modern modes of thought are their constant reminders of death.

When Cotton Mather's little daughter was but four years old he made this entry in his diary:—

"I took my little daughter Katy into my Study and then I told my child I am to dye Shortly and shee must, when I am Dead, remember Everything I now said unto her. I sett before her the sinful Condition of her Nature, and I charged her to pray in Secret Places every Day. That God for the sake of Jesus Christ would give her a New Heart. I gave her to understand that when I am taken from her she must look to meet with more humbling Afflictions than she does now she has a Tender Father to provide for her."

The vanity of all such painful instruction, harrowing to the father and terrifying to the child, is shown in the sequel. Cotton Mather did not die till thirty years afterward, and long survived the tender little blossom that he loved yet blighted with the chill and dread of death.

The pages of Judge Sewall's diary sadly prove his performance of what he believed to be his duty to his children, just as the entries show the bewilderment and terror of his children under his teachings. Elizabeth Sewall was the most timid and fearful of them all; a frightened child, a retiring girl, a vacillating sweetheart, an unwilling bride, she became the mother of eight children; but always suffered from morbid introspection, and overwhelming fear of death and the future life, until at the age of thirty-five her father sadly wrote, "God has delivered her now from all her fears."

The process which developed this unhappy nature is plainly shown by many entries in the diary. This was when she was about five years old:—

"It falls to my daughter Elizabeth's Share to read the 24 of Isaiah which she doth with many Tears not being very well and the Contents of the Chapter and Sympathy with her draw Tears from me also."

The terrible verses telling of God's judgment on the land, of fear, of the pit, of the snare, of emptiness and waste, of destruction and desolation, must have sunk deep into the heart of the sick child, and produced the condition shown by this entry when she was a few years older:—

"When I came in, past 7 at night, my wife met me in the Entry and told me Betty had surprised them. I was surprised with the Abruptness of the Relation. It seems Betty Sewall had given some signs of dejection and sorrow; but a little while after dinner she burst into an amazing cry which caus'd all the family to cry too. Her Mother ask'd the Reason, she gave none; at last said she was afraid she should go to Hell, her Sins were not pardon'd. She was first wounded by my reading a sermon of Mr. Norton's; Text, Ye shall seek me and shall not find me. And these words in the Sermon, Ye shall seek me and die in your Sins, ran in her Mind and terrified her greatly. And staying at home, she read out of Mr. Cotton Mather—Why hath Satan filled thy Heart? which increas'd her Fear. Her Mother asked her whether she pray'd. She answered Yes, but fear'd her prayers were not heard, because her sins were not pardoned."

Poor little wounded Betty! her fear that she should go to hell because she, like Spira, was not elected, was answered by her father who, having led her into this sad state, was but ill-fitted to comfort her. Both prayed with bitter tears, and he says mournfully, "I hope God heard us." Hell, Satan, eternal damnation, everlasting torments, were ever held up before these Puritan children. We could truthfully paraphrase Wordsworth's beautiful line "Heaven lies about us in our infancy," and say of these Boston children, "Hell lay about them in their infancy." The lists in their books of the proper names in the Bible had an accompanying list—that of names of the devil.

A most painfully explicit account of one of the ultra-sensitive natures developed by these methods is given by Cotton Mather in his most offensive style in a short religious biography of Nathaniel Mather. The boy died when he was nineteen years old, but unhappily he kept a diary of his religious sentiments and fears. He fasted often and prayed constantly even in his sleep. He wrote out in detail his covenant with God, and I cannot doubt that he more than lived up to his promises, as he did to the minute rules he laid out for his various religious duties. Still this young Christian was full of self-loathing, horrible conceptions of God, unbounded dread of death, and all the horrors of a morbid soul.

A letter written by an older Mather (about 1638), when he was twelve years old, shows an ancestral tendency to religious fears:—

"Though I am thus well in body yet I question whether my soul doth prosper as my body doth, for I perceive yet to this very day, little growth in grace; and this makes me question whether grace be in my heart or no. I feel also daily great unwillingness to good duties, and the great ruling of sin in my heart; and that God is angry with me and gives me no answers to my prayers; but many times he even throws them down as dust in my face; and he does not grant my continued request for the spiritual blessing of the softening of my hard heart. And in all this I could yet take some comfort but that it makes me to wonder what God's secret decree concerning me may be: for I doubt whether even God is wont to deny grace and mercy to his chosen (though uncalled) when they seek unto him by prayer for it; and therefore, seeing he doth thus deny it to me, I think that the reason of it is most like to be because I belong not unto the election of grace. I desire that you would let me have your prayers as I doubt not but I have them, and rest

"Your Son, Samuel Mather."

A strong characteristic of English folk at the time of the settlement of the American colonies was superstition. This showed not only in scores of petty observances but in serious beliefs, such as those about comets and thunder-storms. It controlled medical practice, and was displayed in the religious significance attributed to trifling natural events. It was evinced in the dependence on dreams, and the dread of portents. Naturally children were imbued with the beliefs and fears of their parents, and multiplied the importance and the terror of these notions. It can readily be seen that religious training and thought, such as was shown in the families of Samuel Sewall and Cotton Mather, joined to hereditary traits and race superstitions, could naturally produce a condition of mind and judgment which would permit such an episode as that known as the Salem Witchcraft. Nor is it anything but natural to find that those two prominent Bostonians took such important parts in the progress of that tragedy.

It was my intent to devote a chapter of this book to the results of the study of the part borne by children in that sad tale of psychological phenomena and religious fanaticism. The study proved most fascinating, and research was faithfully made; but a stronger desire was that children might find some pleasure in these pages in reading of the child life of their forbears. Such a chapter could neither be profitable to the child nor comprehended by him, nor would it be to the taste of parents of the present day. It was a sad tale, but was not peculiar to Salem nor to New England. The Salem and Boston settlers came largely from the English counties of Suffolk and Essex, where witches and witch-hunters and witch-finders abounded, and Salem children and parents had seen in their English homes or heard the tales of hundreds of similar obsessions and possessions.

New England children were instilled with a familiarity with death in still another way than through talking and reading of it. Their presence at funerals was universal. A funeral in those days had an entirely different status as a ceremony from to-day. It was a social function as well as a solemn one; it was a reunion of friends and kinsfolk, a ceremonial of much expense and pomp, a scene of much feasting and drinking.

Judge Sewall tells of the attendance of his little children when five and six years old at funerals. When Rev. Thomas Shepherd was buried "scholars went before the Herse" at the funeral. Sargent, in his Dealings with the Dead, tells of country funerals in the days of his youth:—

"When I was a boy and at an academy in the country everybody went to everybody's funeral in the village. The population was small, funerals rare; the preceptor's absence would have excited remark and the boys were dismissed for the funeral.... A clergyman told me that when he was settled at Concord, N.H., he officiated at the funeral of a little boy. The body was borne in a chaise, and six little nominal pall-bearers, the oldest not thirteen, walked by the side of the vehicle. Before they left the house a sort of master of ceremonies took them to the table and mixed a tumbler of gin, sugar and water for each."

A crisis was reached in Boston when funerals had to be prohibited on Sundays because the vast concourse of children and servants that followed the coffin through the streets became a noisy rabble that profaned the sacred day.

Little girls were pall-bearers also at the funerals of their childish mates, and young unmarried girls at those of their companions. Dressed in white with uncovered heads, or veiled in white, these little girls made a touching sight.

Religious expression naturally found its highest point in Puritan communities in the strict and decorous observance of Sunday. Stern were the laws in ordering this observance. Fines, imprisonment, and stripes on the naked back were dealt out rigorously for Sabbath-breaking. The New Haven Code of Laws with still greater severity enjoined that profanation of the Lord's Day, if done "proudly and with a high hand against the authority of God," should be punished with death. This rigid observance fell with special force and restriction on children. A loved poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote of the day:—