Child Life in Colonial Days

A few of the games are to-day unknown, or little known; for instance, the game called in the book "Pitch and Hussel."

The game called "All the birds of the air," reads:—

Mr. Newell has given a list and description of many of the historic singing games and rounds of American children. These were known to me in my childhood: "Here we go round the mulberry bush;" "Here come three Lords out of Spain;" "On the green carpet here we stand;" "I've come to see Miss 'Ginia Jones;" "Little Sally Waters, sitting in the sun;" "Green gravel, green gravel, the grass is so green;" "Old Uncle John is very sick, what shall we send him?" "Oats, pease, beans and barley grows;" "When I was a shoemaker;" "Here I brew, Here I bake, Here I make my Wedding Cake;" "The needle's eye that doth supply;" "Soldier Brown will you marry, marry me?" "O dear Doctor don't you cry;" "There's a rose in the garden for you, young man;" "Ring around a rosy;" "Go round and round the valley;" "Quaker, Quaker, How art thee?" "I put my right foot in;" "My master sent me to you, sir;" "London Bridge is falling down."

Some of these rhymes were founded on certain lines of ballads; but without any printed words or music we all knew them well, and the music was the same that our mothers used—though our mothers had not taught us. To-day children all over the country are singing and playing these games to the same music. I heard verse after verse of London Bridge sung in a high key in the shrill voices of the children of a New Hampshire country school this winter. Such a survival in such an environment is not strange; but it is surprising and pathetic, too, to hear in a public primary or a parochial school the children of German, Italian, or Irish parentage chanting "Green gravel, green gravel, the grass is so green," within the damp and dingy yard walls or in the basement playrooms of our greatest city.

The Dutch settlers had many games. They were very fond of bowling on the grass; a well-known street in New York, Bowling Green, shows the popularity of the game and where it was played. They played "tick-tack," a complicated sort of backgammon; and trock, on a table somewhat like a billiard table; in it an ivory ball was struck under wire-wickets with a cue. Coasting down hill became a most popular sport. Many attempts were made to control and stop the coasters. At one time the Albany constables were ordered to take the "small or great slees" in which "boys and girls ryde down the hills," and break them in pieces. At another time the boy had to forfeit his hat if he were caught coasting on Sunday. The sleds were low, with a rope in front, and were started and guided by a sharp stick.

There is a Massachusetts law of the year 1633 against "common coasters, unprofitable fowlers and tobacco-takers,"—three classes of detrimentals. Mr. Ernst says coasting meant loafing along the shore, then idling in general, then sliding down hill for fun. In Canada they slid down the long hills on toboggans. In New England they used a double runner, a long narrow board platform on two sleds or two sets of runners. Judge Sewall speaks of his little daughter going out on sleds, but there is nothing to indicate precisely what he meant thereby.

"Sports of the Innyards" languished in New England. Innkeepers were ordered not to permit the playing of "Dice, Cards, Tables, Quoits, Log-gats, Bowls, Ninepins, or any other Unlawful Game in house, yard, Garden or backside." Slide-groat was also forbidden. Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge says the shovel-board of Shakespeare's day was almost the only game that was tolerated. This game was perhaps the most popular of old-time domestic pastimes, and was akin to slide-groat.

I found nothing to indicate that the cruel sport known as cock-throwing, cock-steling, or cock-squoiling ever prevailed in America. In this sport the cock was tied by a short cord to a stake, and boys at a distance of twenty yards took turns at throwing sticks at him till he was killed. This sport was as old as Chaucer's time, and universal among the English.

Judge Sewall wrote of Shrove Tuesday in Boston in 1685 that there was great disorder in Boston by reason of "cock-skailing." Another year he tells of a young lad going through Boston streets "carrying a cock on his back and a bell in his hand." Several friends followed him, loosely blindfolded and carrying cart whips; and under pretence of striking at him managed to distribute their blows with stinging force on the gaping crowd around. This was an old English custom. At a later date the sport of shying at leaden cocks prevailed. The "dumps" which were thrown, and the crude little images of lead and pewter shaped like a cock, were often made and sold by apprentices as part of their perquisites.

Cock-fighting was popular in the Southern colonies and New York. There are prohibitions against it in the rules of William and Mary College. Certainly it was not encouraged or permitted here as in English schools, where boys had cock-fights in the schoolroom; and where that great teacher, Roger Ascham, impoverished himself with dicing and cock-fighting. Cock-fights were often held on Shrove Tuesday. The picture of Colonel Richard Wynkoop, shown on the opposite page, was painted when he was twelve years old; the dim figures of two fighting cocks can be seen by his side. They are obscured by the sword which the colonel carried during the Revolution, and which is thrust in front of the picture. The cruel Dutch sport of riding for the goose, was riding at full speed to catch a swinging greased goose. Young lads sometimes took part in this, but no small boys.

Playing cards were fiercely hated, and their sale prohibited in Puritan communities, but games of cards could not be "beaten down." Grown folk had a love of card-playing and gaming which seemed almost hereditary. But I do not believe young children indulged much in card-playing in any of the colonies.

William Bradford, then governor of the colony at Plymouth, thus grimly records in his now famous Log-book, the first Christmas Day in that settlement:—

"The day called Christmas Day ye Gov^r cal'd them out to worke (as was used) but ye moste of this new company excused themselves, and saide y^t went against their consciences to work on y^t Day. So ye Gov^r tould them that if they made it mater of conscience, he would spare them till they were better informed. So he led away ye rest and left them; but when they came home at noon from their work he found them in ye street at play openly, some pitching ye bar, and some at stoolball and such like sports. So he went to them and took away their implements and tould them it was against his conscience that they should play and others work."

The exact description of this game I do not know. Dr. Johnson says it is a play where balls are driven from stool to stool, which may be a good definition, but is a very poor explanation.

The Pretty Little Pocket Book says vaguely:—

At the end of the seventeenth century a French traveller, named Misson, wrote a very vivacious account of his travels in England. He sagely noted English customs, fashions, attributes, and manners; and airily discoursed on the English game of football:—

"In winter football is a useful and charming exercise. It is a leather ball about as big as one's head, fill'd with wind. This is kick'd about from one to tother in the streets, by him that can get it, and that is all the art of it."

That is all the art of it! I can imagine the sentiments of the general reader of that day (if any general reader existed in England at that time), when he read and noted the debonair simplicity of this brief account of what was even then a game of so much importance in England. The proof that Misson was truly ignorant of this subject is shown in the fact that he could by any stretch of an author's privileged imagination call the English game of foot-ball of that day "a useful and charming exercise." Nothing could be further from the Englishman's intent than to make it either profitable or pleasing.

In the year 1583 a Puritan, named Phillip Stubbes, horror-stricken and sore afraid at the many crying evils and wickednesses which were rife in England, published a book which he called The Anatomie of Abuses. It was "made dialogue-wise," and is one of the most distinct contributions to our knowledge of Shakespeare's England. Written in racy, spirited English, it is unsparing in denunciations of the public and private evils of the day. His characterization of the game of foot-ball is one of the strongest and most fearless of his accusations:—

"Now who is so grosly blinde that seeth not that these aforesaid exercises not only withdraw us from godliness and virtue, but also haile and allure us to wickednesse and sin? For as concerning football playing I protest unto you that it may rather be called a friendlie kinde of fyghte than a play or recreation—a bloody and murthering practice than a felowly sport or pastime. For dooth not everyone lye in waight for his adversarie, seeking to overthrowe him and picke him on his nose, though it be uppon hard stones, in ditch or dale, in valley or hill, or whatever place soever it be hee careth not, so hee have him downe; and he that can serve the most of this fashion he is counted the only fellow, and who but he?... So that by this means sometimes their necks are broken, sometimes their backs, sometimes their legs, sometimes their armes, sometimes their noses gush out with blood, sometimes their eyes start out, and sometimes hurte in one place, sometimes in another. But whosoever scapeth away the best goeth not scot free, but is either forewounded, craised, or bruised, so as he dyeth of it or else scapeth very hardlie; and no mervaile, for they have the sleights to meet one betwixt two, to dash him against the hart with their elbowes, to hit him under the short ribs with their griped fists and with their knees to catch him on the hip and pick him on his neck, with a hundred such murthering devices."

This was written three hundred years ago, and these are not the words of a modern reporter, "They have sleights to meet one betwixt two, to dash him against the heart with their elbows, to hit him under the short ribs with their griped fists, and with their knees to catch him on the hip and pick him on the neck."

Stubbes may be set down by many as a sour-visaged, sour-voiced Puritan; but a very gracious courtier of his day, an intelligent and thoughtful man, Sir Thomas Elyot, was equally severe on the game. He wrote, in 1537, The Boke named the Gouvernour, full of sensible advice and instruction. In it he says:—

"Foot-ball wherein is nothynge but beastlye furie and exstreme violence, whereof proceedeth hurte; and consequently malice and rancour do remayne with them that be wounded; whereof it is to be putt in perpetuall silence."

The "perpetuall silence" which he put on the game has not fallen even by the end of three centuries and a half.

Some indirect testimony as to the character of the English game comes from travellers in the American colonies, where the American Indians were found playing a game of foot-ball like that of their white brothers. John Dunton, travelling in New England when Boston was half a century old, tells of the Indians' game:—

"There was that day a great game of Foot-ball to be played. There was another Town played against 'em as is sometimes common in England; but they played with their bare feet, which I thought very odd; but it was upon a broad sandy Shoar free from Stones which made it the more easie. Neither were they so apt to trip up one another's heels and quarrel as I have seen 'em in England."

At the same time English boys were kicking the foot-ball around Boston streets, and were getting themselves complained of by game-hating Puritan neighbors, and enjoined by pragmatical magistrates, just as they were in English towns.

Fewer games are played now by both boys and girls than in former times, in England as well as America. In a manuscript list of games played at Eton in 1765 are these titles: cricket, fives, shirking walls, scrambling walls, bally cally, battledore, pegtop, peg in the ring, goals, hop-scotch, heading, conquering cobs, hoops, marbles, trap ball, steal baggage, puss in the corner, cat gallows, kites, cloyster and hyer gigs, tops, humming tops, hunt the hare, hunt the dark lanthorn, chuck, sinks, stare-caps, hurtlecap. No games are now recognized at Eton save cricket, foot-ball, and fives. Racquet and hockey flourished for a time. The playing of marbles was abandoned about 1820, and top-spinning about 1840. Top-time had always opened ten days after the return to school after the summer holidays. Hoops were made of stout ash laths with the bark on, and the hoop-rolling season ended with a class fray with hoopsticks for weapons. At one time marble-playing was prohibited in the English universities. It is not probable that those undergraduates habitually played marble any more than do our Princeton University men, who have a day of marble-playing and one of top-spinning each spring.

A record of old-time sports would be incomplete without reference to the laws of sport times. These are as firmly established as the seasons, and as regular as the blooming of flowers. Children cannot explain them, nor is there any leader who establishes them. It is not a matter of reason; it is instinct. A Swiss writer says that boys' games there belong chiefly to the first third of the year, always return in the same order, and "without the individual child being able to say who had given the sign, and made the beginning." From Maine to Georgia the first time is, has been (and we may almost add "ever shall be world without end"), marble time. Then come tops. The saying is, "Top time's gone, kite time's come, April Fool's Day will soon be here." Ball-playing in Boston had as its time the first Thursday in April. Whistle-making would naturally come at a time when whistle wood was in good condition. All the boys in all the towns perch on stilts as closely in unison as the reports of a Gatling gun. There is much sentiment in the thought that for years, almost for centuries, thousands of boys in every community have had the same games at the same time, and the recital almost reaches the dignity of history.

CHAPTER XVIII

CHILDREN'S TOYS

In the year 1695 Mr. Higginson wrote from Massachusetts to his brother in England, that if toys were imported in small quantity to America they would sell. In very small quantity, we fancy, though the influence of crown and court began to be felt in New England, and many articles of luxury were exported to that colony as they were to Virginia.

According to our present ideas, playthings for children in colonial time were few in number, save the various ones they manufactured for themselves. They played more games, and had fewer toys than modern children. In 1712, on the list of rich goods brought into Boston by a privateersman and sold there, were "Boxes of Toys." In 1743 the Boston News Letter advertised "Dutch and English Toys for Children," and Mr. Ernst says Boston had a flourishing toy shop at that date. Other towns did not, as we know from many shipping orders.

I have often been asked whether the first childish girl emigrants to this solemn new world had the comfort of dolls. They certainly had something in the semblance of a doll, though far removed from the radiant doll creatures of this day; little puppets, crude and shapeless, yet ever beloved symbols of maternity, have been known to children in all countries and all ages; dolls are as old as the world and human life. In the tombs of Attica are found classic dolls, of ivory and terra-cotta, with jointed legs and arms. Sad little toys are these; for their human guardians are scattered dust. Dolls were called puppets in olden times, and babies. In the Gentleman's Magazine, London, September, 1751, is an early use of the word doll, "Several dolls with different dresses made in St. James Street have been sent to the Czarina to show the manner of dressing at present in fashion among English ladies." This circulation of dressed dolls as fashion transmitters was a universal custom. Fashion-plates are scarce more than a century old in use. Dolls were sent from house to house, from town to town, from country to country, and even to a new continent.

In Poor Robin's Almanack, 1695, is a reference to a "Bartholomew baby trickt up with ribbons and knots"; and they were known at the time of the landing of the Pilgrims. Therefore it is not impossible that some Winslow or Winthrop maid, some little miss of Bradford or Brewster birth, brought across seas a Bartholomew baby and was comforted by it.

A pathetic interest is attached to the shapeless similitude of a doll named Bangwell Putt, shown facing page 370. It is in the collection at Deerfield Memorial Hall. It was cherished for eighty years by Clarissa Field of Northfield, Massachusetts, who was born blind, and whose halting but trusting rhymes of longing for the clear vision of another world are fastened to the plaything she loved in youth and in old age.

Nothing more absurd could be fancied than the nomenclature "French" attached to the two shapeless, inelegant creatures, a century old, shown on pages 364 and 367. Yet gawky as they are, they show signs of hard usage, which proves them to have had a more beloved life than the case of elegant Spanish dolls, on page 389, which were evidently too fine ever to be touched. The "White House Doll" spent the days of her youth in the White House at Washington, with the children of the President, John Quincy Adams, and is still cherished by his descendants.

Skilful jackknives could manufacture home-made dolls' furniture. Birch bark was especially adaptable to such uses. The wicker cradles and "chaises" of babies were copied in miniature for dolls. Tin toys were scarce, for tin was not much used for domestic utensils. A tin horse and chaise over a hundred years old is shown on page 373, and a quaint plaything it is. The eternal desire of a child for something suggestive of a horse found satisfaction in home-made hobby-horses; and, when American ships wandered over the world in the India trade, they brought home to American children strange coaches and chariots of gay colors and strange woods; these were often comical copies of European shapes, sometimes astonishingly crude, but ample for the ever active imagination of a child to clothe with beautiful outlines. An old coach is shown on page 369, with the box in which it was originally packed. It is marked Leghorn, but is doubtless Chinese.

The word "jack" as a common noun and in compound words has been held to be a general term applied to any contrivance which does the work of a boy or servant, or a simple appliance which is subjected to common usage. In French the name Jacques was a term for a young man of menial condition. The term "country jake" is of kindred sense. Jack lord, jack meddler, jackanapes, Jack Tar, smoke-jack, jack-o'-lantern, black-jack, jack-rabbit, the term jack applied to the knave in playing cards, and the expressions jack-at-a-pinch, jack in office, jack in bedlam, jack in a box, jack of all trades, and many others show the derivative meaning. Hence jack-knife may mean a boy's knife. In English dialect the word was jack-lag-knife, also jack-a-legs, in Scotch, jock-te-leg—these by a somewhat fanciful derivation said to be from Jacques de Liege, the celebrated cutler.

A good jack-knife was the most highly desired possession of a boy. Days of weary work and hours of persistent pleading were gone through with in hundreds of cases before the prize was secured. Barlow knives had a century of popularity. Some now in Deerfield Memorial Hall are here shown. Note the curved end, a shape now obsolete, but in truth an excellent one for safe pocket carriage. Knives of similar shape have been found that are known to be a century and a half old. I have never seen in America any of the old knives used as lovers' tokens, with mottoes engraved on them, referred to by Shakespeare. The boy's stock of toys was largely supplied by his own jack-knife: elder pop-guns, chestnut and willow whistles, windmills, water-wheels, box-traps, figure 4 traps. Toy weapons have varied little from the Christian era till to-day. Clubs, slings, bows and arrows, air-guns, are as old as the year One. Ere these were used as toys, they had been formidable weapons. They were weapons still, for some years of colonial life. In 1645 the court of Massachusetts ordered that all boys from ten to sixteen years old should be exercised with bows and arrows.

Pepys thought skating "a very pretty art" when he saw it in 1662, but it was then a novelty to him, and he was characteristically a little afraid of it; justly disturbed, too, that the Duke of York would go "though the ice was broken and dangerous, yet he would go slide upon his scates which I did not like—but he slides very well."

Wooden skates shod with iron runners were invented in the Low Countries. Dutch children in New Netherlands all skated, just as their grandfathers had in old Batavia. The first skates that William Livingstone had on the frozen Hudson were made of beef bones, as were those of mediæval children. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, skating was among the many Dutch ways and doings practised by English folk in the new world. The Plymouth Pilgrims brought these Dutch customs to the new world through their long and intimate sojourn in Holland; the New Haven and Connecticut Valley settlers learned them through their constant trade and intercourse with their neighbors, the Dutch of Manhattan; but the Massachusetts Bay settlers of Boston and Salem had known these Dutch ways longer,—they brought them from England across seas, from the counties of Essex and Suffolk, where the Dutch had gone years before and married with the English.

New England boys in those early days went skating on thin ice and broke through and were drowned, just as New England boys and girls are to-day, alas! Judge Sewall wrote in his diary on the last day in November, in 1696, that many scholars went to "scate" on Fresh Pond, and that two boys, named Maxwell and Eyre, fell in and were drowned.

Advertisements of men's and boys' skates and of "Best Holland Scates of Different Sizes," show a constant demand and use. In an invoice of "sundry merchandise" to Weathersfield, Connecticut, in the year 1763, are twelve pair "small brass scates, @ 3/—£3, 16/." I do not know the age of the skates shown opposite page 346. No date less than a hundred years ago is ever willingly assigned to such relics. They are similar in shape to the ones shown on page 349, in the illustration taken from a book for children entitled Children's Sports, published a century ago, which ends its dissertation on skating with this sensible advice:—

It was not until October, 1771, that a pleasure-filled item appeared, "Boys' Marbles." In The Pretty Little Pocket Book are these lines:—

Boys played with them precisely as boys do now. The poet Cowper in his Tirocinium says of the games of his school life:—

The terms used were the same as those heard to-day in school yards: taws, vent, back-licks, rounces, dubs, alleys, and alley-taws, agates, bull's-eyes, and commoneys. Jackstones was an old English game known in Locke's day as dibstones. Other names for the game were chuckstones, chuckie-stones, and clinches. The game is precisely the same as was played two centuries ago; it was a girl's game then—it is a girl's game now.

Battledores and Shuttles were advertised for sale in Boston in 1761; but they are far older than that. Many portraits of children show battledores, as that of Thomas Aston Coffin. All books of children's games speak of them. It was, in fact, a popular game, and deemed a properly elegant exercise for decorous young misses to indulge in.

CHAPTER XIX

FLOWER LORE OF CHILDREN

The records of childish flower lore contained in this chapter are those of my own childhood; but they are equally the records of the customs of colonial children, for these games and rhymes and plays about flowers have been preserved from generation to generation of New England children. The transmission of this nature lore has been as direct and unaltered in the new world as in Great Britain. Some of these customs, such as the eating of hollyhock cheeses and the blowing of dandelion clocks, came originally, as have other play usages, from England; many were varied in early years by different conditions in the new world, by local fitness and suggestion.

One chapter in Mr. Newell's book upon the Games of American Children dwells upon the conservatism of children. The unquestioning reception of play formulas, which he proves, extended to the flower rhymes and lore which I have recollected and herein set down. These inherited customs are far dearer to children than modern inventions. There is a quaintness of expression, a sentiment of tradition, that the child feels without power of formulating.

If the paradise of the Orientals is a garden, so was a garden of old-fashioned flowers the earthly paradise for a child: the long sunny days brought into life so many delightful playthings to be made through the exercise of that keen instinct of all children, destructiveness. Each year saw the fresh retelling and teaching of child to child of happy flower customs almost intuitively, or through the "knowledge never learned at schools," that curious subtle system of transmission which everywhere exists among children who are blessed enough to spend their summer days in the woods or in a garden. The sober teachings of science in later years can never make up the loss to those who have lived their youth in great cities, and have grown up debarred from this inheritance, knowing not when

"The summer comes with flower and bee."

The dandelion was the earliest flower to stir the children's memories; in New England it is "the firstling of the year." In the days of my childhood we did not wait for the buttercup to open to learn whether we "loved butter"; the soft dimpled chin of each child was held up, as had been those of other children for past decades, to catch the yellow reflection of the first dandelion on the pinky throat.

The dandelion had other charms for the child. When the blooms had grown long-stemmed through seeking the sun from under the dense box borders, what pale green, opal-tinted curls could be made by splitting the translucent stems and immersing them in water, or by placing them in the mouth! I taste still their bitterness! What grace these curls conferred when fastened to our round combs, or hung over our straight braids!—far better than locks of corn silk. And what adorning necklaces and chains like Indian wampum could be made by stringing "dandelion beads," formed by cutting the stems into sections! This is an ancient usage; one German name of the flower is chain-flower. The making of dandelion curls is also an old-time childish custom in Germany. When the dandelion had lost her golden locks, and had grown old and gray, the children still plucked the downy heads, the "clocks" or blowballs, and holding aloft these airy seed vessels, and fortifying the strong young lungs with a deep breath, they blew upon the head "to see whether my mother wants me," or to learn the time o' day.

The ox-eye daisy, the farmer's whiteweed, was brought to New England, so tradition tells, as a garden flower. Now, as Dr. Holmes says, it whitens our fields to the great disgust of our liberal shepherds. It soon followed the dandelion in bloom, and a fresh necklace could be strung from the starry blossoms, a daisy chain, just as English children string their true pink and white daisies. This daisy was also used as a medium of amatory divination, by pulling from the floret the white ray flowers, saying, "He loves me, he loves me not," or by repeating the old "apple-seed rhyme":—

The yellow disk, or "button," of the ox-eye daisy, which was formed by stripping off the white rays, made a pretty pumpkin pie for the dolls' table. A very effective and bilious old lady, or "daisy grandmother," was made by clipping off the rays to shape the border or ruffle of a cap, leaving two long rays for strings, and marking in a grotesque old face with pen and ink. A dusky face, called with childish plainness of speech a "nigger head," could be made in like fashion from the "black-eyed Susan" or "yellow daisy," which now rivals the ox-eye daisy as a pest of New England fields.

Though the spring violets were dearly loved, we slaughtered them ruthlessly by "fighting roosters" with them. The projecting spur under the curved stem at the base of the flower was a hook, and when the violets "clinched" we pulled till the stronger was conqueror, and the weaker head was off.

What braided "cat-ladders," and quaint, antique-shaped boats with swelling lateen sail and pennant of striped grass could be made from the flat, sword-like leaves of the "flower-de-luce!" Filled with flowers, these leafy boats could be set gayly adrift down a tiny brook in the meadow, or, with equal sentiment, in that delight of children since Froissart's day, the purling gutter of a hillside street after a heavy midsummer shower. The flowers chosen to sail in these tiny crafts were those most human of all flowers, pansies, or their smaller garden sisters, the "ladies'-delights" that turned their laughing, happy faces to us from every nook and corner of our garden. The folk names of this flower, such as "three-faces-under-a-hood," "johnny-jump-up," "jump-up-and-kiss-me," "come-tickle-me," show the universal sense of its kinship to humanity. I knew a child who insisted for years that pansies spoke to her. Another child, who had stolen a rose, and hidden it under her apron, called out pettishly (throwing the rose in a pansy bed), "Here! take your old flower"—as the pansy faces blinked and nodded knowingly to her.

The "dielytra" (bleeding-heart, or lady's-eardrops we called it) had long, gracefully drooping racemes of bright red-pink flowers, which when pulled apart and straightened out made fairy gondolas, or which might be twisted into a harp and bottle. How many scores have I carefully dissected, trying to preserve intact in skeleton shape the little heart-shaped "frame" of the delicate flower! The bleeding-heart is a flower of inexplicable charm to children; it has something of that mystery which in human nature we term fascination. Little children beg to pick it, and babies stretch out their tiny hands to it when showier blossoms are unheeded.

What black-headed puppets or dolls could be made from the great poppies, whose reflexed petals formed gay scarlet petticoats; and also from the blossoms of vari-colored double balsams, with their frills and flounces! The hollyhock, ever ready to render to the child a new pleasure, could be tied into tiny dolls with shining satin gowns, true fairies. Families—nay, tribes of patriarchal size had the little garden-mother. Mertensia, or lungwort, we termed "pink and blue ladies." The lovely blossoms, which so delighted the English naturalist Wallace, and which he called "drooping porcelain-blue bells," are shaped something like a child's straight-waisted, full-skirted frock. If pins are stuck upright in a piece of wood, the little blue silken frocks can be hung over them, and the green calyx looks like a tiny hat. A child friend forbidden to play with dolls on the solemn New England Sabbath was permitted to gather the mertensia bells on that holy day, and also to use the cherished income of a prosperous pin store. It was discovered with maternal horror that she had carefully arranged her pink and blue ladies in quadrilles and contra-dances, and was very cheerfully playing dancing party, to beguile the hours of a weary summer Sunday afternoon.