some sentence of the Bible, and make some useful
Remarks upon it." Other people's children he taught as occasion offered;
even when "on the Road in the Woods," he wrote on another day, "I, being
desirous to do some Good, called some little children ... and bestowed
some Instruction with a little Book upon them." To children accustomed
to instruction at all hours, the amusement found in the pages of the
primer was far greater than in any other book printed in the colonies
for years.

Certain titles indicate the nature of the meagre juvenile literary fare
in the beginning of the new eighteenth century. In seventeen hundred
Nicholas Boone, in his "Shop over against the old Meeting-house" in
Boston, reprinted Janeway's "Token for Children." To this was added by
the Boston printer a "Token for the children of New England, or some
examples of children in whom the fear of God was remarkably budding when
they dyed; in several parts of New England." Of course its author, the
Reverend Mr. Mather, found colonial "examples" as deeply religious as
any that the mother country could produce; but there is for us a grim
humor in these various incidents concerning pious and precocious infants
"of thin habit and pale countenance," whose pallor became that of death
at so early an age. If it was by the repetition of such tales that the
Puritan divine strove to convert Cressy, it may well be that the son
considered it better policy, since Death claimed the little saints, to
remain a sinner.

By seventeen hundred and six two juvenile books appeared from the press
of Timothy Green in Boston. The first, "A LITTLE BOOK for
children wherein are set down several directions for little children:
and several remarkable stories both ancient and modern of little
children, divers whereof are lately deceased," was a reprint from an
English book of the same title, and therefore has not in this chronicle
the interest of the second book. The purpose of its publication is given
in Mather's diary:

[1706] 22d. Im. Friday.

About this Time sending my little son to School, Where ye Child was
Learning to Read, I did use every morning for diverse months, to
Write in a plain Hand for the Child, and send thither by him, _a
Lesson in Verse_, to be not only _read_, but also _Gott_ by Heart.
My proposal was to have the Child improve in goodness, at the same
time that he improved in _Reading_. Upon further Thoughts I
appreh