o, three teeth, I will not flinch." And this courage
the writer thought could not be surpassed in a London child. It is
needless to say that Emily's fortitude was sufficient to endure the
sight of her mother's suffering, and to nurse her to complete recovery.
Evidently residence in America had not yet sapped the young girl's moral
strength, or reduced her to the frivolous creature an American woman was
reputed in England to be.

Among the home contributors to "The American Juvenile Keepsake" were
William L. Stone, who wrote a prosy article about animals; and Mrs.
Embury, called the Mitford of America (because of her stories of village
life), who furnished a religious tale to controvert the infidel
doctrines considered at the time subtly undermining to childish faith,
with probable reference to the Unitarian movement then gaining many
adherents. Mrs. Embury's stories were so generally gloomy, being
strongly tinged with the melancholy religious views of certain church
denominations, that one would suppose them to have been eminently
successful in turning children away from the faith she sought to
encourage. For this "Keepsake" the same lady let her poetical fancy take
flight in "The Remembrance of Youth is a Sigh," a somewhat lugubrious
and pessimistic subject for a child's Christmas Annual. Occasionally a
more cheerful mood possessed "Ianthe," as she chose to call herself, and
then we have some of the earliest descriptions of country life in
literature for American children. There is one especially charming
picture of a walk in New England woods upon a crisp October day, when
the children merrily hunt for chestnuts among the dry brown leaves,
and the squirrels play above their heads in the many colored boughs.

[Illustration: _Henrietta_]

Dr. Holmes has somewhere remarked upon the total lack of American nature
descriptions in the literature of his boyhood. No birds familiar to him
were ever mentioned; nor were the flowers such as a New England child
could ever gather. Only English larks and linnets, cowslips and
hawthorn, were to be found in the toy-books and little histories read to
him. "Everything was British: even the robin, a domestic bird," wrote
the doctor, "instead of a great fidgety, jerky, whooping thrush." But
when Peter Parley, Jacob Abbott, Lydia Maria Child, Mrs. Embury, and
Eliza Leslie began to write short stories, the Annuals and periodicals
abounded in American scenes and local color.

There was al