ted the whistle, threaded the needle, & while the company
was collecting we diverted ourselves with playing of pawns--_no
rudeness_ Mamma I assure you. Aunt Deming desires you would
particularly observe that the elderly part of the Company were
_Spectators only_, that they mixed not in either of the
above-described scenes.

"I was dressed in my yelloe coat, black bib and apron, black
feathers on my head, my paste comb and all my paste garnet
marquasett & jet pins, together with my silver plume--my locket,
rings, black collar round my neck, black mitts and yards of blue
ribbon (black and blue is high tast) striped tucker & ruffles (not
my best) and my silk shoes completed my dress."

How clear the picture: can you not see it--the low raftered chamber
softly alight with candles on mantel-tree and in sconces; the two
fiddles soberly squeaking: the rows of demure little Boston maids, all
of New England Brahmin blood, in high rolls, with nodding plumes and
sparkling combs, with ruffles and mitts, little miniatures of their
elegant mammas, soberly walking and curtseying through the stately
minuet "with no rudeness I can assure you;" and discreetly partaking of
hot and cold punch afterward.

There came at this time to another lady in this Boston court circle a
grandchild eight years of age, from the Barbadoes, to also attend Boston
schools. Missy left her grandmother's house in high dudgeon because she
could not have wine at all her meals. And her parents upheld her, saying
she had been brought up a lady and must have wine when she wished it.
Evidently Cobbett's statement of the free drinking of wine, cider, and
beer by American children was true--as Anna Green Winslow's "treat"
would also show.

Though Puritan children had few recreations and amusements, they must
have enjoyed a very cheerful, happy home life. Large families abounded.
Cotton Mather says:

"One woman had not less than twenty-two children, and another had
no less than twenty-three children by one husband whereof nineteen
lived to mans estate, and a third who was mother to seven and
twenty children."

Sir William Phips was one of twenty-six children, all with the same
mother. Printer Green had thirty children. The Rev. John Sherman, of
Watertown, had twenty-six children by two wives--twenty by his last
wife. The Rev. Samuel Willard, first minister to Groton, had twenty
children, a