onable medicine, prayer. Wit, history, romance, poetry, all
contributed to the almanac. The printer turned an extra penny by
advertising various articles that he had for sale, from negro slaves to
garden seeds. So, in addition to what the original readers learned, we
now find an almanac a most suggestive record of the olden times.

As with many colonial books, the most attractive part of an almanac is
not always the printed contents, but the interlined comments of the
original owner. He kept frequently an account of his scanty and sparse
purchases; from them we gain a knowledge of the price of commodities in
his time. We learn also upon how little a New England planter could
live, how little money he spent. He kept a record of the births,
weights, and measures of his family; he entered the purchase and number
of his lottery tickets (but I never found the proud and happy statement
of a lottery prize). He wrote therein Greek verse, as did John Cotton.
He entered wig-making and hair-dressing accounts, as did Thomas Prince.
He kept the amount of beer and cider he made and drank, and the sad
statement of deaths in the neighborhood; such grim entries are seen as
these made by old Ezra Stiles: "This day Ethan Allen died and went to
Hell." "This day died Joseph Bellamy and went to Heaven, where he can
dictate and domineer no longer." President Stiles did not foresee that
his great-grandson would be Joseph Bellamy's also, and would plan a
social reform more vast in its changes than the really sensible scheme
he thought out, of "uniting and cementing his offspring by transfusing
to distant generations certain influential principles," and of
benefiting the growing population of the New World by carefully planned
and wide-spread marriages with virtuous and pious Stileses.

Of course the almanac-owner kept account of the weather--a brave record
through January and February and March; then, lessening his zeal as
spring-planting began, the hard-working summer months have clean pages;
while a remorseful energy in November and December ofttimes made him
renew in the smoke-dried almanac his crabbed entries. Hence from
contemporary evidence does old New England life seem all winter, all
bitter cold and fierce rains and harsh winds; yet there were surely some
warm summer days and cheerful sunshine, so smoothly serene as to gain no
record.

The relations between book-publishers and authors, between
book-publishers and the public, were fro