to make bone lace with pillow and bobbins.

The boys were thrust at once into that iron-handed but wholly wise
grasp--the Latin Grammar. The minds trained in earliest youth in that
study, as it was then taught, have made their deep and noble impress on
this nation. The study of mathematics was, until well into this century,
a hopeless maze to many youthful minds. Doubtless the Puritans learned
multiplication tables and may have found them, as did Marjorie Fleming,
"a horrible and wretched plaege," though no pious little New Englanders
would have dared to say as she did, "You cant conceive it the most
Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7, it is what nature itself
can't endure."

Great attention was paid to penmanship. Spelling was nought if the
"wrighting" were only fair and flowing. I have never read any criticism
of teachers by either parents or town officers save on the one question
of writing. How deeply children were versed or grounded in the knowledge
of the proper use of "Simme colings nots of interiogations peorids and
commoes," I do not know. A boundless freedom apparently was given, as
was also in orthography--if we judge from the letters of the times,
where "horrid false spells," as Cotton Mather called them, abound.

It is natural to dwell on the religious teaching of Puritan children,
because so much of their education had a religious element in it. They
must have felt, like Tony Lumpkin, "tired of having good dinged into
'em." Their primers taught religious rhymes; they read from the Bible,
the Catechism, the Psalm Book, and that lurid rhymed horror "The Day of
Doom;" they parsed, too, from these universal books. How did they parse
these lines from the Bay Psalm Book?

"And sayd He would not them waste; had not
Moses stood (whom he chose)
'fore him i' th' breach; to turn his wrath
lest that he should waste those."

Their "horn books"--

"books of stature small
Which with pellucid horn secured are
To save from fingers wet the letters fair,"

those framed and behandled sheets of semi-transparent horn, which were
worn hanging at the side and were studied, as late certainly as the year
1715 by children of the Pilgrims, also managed to instil with the
alphabet some religious words or principles. Usually the Lord's Prayer
formed part of the printed text. Though horn-books are referred to in
Sewall's diary and in the letters of Wait Still Winthrop, and ap