pear on
stationers' and booksellers' lists at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, I do not know of the preservation of a single specimen to our
own day.

The schoolhouses were simple dwellings, often tumbling down and out of
repair. The Roxbury teacher wrote in 1681:

"Of inconveniences [in the schoolhouse] I shall mention no other
but the confused and shattered and nastie posture that it is in,
not fitting for to reside in, the glass broke, and thereupon very
raw and cold; the floor very much broken and torn up to kindle
fires, the hearth spoiled, the seats some burned and others out of
kilter, that one had well-nigh as goods keep school in a hog stie
as in it."

This schoolhouse had been built and furnished with some care in 1652,
as this entry in the town records shows:

"The feoffes agreed with Daniel Welde that he provide convenient
benches with forms, with tables for the scholars, and a conveniente
seate for the scholmaster, a Deske to put the Dictionary on and
shelves to lay up bookes."

The schoolmaster "promised and engaged to use his best endeavour both
by precept and example to instruct in all Scholasticall morall and
Theologicall discipline the children so far as they be capable, all
A. B. C. Darians excepted." He was paid in corn, barley or peas, the
value of L25 per annum, and each child, through his parents or
guardians, supplied half a cord of wood for the schoolhouse fire. If
this load of wood were not promptly furnished the child suffered, for
the master did not allow him the benefit of the fire; that is, to go
near enough the fireplace to feel the warmth.

The children of wise parents like Cotton Mather, were also taught
"opificial and beneficial sciences," such as the mystery of medicine--a
mystery indeed in colonial times.

Puritan schoolmasters believed, as did Puritan parents, that sparing the
rod spoiled the child, and great latitude was given in punishment; the
rod and ferule were fiercely and frequently plied "with lamming and with
whipping, and such benefits of nature" as in English schools of the same
date. When young men were publicly whipped in colleges, children were
sure to be well trained in smaller schools. Every gradation of
chastisement was known and every instrument from

"A beesome of byrche for babes verye fit
To a long lastinge lybbet for lubbers as meete,"

from the "thimell-pie" of the dame's school