chools by
Boston teachers. She wrote, with evident eagerness and loving care,
for the edification of her parents and her own practice in
penmanship, this interesting and quaint diary, which forms a most
sprightly record, not only of the life of a young girl at that time,
but of the prim and narrow round of daily occurrences in provincial
Boston. It thus assumes a positive value as an historical picture of
the domestic life of that day; a value of which the little girl who
wrote it, or her kinsfolk who affectionately preserved it to our own
day, never could have dreamed. To many New England families it is
specially interesting as a complete rendering, a perfect
presentment, of the childish life of their great grandmothers, her
companions._

_It is an even chance which ruling thought in the clever little
writer, a love of religion or a love of dress, shows most plainly
its influence on this diary. On the whole, I think that youthful
vanity, albeit of a very natural and innocent sort, is more
pervasive of the pages. And it is fortunate that this is the case;
for, from the frankly frivolous though far from self-conscious
entries we gain a very exact notion, a very valuable picture, of the
dress of a young girl at that day. We know all the details of her
toilet, from the "pompedore" shoes and the shifts (which she had
never worn till she lived in Boston), to the absurd and top-heavy
head-decoration of "black feathers, my past comb & all my past
garnet marquasett and jet pins, together with my silver plume."
If this fantastic assemblage of ornament were set upon the "Heddus
roll," so graphically described, it is easy to understand the
denunciations of the time upon women's headgear. In no contemporary
record or account, no matter who the writer, can be found such a
vivacious and witty description of the modish hairdressing of that
day as in the pages of this diary._

_But there are many entries in the journal of this vain little
Puritan devotee to show an almost equal attention to religion;
records of sermons which she had heard, and of religious
conversations in which she had taken a self-possessed part; and her
frequent use of Biblical expressions and comparisons shows that she
also remembered fully what she read. Her ambitious theological
sermon-notes were evidently somewhat curtailed by the sensible
advice of the aunt with whom she resided, who thereby checked also
the consequent injudicious praise of her pastor, the