hymes with accompanying
pictures. Most of these verses were upon Bible subjects, as in the case
of the letter _R_, for example, illustrated by the lines:

"Young pious Ruth
Left all for Truth."

One of the best-loved rhymes was one put into the series after the
Revolution to stir the pride of every young American by reminding him
that

"Great Washington brave
His country did save."

In the pages that followed were to be found an illustrated poem telling
of the awful fate of John Rogers, burned at the stake while his wife and
their ten children looked on, and a dialogue between Christ, a youth and
the devil, in which the youth was finally overcome by Satan's
temptations.

This story of the terrifying fate of the youth was placed after the
shorter Westminster catechism, possibly as a warning to all children who
would not obey their religious teachings. The one hundred seven
questions of the catechism must be answered correctly, even though the
five-syllable words were even harder to understand than to pronounce.

Religious songs and pictures and descriptions of good and of bad
children were also scattered through the book, and in some copies is to
be found the little prayer beginning: "Now I lay me down to sleep,"
which was probably published for the first time in the _Primer_.

As the years went on, pictures and verses and little articles about the
objects of nature and the everyday things that children are interested
in began to take the place of the Bible verses and subjects; and at
length when people saw how well children liked this new way of teaching,
better books than the _Primer_ took its place.

While the young folks in New England families were thus being warned in
story and verse against the awful temptations that lay all around them,
the children in old England were being entertained by popular
penny-books that treated of all kinds of subjects, from the _History of
Joseph and his Brother_ to _The Old Egyptian Fortune Teller's Last
Legacy_. These books were of a size scarcely larger than that of the
letter-paper made for little folks, and they contained usually from
sixteen to twenty-four pages. Illustrations that looked a good deal like
the pictures made by a small boy in his schoolbooks adorned the rough
little volumes.

In every city and town and even in the villages peddlers went along the
streets selling these chapbooks, as they were called. Imagine how the
children, and the grown peop