the warm season. Besides the neighbors' children she had four of her own to look after, yet her en ergies were by no means exhausted, and the semi-lei sure of the schoolroom allowed her to work quite steadily making shirts for the Indians at eight pence each. The beginner's chief aid in starting on the road learning was to a hornbook-not really a book at all, but simply a bit of printed paper about three by four inches fastened on a thin piece of board. The name "hornbook" originated in the fact that the printed slip was covered with a translucent sheet of horn, A "To save from fingers wet the letters fair." light strip of metal, usually brass, was fastened with several short nails or tacks around the edges of the horn to keep it in place. The board had a handle at one end, and occasionally this handle was pierced with a hole so that a string could be attached and the toddling owner of the hornbook could carry it suspended from his neck. At the top of the paper was printed the alphabet, capitals, and small letters; and then in orderly array the vowels, then double lines of ab, eb, ibs, and the benediction, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghoft. Amen." The remaining space was devoted to the Lord's Prayer, unless, as was sometimes the case, this was supplemented at the bottom by the Roman numerals. A curious successor to the hornbook was produced by a Hartford publisher in 1820. It was called "The Revolving Alphabet or Child's Instructive Toy," and consisted of two wooden disks about five inches in diameter with a circular sheet of paper between them. On one side of the paper was printed the alphabet; on the other side a series of little syllables. By turning a thumb-piece the paper inside the disks could be made to revolve, and an aperture near the edge of one of the disks allowed you to see the printing, a short column at a time. I imagine this educational toy never had much vogue, and that few people have ever seen one. II COLONIAL SCHOOLS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY T THE early Massachusetts school laws decreed that any town neglecting to provide a schoolmaster should be subject to a penalty of ten pounds. In 1701 the General Court, after declaring that the observance of this decree was "shamefully neglected by divers towns, and the penalty thereof not required, tending greatly to the nourishment of ignorance and irreligion, whereof grievous complaint is made," doubled the penalty, and enjoined all justices of the peace and grand juries to vigilantly attend to the law's execution. As a result, at nearly every session of the court there were towns "presented" for not maintaining the schools required by law, especially the grammar schools. Many excuses were offered sometimes poverty, sometimes inability to secure a teacher. The poverty was often very real, for the colony had passed through King Philip's War, 1675-78, on which it had spent more than half a million dollars. Besides the expense, there had been great loss of life, twelve out of the ninety towns had been utterly destroyed, and forty others had been the scene of fire and massacre. A number of communities were so reduced that their share in the colony tax was remitted. For a long time the fear of Indian invasion had a tendency to hold the settlers closely together, and in some of the towns it was forbidden to build beyond A Salem Schoolhouse with Whipping-post in the near Street. a fixed distance of one or two miles from the meetinghouse. But now that the savages had been thoroughly subdued, the people began to push out into the wilderness, and new towns were planted and added to the commonwealth in quick succession. Many of them had no village nucleus. They either consisted of widely scattered farms, or of several isolated hamlets. The old towns, too, sent forth new shoots, and developed outlying neighborhoods. Thus the schooling of the children presented new |