York. In the second piece I acted the milliner and by some strange notion of Miss Ledyard's or my own was dressed in a gown, cap, handkerchief and apron of my mother's, with a pair of spectacles to look like an elderly woman -a proof how little we understood the character of a French milliner. When the curtain was drawn, many of the audience declared it must be Mrs. Morton herself on the stage. How my mother with her strict notions and prejudices against the theatre ever consented to such proceedings is still a surprise to me."

All parents did not approve of those exhibitions. Major Dulany wrote with decision to his daughter that he lamented the boldness and over-assurance which accompanied any success in such performances, and which proceeded, he deemed, from callous feeling.

These plays were merely a revival of an old fashion when English school children took part in miracle plays or mysteries. In the seventeenth century schoolmasters took great pride in writing exhibition plays for their pupils. Dreary enough these acts or interludes are. One forced all the characters to act "anomalies of all the

chiefest parts of grammar"

the poor lads that therein
played their

parts!

oh!

CHAPTER V

HORNBOOK AND PRIMER

To those who are in years but Babes I bow
My Pen to teach them what the Letters be,
And how they may improve their A. B. C.
Nor let my pretty Children them despise.

All needs must there begin, that would be wise,
Nor let them fall under Discouragement,

Who at their Hornbook stick, and time hath spent,
Upon that A. B. C., while others do

Into their Primer or their Psalter go.

- A Book for Boys and Girls, or Country Rhimes for Children.
John Bunyan, 1686.

T

HE English philosopher, John Locke, in his Thoughts concerning Education, written in 1690, says the method of teaching children to read in England at that time was always "the ordinary road of Horn-book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible." These, he said, "engage the liking of children and tempt them to read." The road was the same in New England, but it would hardly be called a tempting method.

The first book from which the children of the

colonists learned their letters and to spell, was not really a book at all, in our sense of the word. It was what was called a hornbook. A thin piece of wood, usually about four or five inches long and two inches wide, had placed upon it a sheet of paper a trifle smaller, printed at the top with the alphabet in large and small letters; below were simple syllables such as ab, eb, ib, ob, etc.; then came the Lord's Prayer. This printed page was covered with a thin sheet of yellowish horn, which was not as transparent as glass, yet permitted the letters to be read through it; and both the paper and the horn were fastened around the edges to the wood by a narrow strip of metal, usually brass, which was tacked down by fine tacks or nails. It was, therefore, a book of a single page. At the two upper corners of the page were crosses, hence to read the hornbook was often called "reading a criss-cross row." At the lower end of the wooden back was usually a little handle which often was pierced with a hole; thus the hornbook could be carried by a string, which could be placed around the neck or hung by the side.

When, five years ago, was published my book entitled Customs and Fashions in Old New England, I wrote that I did not know of the preservation of a single hornbook in America; though for many years eager and patient antiquaries, of English and

of