The children’s question, “Did Sir Walter Raleigh find out the virtues of tobacco?” affords an excellent opportunity for a discourse upon smoking and snuff-taking.  These remarks conclude with this prosaic statement:  “Hundreds of sensible people have fell into these customs from example; and, when they would have left them off, found it a very great difficulty.”  Next comes a lesson upon the growth of tobacco leading up to a short account of the slave-trade, already a subject of differing opinion in the United States, as well as in England.  Of further interest to small Americans was a short tale of the discovery of this country.  Perhaps to most children their first book-knowledge of this event came from the pages of “Little Truths.”

Hall’s books were not all so proper for the amusement of young folks.  A perusal of “Capt.  Gulliver’s Adventures” leaves one in no doubt as to the reason that so many of the old-fashioned mothers preferred to keep such tales out of children’s hands, and to read over and over again the adventures of the Pilgrim, Christian.  Mrs. Eliza Drinker of Philadelphia in seventeen hundred and ninety-six was re-reading for the third time “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which she considered a “generally approved book,” although then “ridiculed by many.”  The “Legacy to Children” Mrs. Drinker also read aloud to her grandchildren, having herself “wept over it between fifty and sixty years ago, as did my grandchildren when it was read to them.  She, Hannah Hill, died in 1714, and ye book was printed in 1714 by Andrew Bradford.”

But Mrs. Drinker’s grandchildren had another book very different from the pious sayings of the dying Hannah.  This contained “64 little stories and as many pictures drawn and written by Nancy Skyrin,” the mother of some of the children.  P. Widdows had bound the stories in gilt paper, and it was so prized by the family that the grandmother thought the fact of the recovery of the book, after it was supposed to have been irretrievably lost, worthy of an entry in her journal.  Careful inquiry among the descendants of Mrs. Drinker has led to the belief that these stories were read out of existence many years ago.  What they were about can only be imagined.  Perhaps they were incidents in the lives of the same children who cried over the pathetic morbidity of Hannah’s dying words; or possibly rhymes and verses about school and play hours of little Philadelphians; with pictures showing bait-the-bear, trap-ball, and other sports of days long since passed away, as well as “I Spie Hi” and marbles, familiar still to boys and girls.

[Illustration:  Foot Ball]

From the fact that these stories were written for the author’s own children, another book, composed less than a century before, is brought to mind.  Comparison of even the meagre description of Mrs. Skyrin’s book with Cotton Mather’s professed purpose in “Good Lessons” shows the stride made in children’s literature to be a long one.  Yet a quarter of a century was still to run before any other original writing was done in America for children’s benefit.