The debt of amusement which American children owed to Newbery was paid in this century by the supply to English children of a vast number of little books of profit and pleasure, all written by a single author, "Peter Parley," or Samuel G. Goodrich. In the middle of the century this gentleman stated that he had written one hundred and twenty books that were professedly juvenile. Of these and his books for older minds about seven million copies had been sold, and about three hundred thousand were still sold annually. They were sent to England in vast numbers, and were reprinted there both with and without the author's permission. And when the original books were not pirated, the name Peter Parley was calmly attached to the compositions of English authors, as a vastly salable trade-mark.
Scores of American authors, by the middle of this century, were writing little books for children. These were a class by themselves—Sunday-school books. They do not come within the very elastic time limit set for this chapter. They are not old enough in years, though they are rapidly becoming as obsolete as any children's books of the last century.
Books written avowedly for Sunday-schools are in decreasing demand. Those with sectarian teachings, especially, find fewer and fewer purchasers.
CHAPTER XV
CHILDREN'S DILIGENCE
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
—Divine Songs for Children. Isaac Watts, 1720.
Colonial children did not spend much time in play. "The old deluder Sathan" was not permitted to find many idle hands ready for his mischievous work. It was ordered by the magistrates that children tending sheep or cattle in the field should be "set to some other employment withal, such as spinning upon the rock, knitting, weaving tape," etc. These were all simple industries requiring slight paraphernalia. The rock was the hand distaff. It was simple of manipulation, but required a certain knack of dexterity to produce even well-twisted thread. Good spinners could spin on the rock as they walked. Tape-weaving was done on a simple appliance, the heddle-frame of primitive weavers, known as a tape-loom, garter-loom, belt-loom, or "gallus-frame." On these small looms girls wove scores of braids and tapes for use as glove-ties, shoe-strings, hair-laces, stay-laces, garters, hatbands, belts, etc., and boys wove garters and breeches-suspenders.