A finer coverlet, one of state, the christening blanket, was usually made of silk, richly embroidered, sometimes with a text of Scripture. These were often lace-bordered or edged with a narrow home-woven silk fringe. The christening blanket of Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Colony still exists, whole of fabric and unfaded of dye. It is a rich crimson silk, soft of texture, like a heavy sarcenet silk, and is powdered at regular distances about six inches apart with conventional sprays of flowers embroidered chiefly in pink and yellow, in minute and beautiful cross-stitch. It is distinctly Oriental in appearance, far more so than is indicated by its black and white representation here. Another beautiful silk christening blanket was quilted in an intricate flower pattern in almost imperceptible stitches. These formal wrappings of state were sometimes called bearing-cloths or clothes, and served through many generations. Shakespeare speaks in Henry VI. of a child's bearing-cloth.
A go-cart or standing-stool was a favorite instrument to teach a child to walk. A standing-stool a century old in which Newburyport babies stood and toddled is a rather crude frame of wood with a ledge or narrow table for toys. The method of using a go-cart is shown in this old print taken from a child's book called, Little Prattle over a Book of Prints, published for sixpence in 1801. In the writers of Queen Anne's day frequent references are made to go-carts.
Standing Stool
I find strong evidence that Locke's Thoughts on Education, published in England in 1690, found many readers and ardent followers in the new world. The book is in many old-time library lists in New England, and among the scant volumes of those who had but a single book-shelf or book-box. I have seen abstracts and transpositions of his precepts on the pages of almanacs, the most universally circulated and studied of all eighteenth-century books save the Bible. In contemporary letters evidence is found of the influence of Locke's principles. In the prefaces of Thomas' reprints he is quoted and eulogized. The notions of the English philosopher appealed to American parents because they were, as the author said, "the consideration not what a physician ought to do with a sick or crazy child, but what parents without the help of physic should do for the preservation of an healthy constitution." Crazy here is used in the old-time sense of feeble bodily health, not mental. In these days of hundreds of books on child-study, education, child-culture, and kindred topics, it is a distinct pleasure to read Locke's sturdy sentences; to see how wise, and kindly, and logical he was in nearly all his advices, especially on moral or ethical questions. Even those on physical conditions that seem laughably obsolete to-day were so in advance of the general practices of his day that they are farther removed from the notions of his time than from those of ours. In judging them let us remember Dr. Holmes' lines:—
"Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year
Without both looking and feeling queer."
Certainly an existence of two centuries may make us pardon a little queerness in advice.
One of Locke's instructions much thought on in the years his book was so widely read was the advice to wash the child's feet daily in cold water, and "to have his shoes so thin that they might leak and let in water." Josiah Quincy was the suffering subject of some of this instruction; when only three years old he was taken from his warm bed in winter as well as summer (and this in Eastern Massachusetts), carried downstairs to a cellar kitchen and dipped three times in a tub of cold water fresh from the pump. He was also brought up with utter indifference to wet feet; he said that in his boyhood he sat more than half the time with his feet wet and cold, but with no ill results.
Locke also strongly counselled learning dancing, swimming, and playing in the open air. In his diet "flesh should be forborn as long as the boy is in coats, or at least till he is two or three years old"; for breakfast and supper he advises milk, milk-pottage, water-gruel, flummery, and similar "spoon-meat," or brown bread with cheese. If the boy called for victuals between meals, he should have dry bread. His only extra drink should be small-beer, which should be warm; and seldom he should taste wine or strong drink. Locke would not have children eat melons, peaches, plums, or grapes; while berries and ripe pears and apples, the latter especially after October, he deems healthful. The bed should be hard, of quilts rather than of feathers. Under these rigid rules were reared many of our Revolutionary heroes and statesmen.