“One night her parents sleeping were in bed
Nothing but troubled dreams run in their head,
At length an angel did to them appear
Saying awake, and unto me give ear.
A messenger I’m sent by Heaven kind
To let you know your lives are both design’d;
Your graceless child, whom you love so dear,
She for your precious lives hath laid a snare.
To poison you the devil tempts her so,
She hath no power from the snare to go:
But God such care doth of his servants take,
Those that believe on Him He’ll not forsake.
“You must not use her cruel or severe,
For though these things to you I do declare,
It is to show you what the Lord can do,
He soon can turn her heart, you’ll find it so.”
The daughter, discovered in her attempt to poison their food, was reproached by the mother for her evil intention and swooned. Every effort failed to “bring her spirits to revive:”
“Four days they kept her, when they did prepare
To lay her body in the dust we hear,
At her funeral a sermon then was preach’d,
All other wicked children for to teach....
But suddenly they bitter groans did hear
Which much surprized all that then were there.
At length they did observe the dismal sound
Came from the body just laid in the ground.”
The Puritan pride in funeral display is naïvely exhibited in the portrayal of the girl when she “in her coffin sat, and did admire her winding sheet,” before she related her experiences “among lonesome wild deserts and briary woods, which dismal were and dark.” But immediately after her description of the lake of burning misery and of the fierce grim Tempter, the Puritan matter-of-fact acceptance of it all is suggested by the concluding lines:
“When thus her story she to them had told,
She said, put me to bed for I am cold.”
The illustrations of a later edition entered thoroughly into the spirit of the author’s intent. The contemporary opinion of the French character is quaintly shown in the portrait of the Devil dressed as a French gentleman, his cloven foot discovering his identity. Whatever deficiencies are revealed in these early attempts to illustrate, they invariably expressed the artist’s purpose, and in this case the Devil, after the girl’s conversion, is drawn in lines very acceptable to Puritan children’s idea of his personality.
Almanacs also were in demand, and furnished parents and children, in many cases, with their entire library for week-day reading. “Successive numbers hung from a string by the chimney or ranked by years and generations on cupboard shelves.”[26-*] But when Franklin made “Poor Richard” an international success, he, by giving short extracts from Swift, Steele, Defoe, and Bacon, accustomed the provincial population, old and young, to something better than the meagre religious fare provided by the colonial press.
Such, then, were the literary conditions for children when an advertisement inserted in the “Weekly Mercury” gave promise of better days for the little Philadelphians.[26-†] Strangely enough, this attempt to make learning seem attractive to children did not appear in the booksellers’ lists; but crowded in between Tandums, Holland Tapes, London Steel, and good Muscavado Sugar,—“Guilt horn books” were advertised by Joseph Sims in 1740 as “for sale on reasonable Terms for Cash.”