Your goodness to me I cannot express. My mind is continually crowded with your kindness. If your goodness could be rewarded, I hope God will repay you. If you remember, some time ago I read a story in “The Mother’s Gift,” but I hope I shall never resemble Miss Gonson. O Dear! What a thing it is to disobey one’s parents. I have one of the best Masters. He gave me a sheet of paper this morning. I hope Uncle Flagg will come up. I am quite tired of looking for Betsy, but I hope she will come. When school is done keeping, I shall come to Sudbury. What a fine book Mrs. Chapone’s Letters is: My time grows short and I must make my letter short.
Your dutiful daughter,
P. W.
Nursery rhymes and jingles of these present days have all descended from song-books of the eighteenth century, entitled “Little Robin Red Breast,” “A Poetical Description of Song Birds,” “Tommy Thumb’s Song-Book,” and the famous “Melodies of Mother Goose,” whose name is happily not yet relegated to the days of long ago. Two extracts from the “Poetical Description of Song Birds” will be sufficient to show how foreign to the birds familiar to American children were the descriptions:
The Bullfinch
This lovely bird is charming to the sight:
The back is glossy blue, the belly white,
A jetty black shines on his neck and head;
His breast is flaming with a beauteous red.
The Twite
Green like the Linnet it appears to sight,
And like the Linnet sings from morn till night.
A reddish spot upon his rump is seen,
Short is his bill, his feathers always clean:
When other singing birds are dull or nice,
To sing again the merry Twites entice.
Reflections of the prevailing taste of grown people for biography are suggested in three little books, of two of which the author was Mrs. Pilkington, who had already written several successful stories for young ladies. Her “Biography for Girls” contains various novelettes, in each of which the heroine lives the conventional life and dies the conventional death of the period, and receives a laudatory epitaph. They are remarkable only as being devoid of any interest. Her “Biography for Boys” does not appear to have attained the same popularity as that for girls. A third book, “The Juvenile Biographers,” containing the “Lives of Little Masters and Misses,” is representative of the changes made in many books by the printer to cater to that pride in the young Republic so manifest in all local literary productions. In one biography we note a Representative to the Massachusetts Assembly:
“As Master Sammy had always been a very sober and careful child, and very attentive to his Books, it is no wonder that he proved, in the End, to be an excellent Scholar.