There was always some woman in every neighborhood who, for a small amount of money, was willing to take charge of the children and teach them the rudiments of knowledge. The older and larger towns had these dame schools as well as the pioneer villages, and they were everywhere a chief dependence for elementary instruction; yet they were seldom at first town schools, and none of them were free for a long time. The dame school was an English institution, and the description of it by the poet Crabbe as it existed across the Atlantic would very well fit it here: a deaf, poor, patient widow sits And awes some thirty infants as she knits; Some trifling price for freedom through the day. The school dame did not usually find the labor of teaching very onerous. While she heard the smaller pupils recite their letters, and the older ones read and spell from their primers, she busied her fingers with knitting and sewing, and in the intervals between lessons sometimes worked at the spinningwheel. An interesting instance of school-dame industry occurs in the annals of Northfield, Massachusetts. The first teacher in the town was a woman hired to care for a class of little ones twenty-two weeks in the warm season. Besides the neighbors' children she had four of her own to look after, yet her en A Typical Hornbook. ergies were by no means exhausted, and the semi-leisure of the schoolroom allowed her to work quite steadily making shirts for the Indians at eight pence each. The beginner's chief aid in starting on the road learning to was a hornbook-not really a book at all, but simply a bit of printed paper about three by four inches fastened on a thin piece of board. The name "hornbook" originated in the fact that the printed slip was covered with a translucent sheet of horn, A "To save from fingers wet the letters fair." light strip of metal, usually brass, was fastened with several short nails or tacks around the edges of the horn to keep it in place. The board had a handle at one end, and occasionally this handle was pierced with a hole so that a string could be attached and the toddling owner of the hornbook could carry it suspended from his neck. At the At the top of the paper was printed the alphabet, capitals, and small letters; and then in orderly array the vowels, then double lines of ab, eb, ibs, and the benediction, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghoft. Amen." The remaining space was devoted to the Lord's Prayer, unless, as was sometimes |