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were common in most of the cities and larger towns. Waxworks were also very popular; and of these the most famous were those of Mrs. Wright, with the figures of Whitefield and John Dickinson, and groups illustrating the Return of the Prodigal Son. The beginnings of a menagerie and circus may be seen in the exhibition of a lion in the Jerseys, New York, and Connecticut in 1729, the horses that did tricks and the dogs that rode sitting up in the saddle, and the "shows" that occasionally came to New England towns. On important occasions fireworks, rockets, wheels, and candles were set off. Michel gives an entertaining account of a display at Williamsburg in 1702, at which a number of mishaps occurred. The show began with a "reversed rocket, which was to pass along a string to an arbor where prominent ladies were seated, but it got stuck half-way and exploded. Two stars [wheels] were to revolve through the fireworks, but they succeeded no better than with the rockets. In short, nothing was successful, the rockets also refused to fly up, but fell down archlike, so that it was not worth while seeing. Most of the people, however, had never seen such things and praised them highly."

The calendar days of St. Andrew, St. Patrick,

St. David, and St. George were celebrated in the South with drinking and speechmaking, and St. Tammany Day was observed in Philadelphia with music and feasting. Christmas week was a period of merrymaking not only in the South but also among the Anglicans in the North, where a Christmas service was always held in King's Chapel in Boston. In both sections of the country the occasion was marked by presents to members of the family and to friends and by "boxes" (a term familiar to the Southerners and still in use in England) to the servants and tradesmen. It was customary to observe Gunpowder Day, the 5th of November, in Northern cities, where it was called Pope Day and was celebrated by boys and young men, who carried about in procession effigies of the Pope, the devil, and any one else who was for the moment in popular disfavor. The day, however, was accompanied by so much rowdiness and disturbance of the peace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that its continuance was forbidden in 1768 by order of the Assembly. Thanksgiving Day, that timehonored New England institution which originated with the Pilgrim Fathers in 1621, had become in the eighteenth century an annual November observance, proclaimed by the Governor. During this

holiday no labor could be performed; the people gathered at church and feasted at their homes, surrounded by their kin from far and near, engaging occasionally in harmless enjoyment, but without hilarity or unseemly indulgence.

In the North especially, quoits, football, ball and bat (not baseball, which was a nineteenth-century introduction), stoolball (the forerunner of cricket, with the wicket originally a stool), cricket, and wicket were common sports. Bowling, billiards, and shuffleboard have already been mentioned. For younger people there were plenty of marbles and alleys, tag, tops, and other games so admirably described by Mrs. Earle in her Child Life in Colonial Days, to whose lists may be added pitching pennies, “Button, Button," and "Break the Pope's Neck." Little children had their toys and dolls, often imported in large quantities from England, and dolls of colonial make in Indian costumes. One of these, clad in a dress with a flap or belly clout, stockings, moccasins, and shells for the neck, and with cap of wampum, an Indian basket, and a bow and arrows, William Byrd, 3d, sent as a present to England.

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CHAPTER VI

THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE

In all the colonies interest in intellectual things was limited, and the standards reached by the generality were probably no higher than those of the people at large in England in the eighteenth century. In proportion to the population but few persons were highly educated, for a majority of the colonists either had no book learning at all or had no more than the rudiments of reading, writing, and accounting. The back country and the frontier had very few schools of any kind, and such popular education as was in vogue was confined almost entirely to the older settled regions along the coast, and there, what is now known as the education of the masses had scarcely yet been thought of even as an ideal. To the colonials popular education in the modern sense was as foreign as were democratic ideas in government.

The nearest approach to a plan of education

for every one was made in New England, at least in Massachusetts and Connecticut, including the former colonies of Plymouth and New Haven. Here the colonists recognized the obligation of teaching all children something and imposed on the parents or the towns the duty of providing local schools for the benefit of the community. This obligation was so well understood that in laying out new towns, particularly after 1715, tracts were frequently set aside for schools, not only in Connecticut and Massachusetts but also in New Hampshire, Maine, and the Connecticut settlement in the Wyoming Valley. The higher education necessary for preparing boys for college was furnished partly by the grammar schools and partly, perhaps to a larger extent in the earlier period than afterwards, by ministers who conducted schools in their parsonages or rectories in order to eke out their modest salaries.

The subjects taught in the log or clapboarded schoolhouses were reading, writing, arithmetic, and the catechism. Spelling was introduced early, with little effect, however, as far as uniformity was concerned; but English grammar was not cultivated in the schools even in the larger centers until about 1760. The first aids to learning were

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