field Memorial Hall, the Lenox Library, have been generously opened, carefully gleaned, and freely used. The expression of gratitude so often tendered to these belpful kinsfolk and friends and to these bountiful societies and libraries can scarcely be emphasized by any public thanks, yet it would seem that for such assistance thanks could never be offered too frequently, nor too publicly.

Nor have I, in gathering for this, -as for my other books, -failed to exercise what Emerson calls "the catlike love of garrets, presses, and cornchambers, and of the conveniences of long housekeeping." Many longkept homes have I searched, many an old garret and press has yielded conveniences for this book.

Though this is a record of the life of children in the American colonies, I have freely compared the conditions in this country with similar ones in England at the same date, both for the sake of fuller elucidation, and also to attempt to put on a proper basis the civilization which the colonists left behind them. Many statements of conditions in America do not convey correct ideas of our past comfort and present and liberal progress unless we compare them with facts in English life. We must not overrate seventeenth and eighteenth century life in England, either in private or public. England was not a first-class power among nations till the time of the Treaty of Paris, in 1763. When our colonies

colonies were settled it was third-rate. Life among the nobility was magnificent, but the life of the peasantry was wretched, and middle-class social life was very bleak and monotonous in both city and country. From early days life was much better in many ways in America than in England for the family of moderate means, and children shared the benefits of these better conditions. A child's life was more valuable here. The colonial laws plainly show this increased valuation, and the child responded to this regard of him by a growing sense of his own importance, which in time bas produced "Young America."

It is my hope that children as well as grown folk will find in these pages much to interest them in the accounts of the life of children of olden times. I have had this end constantly in my mind, though I have made no attempt, nor had I any intent, to write in a style for the perusal of children; for I have not found that intelligent children care much or long for such books, except in the very rare cases of the few great books that have been written for children, and which are loved and read as much by the old as by the young. As our tired century bas grown gray it has developed an interest in things youthful, — in the beginnings of things. Its attitude is akin to that of an old man, still in health and clear-headed, but weary; who has lived through his scores of crowded years of action, toil, and

strife,

strife, and seeks in the last days of his life a serene and peaceful harbor, the companionship of little children. There is something of mystery, too, in "the turn of the century," something which then makes our gaze retrospective and comparative rather than inquisitive into the future. Hence this year of our Lord MDCCCXCIX has been the allotted day and hour for the writing of this book. There has been a trend of destiny which

has brought not only a book on oldtime child
life, and that book at this century end,

but has included the fate that

it should be written by

Alice Morse Earle.

Kismet!