Private Duteys" in which she is too often tardy; while at sixteen, finding herself "carnall and sitting loose from God," she accepts the small-pox that then "smott" her as a "proper rebuke to her pride and vanity." Reared in such an atmosphere of morbid conscientiousness and theological disputation, the children in the streets caught the current phrases, and during the Hutchinson trial jeered one another as believers in the "Covenant of Grace" or in the "Covenant of Works." We can only hope that certain pleasures inseparable from country living belonged to the children of New England.

Even

the larger towns were but small settlements in those days, surrounded by forests or bounded on one side or the other by the sea. Hence we may believe that the boys spent their recreation hours in the woods or by the water, and that the girls were sometimes permitted to leave their tasks and stretch their limbs by entering into their brothers' sports,-fishing, boating, nutting in the autumn woods, and, rare diversion of the New England winter,

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coasting down the long hills and skating upon the ponds!

Such pleasures being theirs, we may still rejoice that for Puritan children was coming, surely if slowly, the joy of the child's festival; and that all along the coast, from the scant observance in New England to the generous English celebration of the day in the Southern Colonies, the high festival of the Christian year was to bring expectancy, good cheer, well-filled stockings, gifts and greetings to the children who were destined to be the mothers and fathers of a great nation.

RUMORS have come to our ears of a toast to the Puritan Mothers, from those of their sons who meet together in the New England Society, to pour out libations, burn incense, and consume canvasback and terrapin in honor of their ancestors, the especial claim of these worthy dames upon the consideration of the present generation being based upon the fact that, in addition to enduring all the hardships that fell to the lot of the Puritan Fathers, they had to endure the Puritan Father himself. However this may have been, and we doubt not, with all due respect to

their sterling qualities, that some of these progenitors of ours were, like Carlyle,

gey ill to live wi',". it seems as if the courage, patience, and heroism of the pioneer women of America had not been sufficiently honored.

Heroic and much-enduring women we naturally think of in connection with the Revolutionary struggle, but of such there were not a few in the early settlement of the country, whether upon the bleak hillsides of New England, where the winters were more severe and the soil less productive than farther south, or upon the banks of the Hudson and the Delaware, or still farther south along the Chesapeake and the James. A vision of the pioneer women of the Massachusetts Colony, led by the girlish figures of Mary Chilton and Priscilla Mullins, inevitably rises before the retrospective student, because a certain. halo of romance has ever encircled these two picturesque personalities.

Others there were, equally lovely and quite as picturesque, whom the pens of the romance writer and the poet have as yet

failed to touch. In the immigration to Salem in 1630 there came, in a vessel that bore her name, the Lady Arbella Johnson, daughter of the third Earl of Lincoln, in company with her husband, her sister Susan, wife of John Humphrey, the Dudleys, Simon Bradstreet and his " versemaking wife," the two daughters of Sir Robert Saltonstall, and other ladies of high degree who dined with the Lady Arbella in the "great cabin." Delicately nurtured and frail of constitution, Lady Arbella had been urged to remain in England for a time, but rather than be separated from her husband she was willing to brave the perils of the long voyage and the hardships of pioneer life in a strange land. She lived only to behold the shores of the new world clad in spring beauty, before closing her eyes forever to earthly visions, or, as Mr. Cotton Mather wrote years after, she "left an earthly paradise in the family of an Earldom, to encounter the sorrows of a wilderness, for the entertainments of a pure worship in the house of God; and then