agination was the often repeated frontispiece of
"Mercy streaming from the Cross," illustrated by a large cross with an
effulgent rain beating upon the luxuriant tresses of a languishing lady.
There were many pictures but little art in the old-fashioned
Sunday-school library books.

It was in Philadelphia that one of the first, if not the first
children's library was incorporated in 1827 as the Apprentices' Library.
Eleven years later this library contained more than two thousand books,
and had seven hundred children as patrons. The catalogue of that year is
indicative of the prevalence of the Sunday-school book. "Adventures of
Lot" precedes the "Affectionate Daughter-in-Law," which is followed by
"Anecdotes of Christian Missions" and "An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners."
Turning the yellowed pages, we find "Hannah Swanton, the Casco Captive,"
histories of Bible worthies, the "Infidel Class," "Little Deceiver
Reclaimed," "Letters to Little Children," "Juvenile Piety," and
"Julianna Oakley." The bookish child of this decade could not escape
from the "Reformed Family" and the consumptive little Christian, except
by taking refuge in the parents' novels, collections of the British
poets and essayists, and the constantly increasing American writings for
adults. Perhaps in this way the Sunday-school books may be counted among
that long list of such things as are commonly called blessings in
disguise.

[Illustration: _A Child and her Doll_]

Aside from the strictly religious tale, the contents of the now
considerable output of Harper and Brothers, Mahlon Day, Samuel Wood and
Sons of New York; Cottons and Barnard, Lincoln and Edmunds, Lilly, Wait
and Company, Munroe and Francis of Boston; Matthew Carey, Conrad and
Parsons, Morgan and Sons, and Thomas T. Ashe of Philadelphia--to
mention but a few of the publishers of juvenile novelties--are
convincing proof that booksellers catered to the demand for stories with
a strong religious bias. The "New York Weekly," indeed, called attention
to Day's books as "maintaining an unbroken tendency to virtue and
piety."

When not impossibly pious, these children of anonymous fiction were
either insufferable prigs with a steel moral code, or so ill-bred as to
be equally impossible and unnatural. The favorite plan of their creators
was to follow Miss Edgeworth's device of contrasting the good and
naughty infant. The children, too, were often cousins: one, for example,
was the son of a gentlem